I’m on Highway 5 outside of Olympia when it happens.

The drive from Seattle to Portland is about four hours, so I’m settled in for a long day. Traffic is light and I’m in the left lane. I’m listening to music, the sky is blue, and I’m thinking about how much I love the Pacific Northwest.

I notice a red minivan in my rearview, approaching fast. I’m already going 75 and don’t feel like speeding, so I move to the right lane before it gets to me. I think about my Canadian wife and how many road trips we’ve spent talking about highway lane etiquette. She’d be proud of me, I think.

As the van speeds by me on the left, I glance over and this is what I see: a white kid, probably in his twenties, with a number one buzzcut. His right arm is outstretched, flying in the wind, with his middle finger raised. Our eyes meet and I can see his mouth make the words in slow motion: “fuuuck youuu.”

Before I even realize what’s happening, the adrenaline spike hits and time slows to a crawl. The little demon who lives in the back of my brain pipes up.

—

You didn’t move over quickly enough.
No, I totally did. They didn’t even have to slow down.

They hate Jews and they know you’re Jewish.
Wait, how would they know that? It’s not like I have a mezuzah on my tailgate.

You shouldn’t have put those bumper stickers on the truck.
The Adventure Time stickers? Who hates BMO?

Flash your lights! Speed after them! What are you, a pussy?
What would that accomplish? They could be armed. Also, buddy, we don’t use that word anymore. We need to talk about that later.

Fine, baby. You know this is all your fault.
I know. Wait, is it?

—

All of this flashes through my brain in an instant as I watch the van speeding off. But then something funny happens. They get to the next car, the one in the right lane ahead of me, and out comes the hand again, bird defiantly flipping.

Then the next car, and then the next. Birds all the way down the highway.

And it hits me. They’re just two punks in their mom’s minivan driving Highway 5 to flip the world off. They don’t hate me, or the people in the car ahead of me, or the people in the car ahead of them. They hate the world, or themselves, or some combination. This is their way of fighting back, or lashing out, or having fun, or just trying to escape whatever shit they’re in today.

And I realize, I’ve been that kid. I had a buzzcut like that in my 20s. I never flipped off random strangers, but I did wave at them. I sometimes blew kisses at people who tailgated me in my slow-ass VW Bug. I used Highway 5 as an ashtray during a summer drought. I said “fuck you” to the world in my own way.

It’s not about me. I’m just a guy, driving home, on the receiving end of a random act of aggression. Because the world is pretty complicated right now. Because some people are just looking for trouble. Because hard times make hard people.

—

And here’s where I bring it back to online behavior (because that’s what I do). The next time someone is a jerk to you online, especially on a place like Twitter that’s optimized for aggression, take a moment to think about them as that sad, angry kid in the minivan. Consider that maybe it has nothing to do with you. You just happened to be closest at the moment they needed to lash out for some reason. The intentions of the person who flipped you off should matter as little to you as your feelings mean to them.

Does thinking like this make it better? Hell no. Your heart will still beat faster. And your first instinct will be to fight back, or beat yourself up, or something else just as unhealthy.

But for me, remembering that it’s not about me helps. If it’s not personal, it’s easier to see reality for what it is. It’s easier to ignore the demon in the back of my head. And it’s easier to just look at those idiots out there trying to ruin your day and do what I should have done when I got flipped off on Highway 5: laugh.

After 12 years and over 41,700 tweets, I’ve deactivated my Twitter account. Here’s a few reasons why.

• It made me unhappy.
• It made people around me unhappy.
• It helped elect Donald Trump and continues to give him a platform to ruin the world.
• Its interface is designed to make people fight.
• Jack.
• Its leadership doesn’t seem to know the first thing about human beings or communities or how people think or feel or talk.
• Its leadership has delusions of governance that they use as an excuse to not moderate their community.
• Alex Jones.
• Every interview with Jack shows that he has no grasp of the how to fix problems or what the problems even are.
• I’ve lost faith that it’ll ever improve.
• It’s like a vacuum, sucking up every word I have to type, leaving very few words for other places. I’d like to put more words other places.
• The ads.
• I don’t like being reduced to the filler in between the ads.
• They fucked their third party developers, including Tweetbot, my favorite client.
• The out-of-order timeline.
• Nazis. Literally, nazis. If you can’t boot nazis off your service, you have no business running anything.
• The generally shitty way people treat each other on Twitter makes me lose hope in humanity, and without that hope I basically can’t function.
• How the generally shitty way people treat each other on Twitter has warped expectations for what is allowable behavior online.
• I feel like I’ve spent over a decade thinking about what Twitter was doing wrong and how Twitter could be fixed, when I should have been thinking about other ways online community could form and thrive. Quitting will, hopefully, help me focus on that.
• The metrics of likes and retweets were addictive. I don’t like feeling like an addict.
• The realization that Twitter is just the comment section of a news article, without the news article.
• Again, Donald Trump. I don’t want to have anything in common with that festering, semi-sentient pile of racist garbage. Now I have one less thing in common with him, at least.
• What happened to James Gunn.
• The person who tweeted at me “LOL WTF” today as I was trying to say something nice and supportive to a friend in mourning.
• The constant stream of outrage. I understand the importance of screaming into a pillow now and again, but if you do it too much you’re gonna need a new pillow.
• Their community malpractice. I’ve been building communities online for a long time. I can’t be part of a place that does it this badly.
• It made me unhappy. And 2018 has more than enough unhappiness already.

In my community consulting work, I’ve often had to remind clients that their products, while important, are not governments.

I can almost understand the confusion. Community systems create a kind of governance. There are rules for what members can do and procedures for when those rules are broken. Sometimes there are even appeals processes. If you squint, the whole thing can take on the shape of a rudimentary justice system.

The government-thinking has a secondary appeal to executive teams. If their site is a country, that makes them the ruling class. It makes the CEO the president (or dictator). And again, squinting, it can kind of feel that way. Running a company, like managing a community, is literally a power trip. You can do things your members can’t, including punishing those members. Power, even tiny power, can be addictive.

