Podcast appearances and mentions of andrew losowsky

Cela s'appelle " fatigue informationnelle ". Une enquête réalisée pour la Fondation Jean Jaurès et Arte par LʹObSoCo (LʹObservatoire Société et Consommation) constate en France une " fatigue informationnelle " et évoque un véritable " exode informationnel " dans une société devenue " info-malade ". En clair, les citoyens en ont marre de l'info en général, et des médias en particulier : la confiance sʹeffondre, la fatigue et lʹévitement de lʹactualité augmentent, et la polarisation sʹintensifie. Les plateformes dépriorisent lʹinformation, le public sʹen détourne et les influenceurs captent lʹattention. " Quiconque nourrit une vision optimiste pour les médias en 2025 est dans lʹillusion ", affirme S. Mitra Kalita, CEO de URL Media, dans les prédictions annuelles du Nieman Lab, laboratoire de journalisme de Harvard. Comme le souligne Andrew Losowsky, head of community product chez Vox Media, " la situation est désormais si désespérée que le changement est la seule option ". Mais quel changement ? Pour en parler, Fathi Derder reçoit Guénaëlle Gault, directrice générale de LʹObSoCo (LʹObservatoire Société et Consommation). https://www.jean-jaures.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/exode-inform.pdf 

In this episode we welcome Andrew Losowsky, Head of Coral by Vox, a tech platform that helps improve communities on websites. Andrew was Coral's first hire when it started as a very unusual collab between the New York Times, Washington Post and Mozilla, tasked to figure out how to build software that helps readers engage with journalists, with a focus on sustainable community growth.We cover: How to empower & enable communities to be supportive of each-other and the journalists, how to look for what audiences genuinely need and what it takes to properly scale communities.Using AI in a creative & responsible manner, while still keeping the human connection, learning how strategy & a tactical approach are important to improve your audiences' lives through software.Where are the gaps in design & organizational culture that need to be filled in order to make marginalized communities feel welcome?How to measure success in community moderation at scale and understanding how much people value the community.What pitfalls to avoid when growing communities as a startup, with actionable advice.Great reads referenced in the podcast:Brand Community by Albert M. Muñiz, Jr. & Thomas O'GuinnBuilding Successful Online Communities by Paul Resnick and Robert E. Kraut Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information.

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is a frequent topic of conversation on Community Signal. As Patrick puts it, if you’re a community professional in the United States, “this is the law that places the liability for speech on the author of that speech, not on you as the [community’s] host. It allows you to moderate and remove certain content while not assuming liability for what remains. I like to think of it as the legal basis for our profession in the US, and it is an important legal protection against the wealthy and powerful who would happily take down an entire online community for one post they don’t like.” Plainly, this is a law that protects our jobs, our communities, the people in those communities, and their right to have civil and safe discussions online. For this episode of Community Signal, we invited past guests to share how Section 230 has enabled them to foster community and what changing Section 230 could do to the fabric of online communities. Our Podcast is Made Possible By… If you enjoy our show, please know that it’s only possible with the generous support of our sponsor: Discourse. Big Quotes “At The Times, Section 230 allowed us to build a modern news operation where we could have a public back and forth with our readers; an ongoing one. It gave us the chance to respect them by setting rules for engagement and privileging those who spent the time to be thoughtful about the news. By allowing us to pre-moderate, and not be legally liable for any mistakes we may have made in that process, [that’s] really what made our community operation at The Times economically feasible.” –@BasseyE “As co-founder of a community software company, I personally rely on [Section 230’s] protection every day. If we go down the path of adding caveats and exceptions to Section 230, we risk losing it altogether. Yes, online