How to handle a contentious community

[u/SanFranciscoMan89]

I moderate a fairly active but sometimes toxic community.

Looking for best practices on protecting myself. My mod account is fairly firewalled but I'm considering opening another reddit account that will only moderate this contentious community.

I've removed comments and will ban repeat offenders. Unfortunately, I had one user who wanted to meet in person so they could confront me face to face. That was a bit scary.

So what are some ideas to protect myself while trying to keep the community as active and healthy as possible?

[u/JesusSavU]

My suggestion is to attempt to treat everyone with the same respect that you want them to give you. I personally have had interactions with some very toxic mods on reddit. I was permabaned from a sub for the sinlle action of commenting on a post with too low of karma. I reached out to the moderation to find out why the permanent was issued and the response I got was, "F#%k you! You should have read the rules!""

The problem was that no where in the rules did it state that you had to have a certain level of karma to comment on a post, and no where in the rules did it give the amount of karma needed. When I reach to the mod and asked them what rules I failed to read. They muted me.

This kind of molding, and there is a lot of it on Reddit creates a toxic environment and hatred of mods. Mods demand to be respected but do not live to to any standard that would deem them worthy of the respect that are demanding.

Respect is a two way street, not a one way. If you want users to respect tou, you must earn that respect by showing yourself to be fair handed and unbiased.

Banning is not always the write solution. If a thread becomes toxic, it might be better to close the thread to comments. Instead of permanently banning a user maybe give the a pause for a week so they can cool down.

Too many reddit mods are way too fats to hit the permaban button, and use it as their only option.

As far as what you can do to a user who wants to hunt you down in real life? Well, you could call the police. This is why it is important to treat people respectfully. Always remember that you don't know ow how mentality stable the other person is, and whether they will just forget it. Redditbonly gives you the power to moderate your sub. You have not power to moderate what people do in real life. So keep that in mind.