But it’s not true. None of it. Your product is not a country. You are not a government. Your CEO is not a president. And, worse, thinking that way is damaging to the community, disastrous for the company, and may just be ruining the world.

Governments Aren’t Optional

I am a citizen of the United States. I became that by simply being born here (unlike my dad, but that’s another story). I did not have a choice in the matter.

But I can choose whether I’m a member of Facebook or not. I can decide to delete my Twitter account. (Every day I get a little closer.) No matter how important these sites become, they’re still optional. Nobody has to participate in them.

When the leaders of these sites fall into the trap of thinking of themselves as governments, they forget their people can simply up and leave if they get angry. They become callous to member complaints and arrogant enough to think they can mistreat their communities without repercussions.

But these sites come and go (just ask Tom from Myspace). Mark and Jack could use a little humility, and part of that is remembering that you’re not a sovereign ruler, you’re just another temporary caretaker of a precious commons.

Governments Give Rights

If you work in community management, there are two words that probably make you twitch: “free speech.” Because every time you’ve had to remove content for some reason, someone somewhere used those words in an angry response.

But here’s the thing: “free speech” is guaranteed by governments. (And not even all governments! We’ve got our First Amendment here, and Canada has something similar, but after that it gets a lot sketchy.) Free speech means you have the right to speak. In your life. In general. It does not mean you can say whatever you want, wherever you want.

You can’t yell “fire” in a crowded theater. You can’t post the phrase “I’m going to,” followed by a word that rhymes with “thrill,” followed by “the president,” pretty much anywhere. (No joke, I was once subpoenaed by the Secret Service because I was the admin of a community site where someone posted something they interpreted as a threat.) You can’t post photos of federal facilities online. You can’t post illegal content (child porn) or copyrighted content.

Point is, speech has limits, online and off. So limiting speech online, in a community run by a private company, is not a violation of the First Amendment, no matter how important the site is.

A government can censor you, a private company cannot. So it matters which one you are. If the CEO of a huge community company is under the delusion that they’re the president of a country, they may think they have to allow hate speech because that’s what countries do. But that’s wrong. And it leads to inaction when the community is being attacked by bad actors.

Countries guarantee free speech. Your site is not a country. There is no guarantee of free speech on your site or any site, unless a government made it, which, again, is not you.

Governments Have Responsibilities

Finally, I try to remind executive teams that, even though it can be kind of thrilling to imagine yourselves as the ruling council of a great country, you really do not want that. Because governments have responsibilities.

Transparency is good when you’re a government. It’s even required in a lot of cases. Every vote tallied, every memo recorded. As CEO, you want all your emails to be public property? You want to be subject to elections every four years? (Maybe some of us would like that, but I know the CEOs wouldn’t.)

But transparency is not required for companies. And while many people think they should be more transparent, and maybe sometimes they should, there are some really good reasons not to be. Spelling out exactly what actions are taken for what rule-breaking gives the rule-breakers the tools they need to get away with it better. Think of all Google has to do to stay ahead of the people trying to game their search algorithm. That opaqueness keeps their results good for us. Opaqueness is valuable sometimes.

Governments are slow moving on purpose. You want to have your hands tied up in red tape? You want to have to do a long term study before rolling out a new feature? (Again, maybe we should.)

But, no, CEOs and executive teams prize their independence, privacy, and fleet footedness. So if you don’t want to subject yourself to the rules and responsibilities of governments, don’t pretend you are one.

Thinking of your site as a country, and yourself as a government, is seductive. It feels good. But it leads companies to make bad decisions for the wrong reasons, and we all suffer as a result.

Mark was so busy running Facebook like an empire, he didn’t notice when Russians used it to disrupt the 2016 US election. And in his confused effort to rationalize his community management inaction, he defended Holocaust denial, which is hate speech.

Twitter is now working so hard to protect the “free speech” of Alex Jones that it’s allowing him to use the platform to promote hate, libel innocent people, and poison the entire community. In his effort to appear presidential, Jack has condoned bigotry on the platform, which opens the door to a legion of smaller bigots to come in and harass everyone else with the blessing of the CEO.

It’s time for these guys to stop playing pretend politics and admit that they’re not presidents, their sites are not countries, and we are not their citizens. They are caretakers of communities and they’d better start acting like it or they won’t have anyone to rule anymore.

Your Community Site is Not a Government was originally published in Fertile Medium on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Let’s start from the beginning. Say you make a website that allows people to say something online. Most people use it like you intended, and everything’s fine.

If you’re exceptionally lucky, more people start to use your site. In fact, enough people use it that they begin to feel a kinship with each other.

Congratulations, you’ve got a community.

Because communities are made of people, and people are hopelessly, ridiculously complicated, eventually, inevitably, someone uses your site in a way you hadn’t expected, to say something terrible. So you remove that one thing.

Congratulations, you’re a community manager.

Again, you’re very lucky. The community grows. And grows. And soon there’s a lot of community management work to do. So you hire some people. And the first thing they ask is, but is this allowed? What about this other thing? And you realize that your community members have been asking those same questions.

So you write some things down. Rules. Community guidelines. Terms of service. And you think, I probably should have written these things down earlier. But it’s done now, so everything’s fine.

But then the community grows more and something truly frightening happens. Because you’ve been successful, because your community is so large, the community itself becomes a target. The bad actors arrive. The trolls, grifters, and criminals. They’re all coming because that’s where their victims, marks, and targets are. Because that’s where everybody is.

Congratulations, you’ve got a problem.

The community you started with optimism and naïveté is now a battleground. People get hurt feelings, but you can wave that away with idealistic platitudes about free speech. Then people get killed in SWATtings and broadcast their suicides, but you can just claim those are a few bad eggs.

And then you leak private data to Russians. And then you help elect Donald Trump. And then you get called in front of congress.

Congratulations, you’ve got a big fucking problem.

I’m old enough to remember when search engines were dumb. Alta Vista, HotBot, Lycos, Web Crawler. Names nobody remembers anymore. They were dumb because all they did was crawl the web and make indexes. Lists of which words appeared on which pages. So you’d type in a word and you’d get a list of pages that included that word. This was exciting at the time.