content is messy – so is freedom, so is free speech. If we still believe in those things, we need to protect the innovators, not squash them under a burden of regulatory red tape or lawsuits.” –@rhogroupee “Yes, online communities need to be moderated and cared for and that is the precise reason why Section 230 exists, to empower moderation without creating liability. If Section 230 goes away, the main groups to benefit will not be the most vulnerable users of the internet, it will be the huge platforms uniquely possessing the resources to be compliant with whatever new regulation that they will have helped to craft.” –@losowsky “Without the protection of Section 230, a well-meaning person or organization may lose their right to maintain a clean well-lighted space for civil discussion and capitulate to every demand regardless of its merit. An organization facilitating online community may decide to close their community altogether deciding that the risk is not worth the benefit. Who really loses when we threaten the opportunities to build meaningful communities that can have a positive impact on people’s lives?” –@scottmoore About Our Guests Bruce Ableson, director of evangelism and enablement at Adobe Gail Ann Williams who consults on community conversation and craft beer, formerly of The WELL and Salon Media Group Bassey Etim, editorial director at Canopy, formerly of The New York Times Rosemary O’Neill, president of Social Strata Andrew Losowsky, head of Coral at Vox Media Scott Moore, community veteran with a focus on nonprofits Michael Wood-Lewis, co-founder and CEO of Front Porch Forum Angela Connor, founder and CEO at Change Agent Communications Related Links Sponsor: Discourse, civilized discussion for teams, customers, fans, and communities Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act on Wikipedia Law professor Eric Goldman on Community Signal The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s civil liberties director David Greene on Community Signal Patrick and Scott Moore discuss Section 230 Bruce Ableson, founder of Open Diary Gail Ann Williams, formerly of The WELL and Salon Media Group Zen kōan Bassey Etim of Canopy, formerly of The New York Times Rosemary O’Neill, co-founder of Ultimate Bulletin Board and Hoop.la Andrew Losowsky, head of Coral at VOX Media Scott Moore, a 20-year community industry veteran with a focus on nonprofit Michael Wood-Lewis, founder of Front Porch Forum Angela Connor, founder and CEO at Change Agent Communications Transcript View transcript on our website Your Thoughts If you have any thoughts on this episode that you’d like to share, please leave me a comment, send me an email or a tweet. If you enjoy the show, we would be so grateful if you spread the word and supported Community Signal on Patreon.

Andrew Losowsky is an award winning writer, editor and storyteller. After a long and successful career in journalism he became the head of the Coral Project at Vox Media - an open source project that seeks to help publishers build better communities around their journalism. We discuss the history of comments sections, where they lost their way, and the whys and hows of building positive communities around your publishing brand. Enjoy!

Andrew Losowsky, Head of Coral at Vox Media, an editorial newsletter tool for writers and publishers, talks to your host Vahe Arabian of State of Digital Publishing about the state of Coral, an open-source project assisting publishers with building better communities around their journalism. Andrew discusses Coral’s premier tool called Talk, the various types of comments that moderators have to look out for, and how journalism and technology are merging together. Support the show.

In this episode of Tricky, Heather and Emily talk to Sarah L. Roberts, the woman who coined the term “commercial content moderation,” about how elements of online discourse are governed by outsourced and unseen low-paid workers, who sift through “the grossness of humanity.” And they ask Andrew Losowsky of the Coral Project whether newsrooms and journalists still have a part to play in fostering civil discourse, on and offline. Plus: the bubonic plague, dance mania, Karen Carpenter, and pointy shoes. Read the full transcript below. Reading list: https://journalismdesign.com/please-dont-read-comments/   Theme music: The Insider Theme by The Insider is licensed under a Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 International License.

