In the Spotlight — Multiplatform Community Builder Ane

“If you don’t have members, you don’t have a community.”

— Ane of /r/GabrielDropOut

The quote above is deceptively redundant. It may seem obvious that no people equals no community. However, the unorthodox feeling of the culture and methods that Ane and his team implement at /r/GabrielDropOut bring to light that many communities may not actually understand this as much as they could. Some of you may even be unknowingly working against it!

Before starting, I want to make a quick note that I will be expanding the takeaways in this spotlight in a series following it. While it’s not necessary to read the following parts to begin making use of these concepts, we encourage you to follow the blog and read them to understand more of the why behind each. Why? Because every community is a little different and what works for one may not work for another. By understanding more about the situation surrounding a problem, you can better understand how to take a solution and adapt it to your own situation.

With that out of the way, let’s dive in!

Who Are They?

Ane describes his community as a “wholesome anime community” and it checks those boxes and many more. While themed after a specific animated series, Ane ensures that the theme stays separate from the culture. The community spans across Discord, Reddit, Twitter, and other platforms — this multiplatform approach which he attributes to its continued success. The scope of his community is now much, much larger than its humble origins as a few emoji servers. To this day, he continues to work tirelessly on expanding to new platforms in efforts to spread the community’s reach to new audiences.

His community primarily resides in the /r/GabrielDropOut subreddit and accompanying Discord server. Growth has been steady over the years since the Discord community’s opening to the public on Christmas 2018. This is an impressive feat for a community themed around an animated series that hasn’t aired since before that same time!

Backstory

“If you had told me that me asking, ‘who is that?’ would lead to all of this, I never would have believed you.” — Ane of /r/GabrielDropOut

/r/GabrielDropOut has many parts to its story, however it all traces back to the simple question you see in this quote. In a scenario fit for a movie about the Butterfly Effect, Ane asking one of his friends about a character he kept seeing emojis of (Satania of GabrielDropOut i.e. Best Girl) led to where his community is today. From the answer to that question, he began creating emoji servers around each of the characters of that and other series. This doubly acted as a creative outlet, and to serve as a break from the wear-and-tear of his daily life. It also came with the added benefit of giving things to people that made their Discord lives a little better. Using his passion in graphic design, he served others in the form of hundreds of emojis that they could use to express themselves. He settled into a niche where he could use his skills, and slowly began to make a name for himself in the popular Discord server Emote List. Through connecting his sister emoji servers via links in a channel and having this large community as an inlet capturing new audiences, his emoji servers were off to the races.

At this point, there still wasn’t a place to talk in the emoji servers — they weren’t yet communities. Originally Ane had no aspirations to make a community, let alone one within reach of being a Discord Partner. However, Ane did something that would result in people pushing him to make one. He held simple giveaways from time to time. Without realizing it, he was building bonds with people in other communities such as Emote List and was doing the same with his own audience through these giveaways.

As a result of this and as a gift to his soon-to-be community members, on the fateful Christmas of 2018, he opened the doors of the Discord server Gabriel HangOut. Starting from no mods and no leadership, he now currently has four other leaders alongside him driving the community forward, and many moderators acting as culture agents. Now, you may have noticed the difference in the name of the community, GabrielHangOut, when it released. During all this craziness, something else happened as a direct result of Ane’s actions.

In showing dedication and real commitment to his community, the previous owner of the /r/GabrielDropOut subreddit took notice of Ane and his blossoming community. Prior to getting the subreddit, the main Discord server was named “Gabriel HangOut” as a nod to both the theme and culture of the community. As you can probably see where this is going, the owner of the subreddit — feeling that they were unable to devote the time needed to it — gave it to Ane.

“I’m not sure if this is going to be worth it in the end.” — Ane of /r/GabrielDropOut

The subreddit was in dire straits; but despite this and his doubts, Ane took to it. After delegating Discord community management to his new leadership team, he focused all his time on restoring the dead platform. In one and a half months of arduous work, he breathed new life into it! From around 3,000 subscribers to now 6,800 and still growing, we can be sure that the previous owner was right in his decision to choose Ane as successor.

The Interview: Major Takeaways (Abbreviated)

So, what can we learn from Ane’s endeavors? He and I talked about many things in our 3-hour conversation. Here are the important takeaways that drove — and are currently driving — him towards success in his quest for the coveted title of Discord Partner. Remember that these are summarized versions. Keep an eye out for the deep dives of these by following Community Builder’s Blog here on Medium or subscribing to the “Blog Updates” role in the Community Builder’s Blog Discord server (linked at the bottom)!

Specialization in a Marketplace of Ideas

“Having a theme is extremely important in making your community stand out and making it something people want to be a part of. We’ve thought about converting to just a generic anime server, but then we always come back to the same question: ‘Why would anyone choose us over the next, bigger generic anime server?’ You need some sort of consistency and theme to your platform in order for people to have interest and be like, ‘Oh, this is what we’re discussing.’” — Ane of /r/GabrielDropOut

We are in a marketplace of ideas. Each community wants people to spend their time and activity in it — and people want a community where they feel a return on investment of their time and activity. As Discord has grown and matured over the years, so has the marketplace. What may have worked back in the beginning of Discord, like a generic anime server, will not have the same chance at success because there are already established communities who are known for that.