But it was dumb because knowing that a page included a word didn’t necessarily mean that page was about that word, or even necessarily good for that topic. And, worse, the people making the pages quickly learned that could just use a word a lot and get found that way. After all, a page that uses the word “dog” 400 times must really be about dogs, right?

The reason you “Google” things now and not “Alta Vista” them is because Google was the first company to really nail search results. And they did that with something they called PageRank. They made the usual index of which pages included which words, but then they made another list of which pages got linked to a lot, and used that linking behavior as a trust metric. So if a page got linked to a lot using the word “dog,” then it was a pretty good result for a search for “dog.”

This PageRank thing, they told us, was an “algorithm.” And, for a time, algorithms were all the rage. We were living in the age of the algorithm. And in all my client meetings and project plans, every time we had a decision to make, someone would say, “the algorithm will do it.”

The algorithm never did it.

When Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified in front of Congress on April 10, 2018, he was pressed repeatedly on what Facebook was doing to combat the rising tide of terribleness on his platform. And every time his answer was AI. He said it 25 times in one sitting.

So what’s AI? When you say “Artificial Intelligence” to a normal person, they probably think of a sentient robot. Star Trek’s Data. Star Wars’ C-3P0. It’s a romantic, futuristic notion. And totally wrong.

In the context of community moderation, all “AI” means is: teach a computer to do something so it can do it faster than you can. AI is the new algorithm — another way to avoid human responsibility.

If you want to see how meaningless the term “AI” is, just replace it with “recipe” when you see it.

SENATOR: How will you prevent abuse?

CEO: We will use a recipe.

SENATOR: A recipe? For what? What’s in the recipe? What does it do? Who’s making the recipe? How will it help?

CEO: That’s right! A RECIPE.

AI is just computers doing what they do. It’s not a solution to everything. And if we’re using it to avoid making hard decisions, then it’s part of the problem.

When technologists talk about AI, I think what they’re really talking about is machine learning, which is pretty cool and not nearly as new as people think it is. It’s been around since the 1960s. It just goes faster now because computers go faster.

Machine learning, at its simplest, it’s taking a pile of data, calling it a thing, and asking the computer to find more things like that. It’s pattern matching and computers are good at that.

Imagine you’re running an email system and you really need to help your users avoid spam. So you make a pile of spam messages and say, hey computer, this is spam. And the computer scans all that data and finds patterns in it. Then, when new messages come in, it can take a guess at how closely they match that pattern. This happens now, every second of every day, and every time you mark a message as spam, you’re adding to the pile and helping train the system.

What’s interesting about machine learning is that it requires you give the computer examples, but allows you to skip defining it. You can just let the computer find the similarities in the data. That works for something as simple as spam vs not-spam, or photos of faces vs photos of not-faces.

In his senate testimony, Zuckerberg claimed that internal “AI tools” at Facebook are already deployed against terrorist content. He said: “99 percent of the ISIS and Al Qaida content that we take down on Facebook, our AI systems flag before any human sees it.”

Even though this is unprovable (“trust us, we’re removing bad stuff before you see it 99% of the time!”), I don’t doubt it. Because terrorist content, like spam, is relatively easy to define, target, and remove. It’s identifiable because it includes telltale phrases, signifiers, and comes from known bad actors.

The trouble with taking this technique and applying it to general community management is that we are too messy, too inconsistent, too prone to human weirdness.

Anyone who’s ever managed a community knows how complicated people are. A reasonable community member can suddenly have a bad day. Sometimes things that look like bad contributions are honest mistakes. Other times things that look reasonable to a bystander are known to be abusive to the sender and recipient. (Nazis are using milk as a hate symbol. MILK.) When one person tells another to die on Twitter, it’s a threat. But when David Simon says it, he’s making a point. Abusers can use liking to remind their victims that they’re watching. And abuse isn’t limited to one system — just ask Kelly Marie Tran. Point is, we’re complicated critters.

Of course humans need tools to help manage community. I’ve built systems to do this. And, sure, machine learning can be part of that. But I fear the leaders of Twitter and Facebook are depending too much on technology (again), and overlooking the kinds of systems that are great at this kind of empathetic flexible pattern recognition: humans.

They’re also overlooking the reason they’re in this predicament in the first place: unfettered growth, design that encourages immediate engagement over thoughtfulness, and a general unwillingness to define and communicate who and what their platforms are for. Thus far, they’ve been for everyone and everything. It’s time to rethink that. While there’s a community for everyone, not everyone is welcome in every community, and that’s okay. That’s how communities work. And when the “everything” that your community is for includes destroying human lives and American democracy, it’s time to raise your standards.

You can’t create a system for everyone, where everything goes, not communicate the rules, not design for community, and then say it’s just too hard to protect everyone. This end state is the outcome of all of those decisions. And AI is not going to be the patch that fixes all the bugs.

AI is not a community management strategy because it’s skipping the hard part of community management: deciding what’s allowed and what’s not. You can’t skip the definition step in community management because that’s literally the very first thing you have to do, and the thing that only you can do. You can’t just give a pile of bad stuff to the computer and say “you figure it out.” That’s just outsourcing your responsibility.

You have to do the hard part. You have to decide what your platform is for and what it’s not for. And, yeah, that means deciding who it’s for (hint: it’s not bots, nor nazis). That’s not a job you can outsource. The tech won’t do it for you. Not just because it’s your job, but because outsourcing it won’t work. It never does.

Call it “AI” or “machine learning” or “the algorithm” or whatever you like, but it’s really an abdication of your duty to care for the community that depends on you. And these days, that community is all of us, our fragile democracy, and possibly the stability of the world in general.

AI is Not a Community Management Strategy was originally published in Fertile Medium on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Two big things happened this week. On the surface, they have nothing in common. But something in my head clicked between them.

On Thursday, a 19-year-old walked into a high school in Florida with an AR-15 and killed 17 kids. The most notable thing about the latest mass murder was how unsurprising it all was. Another disturbed person, another weapon of war, more body bags, and the same old arguments.