Have a love-hate relationship with social media? So do we. In Episode 7, we explore the joys and perils of visibility, and talk with Sydette Harry, an expert in online communities. Trolls, randos, and straight-up neo-Nazis: being a woman online can be tough. This week, we’re exploring how we make choices about what and whether to share online. Our guest this week is the inimitable writer, editor, and tech/media critic, Sydette Harry, also known as @blackamazon. She’s an editor at Mozilla and part of the Coral Project, which is working to create healthier communities and comments sections. She’s also smart as hell, exquisitely blunt, and committed to talking about what’s wrong online in the voice she grew up with. > Yes, in a lot of ways I am more diverse than the average person who shows up to a lot of these things. We’re not going to lie about that. I am, by virtue of being black and female, even though I am a cis, able-bodied person, I am more diverse than the people you usually have in there. That being said, I’m still an Ivy League graduate. I’m still a person of a certain education… So when you say that I am “diversity,” let’s all be clear here: you ain’t doin’ that well, fam. You’re not doing that good. > > —Sydette Harry Here’s what we cover—and of course, we’ve got a full transcript, too. Show notes A year ago, Lindy West quit Twitter—and she’s not coming back. We miss her voice, but we’re also a little jealous. Plus: Jenn moves her sports talk to Facebook, Katel closes the tab and never looks back, and we all wonder whether Klout still exists. (Sara used to be influential in burritos. Just saying.) Interview: Sydette Harry Get comfortable, because you won’t want to miss a second of Sydette’s searing commentary on tech culture, Twitter, journalism, race, gender, and weight. We talk about: Sydette’s work with the Coral Project. Why she’s calling out media for telling amazing people that they don’t belong. How Twitter’s insistence it was the “free speech wing of the free speech party” left it vulnerable to abuse. The Prep for Prep program, the Bronx is Burning era, and the limitations of teaching kids from under-resourced areas how to fit into elite circles. Presentation voice, “home” voice, and the politics of code-switching (or not). Rebuilding life and family in the wake of her father’s deportation under IIRIRA. Managing polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), getting medical care in a fat-phobic society, and how dramatic weight loss changed the way Sydette was treated. Fuck Yeah of the Week: Ladies Get Paid We’ve talked a lot on the show about wages, being underpaid, and how hard it can be to negotiate at work. So this week, we give a fuck yeah to a group educating and empowering cis and trans women and non-binary or gender non-conforming folks to get paid fairly. Check out Ladies Get Paid for workshops, town hall conversations, and more. Sponsors This episode of NYG is brought to you by: Shopify, a leading global commerce platform that’s building a diverse, intelligent, and motivated team—and they  want to apply to you. Visit shopify.com/careers to see what they’re talking about. _WordPress—the place to build your personal blog, business site, or anything else you want on the web. WordPress helps others find you, remember you, and connect with you. _ Transcript Katel LeDû [Ad spot] This episode of No, You Go is brought to you by our friends at Shopify, the leading global commerce platform for entrepreneurs like me! And A Book Apart. Are you looking to join forces with a diverse, intelligent, and motivated team? Well Shopify has great news: they’re hiring more awesome people to join them and they don’t just want you to apply to them, they want to apply you. Visit shopify.com/careers to see what they’re all about [music fades in]. Jenn Lukas [Music fades out] Welcome to No, You Go, the show about being ambitious—and sticking together. I’m Jenn Lukas. KL I’m Katel LeDû Sara Wachter-Boettcher And I’m Sara Wachter-Boettcher. JL Today we’re talking about online personas, communities, and our love/hate relationship with social media. What do we want out of it? And how do we decide how visible to be in a world that’s full of trolls and randos constantly popping into your mentions to tell you that you’re wrong? We’re also joined by Sydette Harry, who works with Mozilla and the Coral Project on building healthier online communities and comments sections. We’ll talk about how race and gender play a role in what happens online. SWB Hey, do you all remember last year when Lindy West quit Twitter? JL No, what happened? SWB Ok, so Lindy is a writer and a comedian, and she had this book come out called Shrill, which is a memoir. And she’s awesome. And she was one of my favorite voices on Twitter, and then one day last January she just deactivated, and she ended up writing about it in The Guardian. She did it on the day that, at the time, our president-elect was taunting North Korea about nuclear weapons on Twitter. And she was just like, I’ve had enough. So she wrote in The Guardian that, you know, “For the past five years, has been a machine where I put in unpaid work and tension headaches come out.” She talks about how she’s used it to write jokes for free, post political commentary for free, answer questions for free, do feminism 101 for free, and she wrote that, you know, “Off Twitter these are all things by which I make my living, but on Twitter I do them pro bono. And in return I’m micromanaged in real time by