Dealing with Death on the internet
Death of community members can put community managers in a difficult situation
Death, as we all know, is inevitable. It eventually happens to everyone. Most of us have probably come across a dead person’s social profile. This could’ve been a friend, relative, colleague, an acquaintance or maybe Mark Zuckerberg.
This is also a good reminder that we’re growing old and the internet, or more specifically Facebook, is becoming a digital graveyard. Dealing with death is extremely difficult. A couple of years back, the obituary column in the newspapers is how we got to know about the death of someone. Now, almost immediately you get the news on a family WhatsApp group or on social media.
Also came across this on xkcd What if-When,if ever,will Facebook contain more profiles of dead people than of living ones?
The Ring Theory or Circle of Grief
Communicating on the internet is really tricky. Comforting someone is extremely tough and we must take utmost care to ensure that we don’t say the wrong things. One of the most commonly adopted method to deal with this is the Ring Theory/Circle of Grief.
Create a set of rings like the one above. In the centermost circle, place the afflicted’s name. Outside of that, place their loved ones’ names. Friends go in the circle outside that and coworkers or acquaintances farther out.
If the person you’re talking to is on a smaller circle than yours, comfort them. Offer support, encouragement, and allow them to vent in any way they deem fit. Then feel free to vent your own frustrations to someone on a more outer circle than your own.
Community Managers handling death in communities
It’s really sorrowful for any community manager to know that a community member has passed away. It’s even more painful to be the one to break it to the entire community. If the members had made a significant contribution to the community, there’s a good chance that the community manager would have a great personal relationship with the member.
Eventually, it all comes to What can we do as community managers?
- Updating the profile of the deceased with a tribute message & link it to the tribute topic.
- Creating a badge in the honour of the member and awarding it to someone deserving each year. The criteria could be decided by the community.
- Creating an obituary thread and emailing/sending the replies by post to their family/loved ones.
- It’s a good idea to ask the family member how the community can help. These could be donations to charities, help with selling or moving things etc.
Fake deaths
This morning I stumbled upon Josh Millard’s blogpost about dealing with death in the Metafilter community. Faking his own death by writing a 4,000- word tome which included tales of sexual abuse, meth addiction, prison, their wedding, death, murder, depression, and what he loved, is just appalling! This is not just a one-off incident in communities. When community members see the condolence messages in the announcement thread, some of them develop a sense of curiosity on what others might say about them. This curiosity has led to a lot of people faking their death in online communities. Richard Millington , from FeverBee, had written a great article and had summed up the learnings pretty well.
We removed more members for pretending to die than for violating the community rules.
The result of the these fake death are that community managers become more cynical when they are informed about a community member’s death. If it’s a genuine case reported by a friend/family member, this reaction of the community manager is often misconstrued to be the lack of sympathy or feelings. But for the benefit of the entire community and the respect that you have for their feeling, it’s only fair on your part to verify the deaths.
Cohesion in communities
There is always some closeness in communities during tragedies. Tom Maybrier puts this beautifully in his blog post.
A death in an online community is always sad, but handled well, it can strengthen the bonds between members and engender a company or platform to its users. Death affects us all in our lives and as life is increasingly lived online, we need to learn to accept, understand and deal with death in a new way.
Always remember, the community doesn’t end there.
If you’re interested in participating in a disscussion about this topic, I’d recommend visiting this thread.
If you’ve dealt with death of a member in your community, do share your experience. Also feel free to tweet at me @dun3buggi3.