On Friday, Mueller’s probe in the Justice Department indicted 13 Russians for a well-orchestrated campaign to influence the 2016 election with trolling, ad buys, identity theft, and lots more. Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are all implicated. The Russians weaponized our social media to make us all angry and help Trump. It worked.

These two events have little in common. The overlap was in the reactions.

The usual A-rated NRA politicians, all Republicans, came out to remind us that now was not the time to talk about gun control. Ted Cruz’s speech was well rehearsed by now: “Someone who has decided to commit this crime, they will find a way to get the gun to do it.”

They talk about gun deaths like weather. So we can say “19 kids dead today” like it’s the same thing as “it’s stormy out there.” It’s just weather. Whatcha gonna do?

The responses to the indictments were similar. Once you got past the partisans crowing about how this proved their side was right, you got the usual “it’s Chinatown, Jake” responses.

It’s just the internet! There are always trolls. Can’t be helped! A bad person who wants to make trouble on the internet will always find a way. And besides, free speech. Whatcha gonna do?

It’s the same argument. These bad things, they’re just weather. Unavoidable. No point trying to stop them.

Now, I’m not an expert on guns. I’ve fired some and they scared the shit out of me, as they should. I was raised on the same “hero solves problems with guns” media and video games as everyone else. I’ve studied the evolution of the 2nd amendment. I know it’s complicated, and that I’m not an expert.

But I am an expert in online community. I spent two decades doing it. I wrote a book about it. I charged some of the biggest tech companies by the hour to talk about it. I’ve created and run these communities from scratch. And here is a thing I know to be true: you can create an online community without trolls. It’s possible. I’ve done it. More than once.

There’s lots of ways to do it, and you have to do all of them. You have to set up a high barrier to entry so that it’s not worth the time or money for trolls to bother. You have to use human moderators, because community problems are as weird and specific as humans are. You have to prioritize your members over your advertisers or sponsors. You have to disallow bots and automated member creation. You have to prioritize the health of the community over any individual member. You have to create systems that encourage community wisdom and discourage mobs. You have to design with empathy and compassion for how the system makes people feel. It’s hard, really hard, but it’s possible.

Here’s a concrete example: I once worked with a community that was created just for women who were second wives. They needed to talk safely about incredibly personal things. So we set the barrier to entry high. You had to put in a credit card in order to join — not to pay, just to confirm your identity. The whole site was behind a login, so it was safe from being indexed by search engines. Your real name followed you around on everything you posted. But we made exceptions for areas that were very intimate, where the members could choose to disclose who they were or post anonymously (note how you still had to be a member to post anonymously). We used direct messages to take conversations away from community view when things got tense. And more, lots more. It was a lot of work, but the community deserved that work.

There were no trolls in this community. No bots. People worked hard to get in, and were grateful to be there, so the flameouts were rare, and when they happened, people were talked down by friends. It was a real community.

Now of course, every community is different. That kind of extreme barrier to entry wouldn’t work for everyone, nor should it. But you can lower the barrier to entry and still create a strong, healthy community. You just need tools for people to manage themselves and each other. You need to prioritize the health of the community at every step.

It can be done. I’ve seen it done. I’ve done it. I know for a fact it’s possible.

I’ve spent my whole career listening to people who don’t want to try say that it’s impossible. “That’s just the internet, man.” Well, maybe. Or maybe that’s just the internet we’re building because we care more about growth charts and ROI than the communities we build. And when the community we’re discussing is The People of the United States of America, don’t we deserve better?

So when I hear people say that nothing can be done about guns, that sacrificing children on the alter of the 2nd amendment is just the way it is, I think of all those same people who say that there’s nothing to be done about trolls.

And I know they’re both wrong.

In the end, the real division in our country is not Republicans vs Democrats, Boomers vs Generation X vs Millennials. The real division is between people who see a problem and want to fix it, vs people who sit in the trash fire and say, “whatcha gonna do? It’s fire season.”

I’m with the fixers. And it’s time for us fixers to get to work. We will fix the gun problem. We will get Russia out of our social media. We will make communities better than Facebook and Twitter. We will do the work. Because nobody else will. And our community deserves the work.

Guns and Trolls are not Weather was originally published in Fertile Medium on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Today I built a chicken coop. There are 16 chicks in the garage, all cheeps and poops, growing bigger every day. I built a chicken coop because soon they will be too big for their brooder and they’ll need a house to live in.

There are 16 chicks in a brooder in the garage because last year we bought eight, and they grew up to be happy chickens that provide us with breakfast every morning and amusement every day. They eat the bugs in the garden and their poop makes great fertilizer after it’s composted a while. The fertilizer feeds the vegetable garden, which feeds us.

We got the eight chicks last year because we moved to rural Oregon and we suddenly could. I’d wanted chickens ever since I watched them scratch and peck their way through a friend’s yard. It’s calming, Zen-like, watching chickens do their thing.

We moved to rural Oregon because, when we were looking for houses in Portland, my wife and I both found we had a craving for acreage. After decades of living in dense cities, Heather and I had an intense longing for more space, fewer neighbors, and a lot less computer time.

We were moving to Portland because Heather had one of those awesome internet jobs she could do from anywhere, and my job as the CEO of a startup in San Francisco had just ended suddenly and without warning. Just like the startup before that and the startup before that.

I worked in startups because, when the web began, startups were all there were. There was no internet industry. There was just us fresh-out-of-college kids with useless BAs and an endless green field that started with “www.”

I was in San Francisco because there were no jobs in Santa Cruz after I graduated. When I was in college, you could always spot my dorm room because it was the one with all the plants. I used to pocket beans from the salad bar in the dining room, plant them, put them in my one solitary window, and grow the vines.

I don’t know why I did that. I just did.

Nostalgia is an addictive poison, like alcohol or nicotine. It starts out making you feel warm and fuzzy, but it feeds on you. Eventually it replaces the reality of the past with a sanitized version and blinds you to the promises of a brilliant future.

I don’t believe in romanticizing the past because the past my family comes from is horrible. War and persecution, followed by immigration and poverty. Struggles that make today’s millennials’ problems look laughable.