strangers, neo-Nazis mine my personal life for vulnerabilities to exploit, and men enjoy unfettered direct access to my brain, so they can inform me, for the thousandth time, that they would gladly rape me if I weren’t so fat.” So she’s been off Twitter for a year, and I’ve been wondering, is Lindy going to come back? Because she was also somebody who I really looked to for interesting insight and conversation. And as much as I really understand everything she’s saying and I agree with it, quitting Twitter also feels impossible to me because it’s something I’ve relied on for such a long time, sort of personally and professionally. Well, Lindy is not coming back. So earlier this month she wrote a new piece called “I Quit Twitter and it Feels Great.” And she wrote about what her life is like now. She’s like, “I don’t wake up with a pit in my stomach every day… I don’t get dragged into protracted, bad-faith arguments with teenage boys about whether poor people deserve medical care… I don’t spend hours every week blocking and reporting trolls.” And I think about this a lot because like I also am spending more time than I would like to on that kind of shit. But at the same time, I love so much about Twitter, and about social media in general, there’s a lot of stuff that it’s really connected me to. And so it made me really curious, like, how are you all negotiating this? How do you think about your visibility online? Do you feel like you’re making choices as a result of all of that crap? JL Well that sounds lovely, I have to say, to some extent. But I have not followed that same path. KL Yeah, I mean, well Sara and I, actually, we were really lucky: we just saw Lindy speak at an event and I actually really liked something that she said about Twitter and Facebook, those platforms, they want you to and they’re really banking on you to think that they’re the only way, the only way that you can connect with other people. And like while that’s bullshit, we know at the core, it’s really hard, like you were just saying, Sara. I mean this is a lot of how we have gotten to know each other, and a lot of people that we’re friends with, and have made really good connections to work. So I don’t know, I mean, I think it’s trying to find some kind of balance, but I don’t know. I look at both of you and I don’t participate that much on Twitter or Facebook, I guess, but I was thinking back on this. When I was really starting to feel like I had something, maybe, to say, or like I would feel comfortable saying something on Twitter, I was watching all these people that I really loved and cared about getting completely trashed just for like existing there. And I got really scared. So I think that’s why I haven’t really put myself out there at all. JL I think one of the things that I find hard to grasp about Twitter is Twitter now versus Twitter 10 years ago. KL Yeah. JL And I feel like I still have this … like love relationship with Twitter, for the Twitter that I loved 10 years ago, which I just felt was way more focused on specific technology news, which is what I was looking for at the time, and sort of what I was really more putting out was technology news. [5:00] And now it’s so much more. And, you know, it’s sort of — when people are like, “Oh, I long for the good ol’ days!” And part of me is like, “Oh! But Twitter used to be this!” And I’m like, “But just because it used to be something doesn’t mean it is that or ever will be again. And I think for me that’s sort of trying to find how much I still interact with it is definitely not how much I used to. SWB And I mean like of course it’s changed, right? It’s a big platform and it has so much power to get the news to everybody in the world really quickly and some of that stuff is amazing, but it is also overwhelming and can be a little difficult, I think, to handle the kind of like context-shifting of somebody wanting to tell me about some article they wrote that’s relevant to user experience that I might want to read about for work. But then also, here’s the latest absolutely batshit thing the president said,” and then also, “here’s somebody with a really funny joke and a dog picture,” which I like. Don’t get rid of those [KL chuckles]. And then all of a sudden we go to the latest tragedy. And I think that that mishmash of everything is hard. It’s almost like a context collapse, right? Like there is no context anymore. It’s all just in this one weird stream. And I recognize that I have control. I can unfollow. I can create channels that I want to use. I can put people into this or that list, I can follow those certain lists for certain things, but that’s not really how I like to use Twitter. That’s not — then I feel like it’s a job to manage it [uh huh! Yeah! Yes! Right][laughing], and I don’t really want that job. But the thing is, it’s also a really powerful place where I’ve met so many great people, and has been super important to my career, and I hear this a lot from women, especially, who feel like that’s where they were able to find networks and establish some professional footing, and yet … if I have to have one more conversation with some rando who wants to explain the topic of my book back to me, I’m going to lose it. JL I think, for me, I’ve had transition what I post on Twitter over the years. So first starting on Twitter I would post about any random thought that popped into my head, a lot of sports, and then also, because my focus is in engineering and technology, a lot of development news, and one of the