Ane really got to the heart of this section with what he said above. In this case, the idea of “theme” is something that sets your community apart from others and bonds parts of your community that may otherwise not have anything in common. It’s something that people can expect from the community without even joining it; and it’s something that they can use to easily describe it to others. While “theme” is not “identity “, it is an important facet of identity and is paramount to the survival of a new community.

“People are attracted to bigger communities. You need to be the best in whatever you’re trying to be. You need to be more specific at this point.” — Ane of /r/GabrielDropOut

As a marketplace matures and ideas take root, new players have to find a way to make themselves stand-out and be different. A theme is an effective way to do this and has the added benefit of being able to tie together multiple platforms more easily— as we’ll later see Ane suggest. Having a niche that you feel you can do better than anyone else is extremely powerful in life. Community building is no exception. Find your niche and specialize in it.

A “Moderator” is a Community Member, Too!

“They’re just as equally a community member as anyone.” — Ane of /r/GabrielDropOut

There are many dynamics that relate to the perception of authority on this particular topic. Unfortunately, that information is too dense to put into this article so it will be in one of the parts to the series. However, I will at least touch upon the 3 Pitfalls of Authority that any community will face. These are:

• Label Identity
• Moderator Flood & Drought
• Lack of Separation of Powers

Label Identity is the phenomenon where a label such as a title or uniform causes people to identify themselves and others with that label. The label in this case is the title of “Moderator” combined with a singular role color that community administrators often assign to this role. The idea to make it easier to identify these members is not a flawed one, but it can be a double-edged sword. A member’s top role color is the most prominent thing about them as they talk in text. Doing something as conspicuous as communicating rank through this color will cause members to identify the people with that color as being a higher state of authority.

“I’ve noticed a lot of servers that have those markings on their moderators. Their moderators don’t do a lot of that communicating simply because they don’t want to flood the chat with that color, even though they were previously one of their most active members!” — Ane of /r/GabrielDropOut

Moderator Flood & Drought are two vicious side-effects of Label Identity and people’s perception of authority. Moderator Flood is when many Moderators, or other members that are identifiable as having higher authority, are having a conversation in chat. This may make the conversation feel less accessible to those who are perceptive of rank — which will be most people and amplified by the role color. Moderator Drought occurs as Moderators are aware of their own presence in chat and Moderator Flood. To avoid negatively influencing discussion, Moderators talk in the community less.

Lack of Separation of Powers takes effect when Administrators act as Moderators and enforce corrective action or punishment in the community. The most notable of the impacts of this is the idea of your boss’ boss supervising you alongside your boss. Unless it’s ingrained in the culture of the community in a way that members feel is predictable (i.e. safe), this will often lead to the “admins are awake” syndrome where the Administrator’s presence may hurt conversation.

One part of Ane’s solution to Label Identity is simple, Moderators (and Administrators) don’t have a set role color. Like a regular community member, Moderators give themselves their own role colors through the self-role system in the server. Administrators choose a color for themselves. Ane then avoids Lack of Separation of Powers by ensuring that each role stays in its “wheelhouse” — not trying to assume the responsibilities of another and letting Moderators do the moderation.

Be a Shepherd, Not a Wolf

“We put more of a focus on muting people because — it comes as obvious but is something that a lot of owners and leaders of communities have struggles realizing — if you ban the people who misbehave, you end up with nothing eventually because everyone makes mistakes.” — Ane of /r/GabrielDropOut

Trying my best to keep this simple, the long-term effectiveness of the different types of Operant Conditioning (i.e. adjusting someone’s behavior) is as follows:

• Positive Reinforcement (best)
• Negative Reinforcement
• Negative Punishment
• Positive Punishment (worst)

This means that rewarding good behavior will result in better long-term results than punishing bad. In the context of my discussion with Ane, we had talked about how moderation in his community occurs. He expressed that at some point in his journey, he came to the realization in the quote above — that having bodies in the community is important and running around swinging banhammers haphazardly was potentially doing more harm than good. Muting and banning are both forms of negative punishment; they take away a member’s ability to interact in the community. The crucial difference is that muting gives the member a path of redemption and continues to expose them to the community and its culture. Only ban people that prove to be irredeemable with the level of effort you are willing to put into them.

“We don’t address removal of content. We just remove the message and move on.” — Ane of /r/GabrielDropOut

Similarly, when moderators must give a warning, it should occur in DM or somewhere else out of the public eye. This is because reprimanding someone in public is Positive Punishment which is the worst of the types and has the highest chance of introducing negative side-effects like resentment.

I will later expand this section with another named “Assume Positive Intent (but don’t fold to it)” that will cover Ane’s community’s approach to misbehaving community members. Instead I’ll leave this quote which is the crux of that section.

“Corrective action is the course we take.” — Ane of /r/GabrielDropOut

Reserve banning for if someone breaks Discord ToS, or you have determined that they show absolutely 0 ability and willingness to not harm your community. You may find that investing your time in someone else will yield surprising results!