In spite of that past, I’m an optimist to my core. Today is better than yesterday, and tomorrow will be better than today. I believe that because I have to. Because, if I didn’t, the wind would go out of my sails entirely.

But that doesn’t mean examining the past is useless. On the contrary, it’s our duty to remember where we came from. And examining it helps you realize how you got to where you are today.

The thing about hindsight is that it makes everything look connected. Because it is. One decision leads to the next, even though, at the time, they each feel discrete.

That’s how my first job at a startup in San Francisco led to the chicken coop today. How that dorm room bean plant led to the vegetables I’m farming. How my grandparent’s struggle connects to the opportunities my extended family and I share.

I spent 20 years building digital things. I built a website for telling true stories, a website for posting anonymous complaints, a website for photos of cute pets.

Some of those digital things crossed out of the ether and into the physical world. My wife and I started an online community of photographers that published printed magazines. The storytelling website, Fray, spawned a series of live events across the globe. The digital projects that jumped into the real world were always the ones that meant the most to me, but somehow it took me a while to catch on, probably because that’s not where the money was.

The money was in client work, and I did a lot of it. I started by writing html, converting designer’s work into something a web browser could understand. When the designs were bad, I couldn’t do my job, so I became a designer.

As a designer, I converted other people’s business ideas into something a person could understand. But when the business ideas were bad, I couldn’t do my job, so I became a consultant.

As a consultant, I advised companies on how to design solutions to their problems. But when they were focused on the wrong problems, I couldn’t solve them, so I started my own companies as an entrepreneur.

As an entrepreneur and a CEO, I was in a whole other world. A world of venture capital, of valuations, of endless steaming piles of bullshit. After a few years, I looked up to realize that everything I’d loved about the web, the connections real people could form across the wires, was gone from my life.

One thing led to the next. Hand over hand, I followed the thread. And it took me to a place I no longer wanted to be. Suddenly, for the first time in my life, there was no more thread. I had to make a change.

Heather and I decided to leave San Francisco on October 1, 2014. By October 10, I’d given all my plants to friends, we’d thrown out or given away half of our belongings, put the other half in storage, and were driving north in a car with two suitcases, two dogs, and a few plants I couldn’t part with.

I tell people that changing your life is easy. All you have to do is be willing to blow everything up. There was no goodbye party. No Dear John letter to the city I’d loved so much for so long. We just quietly left.

I feel bad about how I did it. I have friends there I never said goodbye to. Relationships that I just bailed on. My only explanation is that I was scared. Scared that if I lingered, I’d lose my nerve. Fall back into the “this startup will be different” trap. Scared that if I put all my love and energy into one more startup that fell apart spectacularly like all the others, I wouldn’t be able to survive it.

We now live on a couple acres in a rural part of Oregon that’s close enough to Portland to drive in and see friends. Our house is a former barn that still has bits of the original rough wood visible on the ceilings. The heartbeat count here on the farm has gone up quickly. It currently stands at two humans, three dogs, five goats, and 23 chickens.

Instead of building digital things, I’m building physical ones. A chicken coop, a goat shed, a greenhouse. I’ve been delighted to realize that the design skills that powered my career have translated well into three dimensions. HTML and CSS have become lumber and wood screws. BBEdit has become a miter saw. In a browser, you have to worry about versions and platforms. Outside, you have to worry about weather and gravity. But in the end it’s just designing around different variables. Problem solving is problem solving. Design is design.

Designing for plants and animals turns out to be pretty similar to designing for online communities. You can build a beautiful nesting box, but the chickens will still lay eggs in the hay pile. Sometimes the chickens peck at each other and we have to “community manage” them. Abby, our Rhode Island Red, likes to follow us around, squawking in angry tones. We call her our “Internet Commenter.”

The goats, all Dwarf Nigerians, are the perfect metaphor for an online community. They test all the fences to see where the weak points are. They can go from adorable playthings to forces of pure destruction in a heartbeat. They will literally eat the shirt off your back. And just when you’re about to lose your temper, they surprise you by being completely adorable.

Gardening has always been the go-to metaphor for online communities, so much so that it’s a cliché, but it really is the right one. Because in both cases, control is an illusion. Sure, you can prepare the soil, plant the seeds, and provide the nutrients, but the outcome is always subject to the whims of the universe. Sometimes you do everything right and the plants don’t thrive. Sometimes they explode and take over and the rate of growth becomes a problem. In the end, all you can do is nurture the seedlings and hope for the best.

The thing that people miss about gardening is the same thing people miss about online community. It’s never about one plant or one person. A garden is an ecosystem, each piece is an integral part of a greater whole, from the beautiful flowers to the grossest bugs, and the system exerts far more influence than any one thing.

I was at my Master Gardener class when the subject of pest control came up. We were talking about deer, a notorious pest in gardens because they can hop fences and decimate a crop in an evening. He said there’s no sure fire way to deter them. They’re just a part of nature, and it’s our jobs to create gardens where they’ll do the least damage. Maybe it’s tall fences. Maybe it’s planting certain plants they don’t like around the perimeter. Maybe it’s just standing outside with a broom.

And I thought of all the communities I’ve designed and participated in, and all the pests they encountered. How easily the deer stand in for the trolls and haters that see a beautiful garden as a buffet and toilet. How the fences so easily can represent the carefully constructed barriers to entry we design. The legion of community managers, all armed with brooms, trying to protect the fragile community inside, and cleaning up the mess when the pests inevitably get in.

I wonder how much better we could make online spaces if we took more cues from farmers. Because any farmer can tell you, the deer will never decide to stop being deer. It’s your job to protect your garden. Or, at least, make it inhospitable enough that the pests move on to the next one.

When I blew up my San Francisco startup life, I thought I was entering a whole new world. And, indeed, it is different. The shit I deal with is now, literally, shit. At least I can grow things with it now.

But the truth is, the thread that connects the web to the garden is there. It took a weird path from Santa Cruz to Portland, from digital to soil, but it’s there. And for the first time in a long time, I can see it spooling out into the future, and I can’t wait to see where it leads.