things I found is I’d get a lot of feedback from people that would be like, “Oh. It’s baseball season. I should unfollow Jenn Lukas because she’s tweeting about sports again.” And I was like, “Hey!” But then part of me is like, well, you know what? What I go to Twitter for is to read technology news, and so I just sort of took that at that time and was like, you know what I’m going to do? My Twitter account is going to focus more on development, engineering, UX, UI, links, things I write, that sort of subject, and then I moved all my more personal thoughts, including sports, cuz that’s personal [laughter]. My love of the Eagles is very personal! KL Gets personal. SWB I’ve seen Jenn do a football dance, it’s extremely personal! [Laughter.] JL But I moved that all to Facebook where I found the audience sort of matched better what I was doing there. So more local friends, more of the people that wanted to hear more about that, and where with the comments on Facebook, I could have more conversations about those personal things. Whereas Twitter where it’s a megaphone versus a two-way conversation there mostly. So there I kept things that were more announcements and then moved things conversational to Facebook. And, like you said though, Sara, you get into this weird context switching. So that’s worked for me and I think it’s worked really well, but there are times where I’ll go to Twitter and I’ll be like, “Oh. I want to post about this thing I wrote.” But then there’s a school shooting and, for me, I can’t look at this stuff and be like, yeah, lemme tell you about a new variable font on the web when there was just a shooting in Florida, and that feels super weird for me. And those are the times where I don’t really even know how to handle social media. SWB How could anybody, right? Like we’re dealing with a world that communicates in such an always-on kind of way, and I don’t know that anybody has figured out what to do with that, and what is a healthy way to deal with that. I sometimes feel like I end up spending all of this time kind of hemming and hawing and debating about whether I should post anything at all. And in a way that I never used to do. And so like, for example, I will sit there and think through the various potential outcomes like, “If I’m going to say something that’s kind of funny, is this something where somebody is going to not get the joke and then they’re going to get mad, and then they’re going to snowball from there? Is this a thing that I’m going to have to be explaining the joke to people all day? Is this a thing where I’m going to have to be, like, defending my own credibility to talk about this subject? Like what kind of labor am I going to have to put in to manage this?” And then also I start thinking like, “Well how does this fit into the overall context of other things that I post?” [10:00] And where I used to be just like, “Here’s a funny, random thought that I had on my way to the bank!” And it was OK. I’ve stopped feeling like that, and I’ve actually found that it’s almost like I have, in some ways, less faith in myself over knowing what I want to be communicating, which is a little bit unsettling. KL Yeah. You’re second-guessing yourself. I mean that’s where my anxiety paralysis comes in really handy because I just don’t do it [laughing] and then I walk away, and then I’m like, “All right, wait till the next decision.” JL And I totally get those feelings. I have them too. I’ve actually been trying to force myself to tweet more, but, again, because I write and I make a podcast with two wonderful friends, and I have to get that out there somehow because I want to share that with people. So I still have that. Like, I would love to quit Twitter, but I also want to keep sharing, and I want to keep seeing what other people are doing, too [KL yeah], and, for me, I haven’t found the exact medium to replace that yet. SWB Well, and also, like, when you do things like have a podcast and write a book or whatever, a lot of the success of those things ends up coming down to your ability to promote yourself. And, even if you have, for example, for my book, I mean, I have publishers, they have PR people, they’ve done a lot of stuff, but if I weren’t doing the work too, it just doesn’t go anywhere. And part of that work is making it visible and so then, then you get into this space where you feel like, “Is all I’m doing posting about my own projects? My own like —” KL Building your own personal brand. SWB Yeah, like, “Hey! Subscribe to my podcast!” JL My Klout score! KL [Laughing] Oh my god! JL Does that still exist? KL I don’t know. SWB I remember opting out of that but, at one point, I was influential in burritos [laughter]. Thank you very much. JL What?! I would eat a burrito with you. KL That’s amazing! [Music fades in.] SWB [Music fades out.][Ad spot] If you’ve visited noyougoshow.com, then you know it’s the center of our online presence. Well, we built it on WordPress. We love WordPress because it’s super easy to customize, has great customer support, and comes with lots of features that make publishing our podcast, or pretty much anything else, really easy. It’s no surprise that nearly 30 percent of all websites run on WordPress. Plans start at just four dollars a month. Start building your website today! Go to wordpress.com/noyougo for 15 percent off any new plan purchase. That’s wordpress.com/noyougo for 15 percent off your brand new website! [Music fades in and out.][End of ad spot.] SWB A few years ago, I realized