Don’t Kill the Goose that Lays the Golden Egg

Give it a kingdom instead. Don’t be afraid to create systems that favor those who give back to the community; and be sure to be inviting to all new people who join.

The thing about this concept that’s so great is that it’s made up of many small things that Ane and his community do. It’s also the concept that relates most strongly back to the quote at the beginning of the article —

“If you don’t have members, you don’t have a community.” — Ane of /r/GabrielDropOut

The number of examples I have means that Ane and his team have a deep understanding of this concept. It’s culture. A few of them are:

• Ane: “We try to be open and welcoming to absolutely anyone who joins.”
  - The community is strict on members who are rude to new people. Most communities will not survive without new people to fill the spots of those that will inevitably leave. If the community feels closed off to new people or worse, drives them away, then it will have trouble sustaining against the natural flow of people leaving.
• Ane: “We don’t ban raids, at all. Whenever raids happen, we focus on trying to get them as part of us.”
  - Directly following the last point, Ane’s community has turned previous raids into moments of opportunity to grow. It now has once-raiders actively engaged and contributing to the community. This is something that would only happen through group effort of the whole community. Something that would only happen through culture.
• Ane: “If you’re helping us in any way, shape, or form — by being active, by donating, by nitro boosting — if you’re supporting us in one way or another, that’s how you get those VIP channels.”
  - The Discord server has VIP channels set up with some fun bots to give back to the people who support the community either monetarily or through activity. (Side-note: This is a cool use-case for Mudae and Statbot that I will be writing about in a later post.)
• The community will not ban those who financially support the it (except extreme cases like breaking Discord ToS). At most, one of these members may be perma-muted until appeal.
  - This is demonstration of Ane and his team’s understanding of two ideas: 1. The importance of the message these people send by financially supporting a casual community like /r/GabrielDropOut; and,
  2. Maintaining a path of redemption.

See anyone and everyone as an opportunity to gain another active community member; and treat your supporters as royalty. Without these people, the community will eventually die.

More Tips and Advice

When asked if he had any specific hints and tips, Ane had recollected on a few of the things we had talked about:

“Incorporating the subreddit and making it multiplatform was a huge part of the consistent growth that we still receive.” — Ane of /r/GabrielDropOut

1. If you can, go multiplatform and tie the platforms into each other. In the case of /r/GabrielDropOut, this looks like webhooks that relay subreddit posts to Twitter and a channel in Discord. Some people prefer to spend their time on either of these platforms over Reddit, and so doing this keeps those people engaged with the community at large. Likewise, not everyone is on Discord all the time, so giving a method to those people that will keep them connected with a part of the community through another platform will keep them engaged more often. Finally, more platforms mean more audiences and more potential members.

“You need some sort of back-up plan.” — Ane of /r/GabrielDropOut

2. Take your future into your own hands and create contingency plans. For the things that you do not have control over, like public Discord bots, make sure that you have ways to continue running on a rainy day. This may look like creating your own Discord bot that mimics the functionality that you use in another; or having a way to reach your community if Discord itself goes offline or you lose access to your account. If whatever you do is public facing, tie it into the theme of the community as well. In the case of /r/GabrielDropOut, they have a moderation bot called Gab (after the title character’s name) that has the features that they need from Dyno. Since all moderation tasks happen through these commands, if Dyno were to go offline then moderators would be left without a way to properly fulfill all their responsibilities.

“Reach out to other communities and see if anyone is willing to help you.”

“Without help from developers and having that direct 1-on-1 contact that I’ve been able to form; my server would be nowhere near to where it is today.”

— Ane of /r/GabrielDropOut

3. The premise of this blog series is that other people’s experience and knowledge will help you avoid and more quickly overcome many hurdles. Ane expresses this same sentiment. By making connections with other community builders and key players in the systems that you use to run your community, you’re strategically setting yourself up for success. Having people to turn to with questions is particularly invaluable to new community builders. In the case of those with experience, having an outside perspective may shine a new light on a problem they’ve been struggling through or haven’t yet seen.

Wrapping It Up

My conversation with Ane was packed with ideas, too many and too deep to go in-depth in this single post. Again, I will expand many of these key takeaways in following posts. As a recap they are:

• Specialize
• Be wary of displays of authority in your community
• Seek corrective action over punishment
• Give back to your supporters and be welcoming to all new members

In closing, there are two words that come to my mind and they are branding and culture. Branding affects getting new members. It is how the outside world perceives the community and is what decides who finds it and if they join it. Culture is how those inside the community perceive it. It starts to come into play when a person joins or takes part in the community, and it takes over shortly after. (There is a brief overlap where culture is a part of the branding. That is “first impression.”) Ane has control over these two aspects and weaves them together which has resulted in /r/GabrielDropOut’s continued growth.

See it for yourself! Whether you like anime or not, /r/GabrielDropOut is a close-knit and welcoming community for all people to chill and make friends! Don’t take the essay here as the only evidence. See for yourself in the Discord, subreddit, and Twitter. At the time of this writing, Ane is also in the process of reviving other subreddits around the series such as the smug queen, /r/Raphiel (Discord) so give that some love as well.

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