Fray is a celebration of true personal storytelling. Our goal is to create a safe space where we can connect over the stories of our lives. Also, it’s pretty fun. Fray Cafe is a storytelling open mic, which means we depend on you to get up and tell a story. Wanna? Read on.

The Three Rules

Rule 1: Tell a true story.

We’ve got nothing against fiction, but that’s not what Fray is for. We ask all storytellers to tell a true story. Truth is subjective, and that’s okay, so tell the story from your point of view.

Storytelling can be poetic, but this is not a poetry reading. Storytelling can be funny, but this is not the place for a stand up routine. Just tell a true story. The audience will be with you.

Rule 2: Tell a personal story.

A personal story is told from your perspective, about something that happened to you. You’re the protagonist. Don’t tell someone else’s story unless you have their explicit permission (and even then, say why their story is important to you).

Good Fray stories are about times when you were tested, something that made you change your mind, something that, looking back on it now, seems bigger than when it happened.

Rule 3: You’ve got five minutes.

Each open mic participant has five minutes. The time limit is a gift for both you and the audience. Not every story is going to be interesting to every audience member. That’s okay. Knowing that it’ll only last five minutes keeps them in their seats until the next one.

The five minute limit is good for the storytellers as well. It gives us incentive to cut out the extraneous details and get to the point. It helps us focus on the important parts of the story.

The Carrot: If you stick to those three rules, you’ll receive an audience full of bright eyes and open hearts, ready to welcome you to the stage and really listen to what you have to say, and prepared to applaud like thunder when you’re done. You may also get some parting gifts.

The Stick: If you break one of the three rules, you’ll have to wear the Boa of Shame. The emcee (yours truly) will come place it on your shoulders. That’s your cue to leave the stage. If you don’t, further countermeasures may be deployed.

Tips for Storytellers

DOs

• Skip the setup. You don’t have to explain how old you were, where you lived, or any other details that aren’t relevant to the story. Just launch into the story and the audience will follow you.
• Be reflective. The best stories balance two goals: personal storytelling and emotional reflection. Don’t just tell us a story, tell us why it matters to you.
• Be confident. No one else knows the story you’re about to tell as well as you do, so own it!
• Have energy. Excitement is contagious.
• Make eye contact. Resist the urge to stare at your feet, no matter how interesting they seem.
• Above all, enjoy yourself! If you’re having fun, so is everybody else.

DON’Ts

• Don’t tell your Life Story. Focus on one moment that has a larger meaning in hindsight.
• Don’t talk about the web. We all know what it’s like to be online. We don’t know what it’s like to be in your shoes. Tell us about that.
• Don’t bring paper. This is a telling, not a reading. Paper puts a wall between you and the audience. You won’t have the light to read it anyway.
• Don’t dither. Avoid using delay words like “um, uh, well” too often. I know that one’s hard. Don’t beat yourself up if one, uh, slips in.
• Don’t plug your startup. That’s just gauche.

The Process

Before the Event

• Get inspired. The best way to come up with a story is to hear other people’s stories. Listen to some past Fray events to get warmed up.
• Practice. Once you have a story in mind, practice by telling it to a friend. Don’t worry about the time limit, just try to tell it as you would casually. Get their feedback. Notice where they laugh. Ask them if they were confused at any point.
• Practice some more. If you feel good about the story, practice it a few more times alone. Once you’re feeling confident in it, try it with a timer. If you’re over 5 minutes, look for things you can leave out to tighten it up. If you’re under 5 minutes, you’re ready!

At the Event

• Arrive early. We’ll start taking signups at 10pm and stop when we think we’ve got enough for two hours. Be prepared to write down a tweet-length description of your story.
• Don’t leave. Once you sign up, sit near the stage. We don’t put people on stage in the order they signed up. If we look for you and you’re not there, you’ll lose your slot.
• Be a great audience member. Give the storytellers before and after you the kind attention and applause you’d like to receive.

Other Notes

• There is no theme, other than true personal stories.
• Like the rest of XOXO, the entire evening will be recorded and released online after the event. If this is not okay with you, you can opt out on the signup sheet, but there’s no guarantee that someone else won’t be recording.
• This event, along with the rest of the festival, must comply with the XOXO Code of Conduct.
• Photography is okay, so long as you’re not using a flash, and not disturbing anyone.

And Finally

Wow. You read all the way to the end. You’re fantastic.

If you have any additional questions, comments, or ideas, drop them in the XOXO Slack in the #fraycafe channel, or email me at “fraying” at the gmails dot com.

Thanks for reading. See you in the Fray!

The internet is a big place and we’re all invited to contribute to it. Sometimes those contributions create the opportunity for people to respond in the form of publicly viewable comments.

Comments have a reputation for badness, but that’s not entirely the fault of commenters, it’s the fault of the comment systems in use today.

People misbehave when they feel abandoned or insulted, and the experience design of most comment systems creates exactly that feeling. If comment systems treated commenters better, their comments would be better.

To that end, I propose the following Commenters’ Bill of Rights.

But first, a disclaimer. Comments, while being a good and necessary part of the web, are not required on everything. Anything can be posted to the web and there’s no law that says you must have a comment thread on it. But if you choose to add comment functionality to your site, there are a few things you must do to comply with the Commenters’ Bill of Rights.

Commenters have the right to edit or delete their comments.

Just as people talk without thinking, they comment without thinking, too. Sometimes even the most even-tempered of us posts a comment before realizing that it sounds hostile, contains errors, or is just generally bad. This is just human nature, so it must be designed for.

Having an immediate way to edit or delete a comment after posting will help people self-correct. Sometimes all it takes is to read your comment in context to realize that you’ve spoken out of turn. Sites that do not allow commenters to self-correct after posting are excluding a huge set of volunteer copyeditors with the perfect incentive to make the comment thread better: the commenters themselves.

Caveats: In governmental use or formal debate settings, there may be cases where the removal of a comment from within a thread could disrupt the train of thought. In these cases, while the commenter should still be able to edit or delete their contributions, the site could add a line disclosing the change. For example: “This comment was edited by the author 15 minutes after posting.” Or: “This comment was deleted by the author.”