that way too much of the media I was consuming was coming from white people. And something I started doing was really paying more attention to where I was getting news and where I was getting information, and I started seeking out a lot of different writers, people of color who were involved in the public in some way, journalists. And along the way I obviously started paying attention to lots of big names: Roxane Gay or Ta-Nehisi Coates. But after awhile I feel like a whole new world opened up for me, and one of the voices that stuck out to me almost immediately was Sydette Harry, who is probably better known as @blackamazon on Twitter. Sydette, I hope, does not mind me saying that she is a force, and I have learned a lot by listening to her and watching her have conversations about everything from immigration to online harassment to black culture that I didn’t know anything about. And I am just so elated that she took the time to be on the show today. Sydette, welcome to No, You Go! Sydette Harry Thank you! Thank you for having me! SWB So I’m really happy to have you here and to hear more about how you ended up doing what you do. So the way I understand it, you are currently running editorial at Mozilla, and I’d love to hear more about how you ended up there and what that day-to-day looks like. SH Ok. So. What it is — I am the editor of the Foundation website and editor of the Network. So my real goal is to develop processes and systems and discussions. I was like, “How do people talk? How do you get online? How do we get stuff out?” Really shifting from the kind of traditional like, oh this is a Foundation and we kind of do these things, into a, so how do we start a global push towards something Mozilla has called internet health. They’re writing reports on it, there are fellowships around it, but this discussion of how do you know that the internet you use is healthy and sustainable and useful for you? And that it works for what you want to get done and what you want to do in life. And I think that that is super, super important to think about in a way that is informed by my experience online. My experience online is that I am from Far Rock. It is a two-hour train ride, if you are very, very lucky. And it became very, very apparent to me that if I wanted to — once, and I was also, right after I graduated from college, so that was one of the first colleges to get Facebook. [15:00] So it was like Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Penn. And it’s like, “Oh! We have Facebook. Yay us.” And there was also very much — at the same time, my father got deported the year I graduated college. And then the economy tanked in around 2007. So … there becomes this very big thing of, “How do I navigate this idea where I’m leaving this place of great privilege, where I’m leaving this great place of, oh, you have everything available to you in ways that you never had before,’” and it’s now you are part of a broken family. Literally broken: they took your father and they deported him. And you are not — and you were told at your very, very expensive graduation: “This is how you will amass the world and blah blah blah blee da blee blee.” And you now have no job, you’re going back to your house, and you’re going to have to try and rebuild your life from what is, essentially, a very traumatic place. And I have a background in theater, so my thought was, “I now have a forum to talk!” And ever since then I have been commenting on anybody who’ll give me a password and some access. And I tried everything. But my actual training was history and theater and dramaturgy and pipes and processes. So while I was doing that commentary, I became very interested in, “How does this work? How does this apply to communication theory? How does this work for what we’re doing?” And, through that and writing and commentary — I had a blog called Having Read The Fine Print — trying to get into this space of so how do we know what we’re doing is correct? And how do we know that what we’re doing is useful? Because that is a huge question. And Coral had seen some of my work, and they hired me, and I’ve been working from that ever since. SWB OK, so Coral Project. I’m a big fan of the Coral Project, which has been working on making comment systems more healthy and humane for quite some time. Can you tell us a little bit more about the Coral Project? SH Coral Project was started in 2014. People got together and said, “Comments are terrible.” So it’s The New York Times, The Washington Post, Knight Foundation. We were under Open News, and we are now under Mozilla. And we worked out of The New York Times building. It was like, “So how do we build better comments?” The first person hired was the project lead, the general, Andrew Losowsky, and I call him The General because [laughing] he always gets so — he’s like, “Why do you call me The General?!?” And I was like, “Partially because it makes you blush,” and also it was right around the time of Hamilton [laughter]. We’re like, “OK, you’re The General.” But he does not make me call him that. But — and then I was the second hire. And then we were working with our tech leads, and one of the things we came to really quickly was that it wasn’t enough to focus just on comments, we had to look at how communities were sorted. So people were like, “We’re going to write guides on how to use better comments.” And it was going to be research on comments and then it was like — as we were talking, we were like, “All of this stems from larger