At the root of this right is a simple fact: You own your words, even when you post them as a comment. Because your comments are your property, you have the right to edit or delete them whenever you wish. Giving commenters this respect will help improve all comments. Real ownership creates pride of ownership.

The content creator has the right to remove comments or opt-out of comments entirely.

As we invent more flavors of user-generated content, we must retain the ability for the content creators to manage the communities that grow around their content.

Vine is a telling recent example. The app enables people to post publicly-viewable 6-second videos. Vine forces every video to have comments with no way to opt-out, so if you’re a pretty girl on Vine you’ll be greeted by a stream of creeptastic comments every time you say hello. This is just wrong.

Flickr, as usual, did it right, and has done so for a long time. There, the photographers can choose whether or not to allow comments on every individual photo, who can comment (anyone, contacts, or just friends and family), and delete any comment at any time.

Kinja, the Gawker Media commenting system, takes this a step further. The platform puts every commenter in charge of moderating all the replies to their comments. So if I leave a comment in response to a post, and someone replies to me, I have the power to moderate that response.

Not only does this give power to the commenters, it also helps distribute the work of comment moderation to the commenters themselves. The system creates a positive feedback loop, as the commenters are rewarded for good comments by having more responsibility to promote other good comments.

As creators, we have the right to choose if we want comments on our work. And if we choose to allow comments, it’s up to us to moderate them. Any comment should be able to be removed by the owner of the content that engendered the reply.

Caveats: In flat systems like Twitter, where every tweet is on the same level as every other tweet, it should be possible for me to remove a reply from my view without deleting the tweet itself. In other words, I have the right to break the reply’s association with my tweet, but not to remove it from Twitter outright. If Twitter enabled this, it would remove the major reason people misuse “Block” now — it’s simply the only way to remove someone else’s tweet from your view.

Commenters have the right to reply privately.

Sometimes the aggravating factor that turns a minor snark into an all-out war is the publicness of comments. It’s the difference between a hushed personal conversation and being criticized in front of all your friends. So it’s amazing to me that more social sites don’t have a private alternative to public comments.

Years ago, Vox, a public blogging community similar to Tumblr, had a great solution for this. Below the public comment form, beside the post button, was a simple text link. Clicking it changed the form from a public comment to a private message from you to the author. It was perfect for those moments when, halfway through a comment, you realize you really just want to tell the author what you’re thinking, not the whole world.

Giving people an affordance to easily switch their communication from public to private is an effective way to take disagreements offline, leading to a more conflict-free comment space, which in turn invites more and better comments.

Caveats: Private communication channels can become spam vectors, so they’re best limited to contacts and closely monitored. In places where that’s a concern, they could be limited to an in-stream comment that’s not visible to anyone but the author (as “notes” are here in Medium initially).

Commenters have the right to clear, human-readable comment guidelines.

Comments are potent because they’re so flexible. Are comments responses to the work or the author? Are they a line of communication between author and audience, or are they a peanut gallery conversation where no response is required, like talking to the TV? The truth is, comments are all of these things and more, which is why they go wrong so often.

If you’re going to give people the ability to leave words on your work, and you don’t want utter garbage, it’s up to you to tell them what you want.

In my experience, many site creators are strangely shy about making their expectations clear, but it’s the uncertainty that leads to negative participation. If you put an empty box on a city sidewalk, it’ll be filled with garbage in no time. Don’t be afraid to tell people what the box is for.

In practice this means creating a clear set of community guidelines that include examples of what you want to see and what you don’t. And make sure these guidelines are summarized at signup, login, and wherever you give people the ability to comment. (Here’s an example set of comment guidelines I wrote for my plant blog. Flickr’s are great, too. Yours should match the look and voice of your site.)

Making these expectations clear also gives you the leverage to be more forceful in removing comments that do not meet your criteria. You can’t get angry at someone for breaking a rule you never told them about. Give your members the best chance to do the right thing before punishing them for doing something wrong.

Caveats: None. If you put a comment form on your site, and you don’t tell people what it’s for, then you have no one to blame but yourself when it collects garbage.

There will always be bad comments and bad commenters, just like there are rude jerks in every real world community. But protecting these simple rights for commenters will make negative participation in comments is much less likely. And sometimes that’s all it takes to help people do the right thing.

The Commenters’ Bill of Rights was originally published in Fertile Medium on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Doctor Discord’s evil plan to make us all fight.

Say you’re a supervillian. Doctor Discord! Your goal is not to take over the world, but just to create more unpleasantness. So you set out to create a device that would ensnare normal, rational people and turn them into ranting lunatics. What would your Argument Machine look like? How would it work?

(Note that I mean “argument” not in terms of academic debate, which is healthy, but in the everyday “unproductive, unpleasant, angry fight” sense of the word.)

First, the machine would have to be online, so it could reach the maximum amount of people with the least amount of construction. People feel protected online, like they do in cars, so they’re more willing to fight. But it shouldn’t be just a website. It would also have to be an app on all the major platforms for maximum reach.

All arguments have a beginning, so we’ll create a tool for people to post their thoughts. This should be as easy as possible, so people do it without thinking too deeply. Forethought is the enemy of a nasty argument.

Arguments tend to fizzle out quickly if the participants are able to make a fully fleshed-out thought, so we’ll limit every thought to a ridiculously small size, say 140 characters. Brevity may be the soul of wit, but it’s also the root of misunderstandings.

We’ll then take those short thoughts and present them immediately to the audience, without any ability to edit them after the fact. We’ll even create a “reply” affordance that seems like it’s private, but we’ll actually show the reply publicly. Nothing creates a fight faster than in-group language overheard by the out-group.

To maximize negative reactions, we’ll design the presentation of these short thoughts to create annoyance. Tests have shown that information coming in too fast can create anger and defensiveness, just like someone interrupting you in real life, so we’ll make everything as fast and interruptive as possible. We’ll also pack the app with lots of notifications, so we can make people’s pockets buzz every time someone mentions them. Just like the electric shocks we used on those lab rats.