systemic problems, larger editorial problems.” If you really want to talk about why your comments are bad, you have to talk about how you set up your community online because the experiences of community, even communities that deal with some heavy, heavy stuff, have a wide range. There are communities that deal with some of the most traumatic things that are genial, well-run, not to say that they are always perfect, but there’s a real sense of community there. And then there are communities that deal with what I think would be like pretty superficial things in the sense of — on top they’re superficial, but the same issues show up and they become important, and they implode often. And communities can implode really quickly. And it’s like, why does that happen? What leads to that happening? And how do we talk about that? SWB In that work, it sounds like, you know, your experience firsthand commenting anywhere and everywhere during this really difficult moment of your life was directly applied there. Can you talk more about how you brought that experience into Coral? SH The way I think about it is I try to create communities where, depending on how I’m acting, it would not be at all difficult to kick me out. And I think that that’s important. And people always, like, stutter. It’s like, I try to create communities that are supportive of the least—the people who have the least advantage, the least resources, the least training, to become a member. And I want to continue to make people aware of what it’s like to try to be a member of these communities. And there are some communities where I’m like, “If I was a moderator of the community, I would put myself out.” And that’s good. And that is how you really have to think about these things, and not because it’s some level of altruism, but it’s very much the first question we ask all the time: who is your community for? Who do you want this community to serve? And how do you make your community represent that? Because what happens with a lot of people is, “Oh, we just had — we just had a community and then we didn’t do anything.” And I am like, “Well, you did do something.” Whether or not you believe you made it. [20:00] No choice is a choice. Because people see that you didn’t make that choice, you didn’t do whatever you said you were going to do, and they very much responded accordingly. If they are the type of people who take advantage of these things, they did that. If they are the type of people who are very likely to be targeted by violence and see that you don’t do anything, they stop responding. They stop being involved. And that is a choice. And with Coral it became varied things from, do not look for the quick fix of “tech will build a tool” or “this will be the tool” or whatever. It’s very much about, so, “this is what you want to do. How have you built it in that this is what you can do? And this is something that you had given space for your community to be able to do? Have you done that?” SWB Yeah, totally, that makes a lot of sense, and I think about a lot of this in the context of something really big that many of our listeners would have familiarity with, like Twitter. They spent a really long time with such a hands-off approach, and with this idea that somehow they were going to be the “free speech wing of the free speech party,” as they said so many times, and therefore their approach to their community was that they weren’t a community, right? They’re just a platform. And the result is, well, they’ve been entirely unable to deal with harassment and abuse on their platform for years and years and years after many people, including you, have told them about it. SH Oh. So one of the things that constantly happens now that I’ve moved from commenting about tech to working in tech is, I don’t ever want to hear the word “scale” again. It has started to become like — I start to get twitchy a little. Because people use scale as an excuse to not talk about very basic stuff. And it bothers my soul. Because ultimately what people want to know is, how are you going to take care of them? And people go, “Well, it doesn’t scale! We’re not in scale!” And I’m like, “Well, that’s nice. What are you going to do for the people inundated right now? If you’re working on it, let’s be honest.” There’s also this myth of the early adopter and what early adopter tends to mean is early adopter with social capital, not actual early adopter. Because I found out very quickly that I was actually — I’m actually one of the first people to adopt Twitter. I’ve been on Twitter for nine years. And I didn’t know that. Because I had never considered myself among the [in mocking voice] “early adopters” because I was never talked about in that fashion. And part of the reason that I wasn’t talked about in that fashion is because I didn’t have social capital when I was an early adopter. Now I have it. And I’m like, oh! OK, so that’s what that means. That’s what you are talking about when you say “early adopter,” you basically are trying to say “someone who matters to us.” SWB Well, yeah, and at Twitter it was very much conceived of people who are like us … “us” being the founders. And who were the founders of Twitter? It’s a bunch of young, white guys. And so I think that they certainly were not thinking about people particularly different from them as being part of those early adopters. But the way I understand it there are tons of stats going back maybe not a full 10 years ago, but at least eight or so years ago, around