If someone isn’t receiving enough of these short thoughts to overwhelm them, then we’ll blanket them with suggestions of other people they should be hearing from, to encourage all new members to quickly reach an overwhelmed state.

With enough people, and enough short thoughts, arguments are sure to occur. When they do, we’ll add heat to them by making sure everyone can see the individual thoughts outside of the argument’s participants. Nothing like a hooting crowd to make a bad situation worse. We’ll even add a tool to allow others to repeat the thoughts to a wider network (out of context, of course). The more people who pile in, the longer the argument will last, the more people will participate.

If everything goes well, the mainstream media will start monitoring these thoughts, so that they can embarrass famous people when they speak out of turn. We’ll even create an way for people to embed these thoughts on other sites so that they remain even after the original poster deletes them. Gotcha!

Nothing is better at creating new arguments than other arguments, so once we reach a critical mass, avoiding arguments will be impossible. Now all we have to do is sit back and practice our supervillian laugh. And maybe go public.

I think you get my point by now. Yes, I’m talking about Twitter.

I’m not saying that Twitter was designed to create arguments. I’m just saying that, if you set out to create an Argument Machine, it’d come out looking an awful lot like Twitter.

I think Twitter is awesome. As of today, I’ve tweeted more than 16,000 times. It’s the community tool I use more than any other. But with Twitter preparing to IPO and monetize all of us, I worry about the health of the community the tool produces.

If Twitter cared about avoiding arguments, there are so many things they could do: remove the outdated character limit, let us edit tweets, create progressive circles of privacy, don’t let retweets out of our networks, slow the whole thing down, and encourage smaller communities. But they’re not going to do any of those things because the financial pressure points in exactly the opposite direction: more users, more tweets, faster and faster. Who cares if they’re fighting?

Well, I do. I want Twitter to succeed. But every time I see some innocuous tweet spawn another long, bile-filled thread of awfulness, I become less interested in tweeting. I know, arguments will always happen, online and off. But the design of the tools we use can encourage or inhibit this human tendency, and I’m afraid Twitter is falling very far into the “encourage argument” side of things. And I’m not alone.

Where will we go when we all tire of getting yelled at on Twitter? Who will be the superhero to save us from Doctor Discord? What would a tool designed to create a harmonious exchange of interests and ideas even look like? I’m confident we’ll find out eventually, but I seriously doubt its logo will be a little blue bird.

The Argument Machine was originally published in From Powazek.com on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Or: I have some awesome job news.

You learn things when you start a company. When I cofounded 8020, I learned to ask the difficult questions. When I cofounded JPG Magazine with my wife, I learned how important it was for everyone to be in charge of something. And when I founded Cute-Fight, I learned … a lot.

Cute-Fight taught me that there’s a certain skill set required to raise venture capital, and it’s not one I really want. It taught me that I really do like managing people, especially when they’re as talented as that team. It taught me that running a startup is mostly about setting priorities and convincing people that they’re the right ones.

But most of all, running Cute-Fight reminded me of some things I already knew but had gotten lost somewhere along the way. It reminded me that I really love making products for specific communities, nurturing the garden, and seeing what blooms. And it reminded me that I really like writing.

At Cute-Fight, with the design, illustration, and engineering all in excellent hands, I did whatever was left over. And most of what was left over was writing. Writing the newsletter, responding to member emails, crafting every word that appeared on the website.

It’s funny that a guy with a journalism degree and 20 years of work in and around the publishing industry should have to rediscover his love of writing, but there you go. I think it just got buried under lofty terms like “experience design” and “content strategy” and “community management.” All those things, at their core, are about putting the right words in the right order.

So when it became clear that Cute-Fight was not going to pay my bills, and, worse, that I had gone into debt chasing the startup dream, I started looking for work with increasing desperation. I made some mistakes in this process. Mistakes I feel bad about now. Suffice to say, it was a rough time. But this is a story with a happy ending.

A couple years ago, Nik and Tony started a company called Tonx. The idea was simple: get the best coffee beans from all over the world, expertly roast them, and mail them to subscribers every two weeks.

I’d been a Tonx subscriber since the start, and Nik and Tony had become internet friends. Tonx was the first company to sponsor a Cute-Fight venue, and while we were working that out, I was impressed with how smart, generous, and passionate they were.

In a couple visits to San Francisco, Nik and Tony told me about their plans for the future of the company. It hit me in a flash: Tonx is a biweekly magazine published in bean form. What JPG Magazine was to photography, Tonx is to coffee.

“What you need,” I said excitedly, “is someone who can write and edit, with experience in publishing and community building.” They both smiled and asked me if I knew anyone like that. Only then did it sink in that they were offering me a job.

I’ve been working as Tonx’s Editor in Chief for a couple months now, and it’s been a joy. It’s all the parts of what I loved about doing Cute-Fight — writing, community, product — with an amazing team of engineers, coffee pros, and a rapidly growing member base of devoted (and caffeinated) customers.

Coffee maintains a special place in creative culture. When I think back to my happiest moments, coffee was always nearby. It’s a daily morning ritual that I share with millions of other people. It’s a connective thread that ties our lives together. With such a hot, emotional product, there’s no end to the collaborative projects we could do.

So we’ve got plans. Big plans. I can’t go into detail yet, but if you know me and my work, you may have a general idea. You can see the humble beginnings in The Frequency, where we’re adding weekly travelogues, reviews, and photo essays — not just about coffee but coffee culture at large. They’re the right words, in the right order, as much as we can.

One of the most challenging things about being a startup CEO that nobody tells you is that, when it’s over, it’s terrifying to go back to being someone else’s employee, working on someone else’s vision. Once you sit in the big chair, every other chair feels too small.

My only advice for someone in that situation is this: use the experience to figure out which parts are required for your happiness and try to find that somewhere else. If you’re extremely lucky, you’ll find a team of talented people working on something awesome who need someone in exactly that role. I was that kind of lucky and I’m so incredibly grateful I can’t even describe it.

If you love coffee, sign up for Tonx. You won’t regret it. And I’ll be on the other end of that line with the rest of the team, working on some exciting stuff for you.

Ever forward!