adoption of Twitter by black people, and how high the black user base was of Twitter, and I just think they didn’t even think enough about it to even consider caring about it. SH And it’s not easy in the way folks want to talk about it. It’s — there is a — “do you have beef with @jack @Twitter @support?” Of course. But that’s not the thing I want to focus on. It’s not the thing that I care most about. The thing I care most about is, how is this affecting who we look at, and who we take care of, and how we take care of them? Because very simply, very, very simply: the way we talk about and look at abuse, the way this is designed isn’t good. And the reason it’s not good is because it hasn’t been designed well, it hasn’t been considered well, and it’s because, and this is my new thing, is that nobody who has a social science degree or had a social science focus sat there and thought about what happens when you get a large black population. What happens when you get a large population of abusers and harassers and things like that? How do you successfully set up your experience? Not a free speech wing in the free speech party, but what does each specific user get when they step on? And that’s very much what I often rave about is the racism and the sexism and the Nazis. I’ve talked about that in public. You can look that up. But what is very hard for me, and a lot of times, and this is what most scares me about it, is the difficulty it is to get people to focus on: so how are you going to help a user in this case? How is this one person going to get what they need from you? Right now? Not at scale. [25:00] Not at scale. Because that’s the word everybody likes to bring out. “We’re going to talk about scale. We’re going to talk about scale.” And I’m like, “When are we talking about the specific person? And it’s very hard to get people to think about that and talk about that because they almost have an innate sense of shame of like, “Well, we really didn’t think about that.” And I could probably use a lot more curse words when I say it. It’s like, I’m completely uninterested in how bad you feel about the fact you didn’t do it before. I want to know how you’re going to do it now. SWB Yeah, you know, I think so much of that reluctance, like you were saying, kind of comes back to shame that they didn’t think about it, and then also that — that fear of looking it dead in the eyes, right? Like when you look at it at scale only, you don’t have to think about the individual people, and as soon as you’re asked to think about the individual people, that becomes a human-level problem that is, you know, is a little bit painful to look at. And avoidance is powerful. So something I would love to talk more about because I think it’s really relevant to this conversation is something I’ve heard you speak about a lot more recently, which is making this argument that the voices we hear in news and the voices that we hear online are not representative of people, like, where you’re from. SH There is very much a non-acknowledgement, especially coming into media, and I have it from a really specific perspective. I am a member of a program called Prep for Prep … which is, it’s specifically designed to try and address systemic equality. So it’s about 40 years old. It was started in 1978, right around “the Bronx is burning.” President Ford basically tells the city, go burn in a fire. We don’t have any resources. And how do you take kids who are under-resourced by the city and whatever and what-have-you, and make them into the leaders, the people who are going to be the dreamers coming out of the progressive sixties and seventies? And the way they thought about it was, you are going to equip the kids who show the most ability to endure — straight up just endure — and high IQs and certain psychological profiles. You’re going to put them through academic, like, basically bootcamp, and you’re going to put them into the NYSAIS system. NYSAIS system being the New York State Alliance of Independent Schools. These are private schools so old that some are older than Harvard and Yale, and some are of age of Harvard and Yale. This is old, old money that can link itself back to the Oxbridge. And what happens with Prep is that you develop a machine to address the fact that we may not have resources and all of that, and we become trained in being leaders, and you do that for 14 months. I did that. I started that when I was nine. This is all going on in the middle of the crack eighties, in the middle of Reagan America, in the middle of the nineties, this is happening while IIRIRA, which is ultimately what my father was deported on, was being signed into law. And at this time, I’m doing a two-hour commute back and forth from Far Rock to Trinity Day School. And I ultimately ended up graduating from Poly Prep… about how this is how you’ll make your mark on the world, this is how you’ll make your world better is that you learn how to be among power. And we mentioned beforehand a lot about code-switching and talking. I also have the experience that I’m a first-generation American. So my general speaking voice is not my speaking, speaking voice, because there’s a voice that very much a lot of people recognize as “home” voice. And it’ll come out in certain words I say but there was very much this, “You are on presentation. You are on presentation.” And then I graduated from college and it all broke down. It wasn’t — like I had done my best, I graduated from college two years early, and there wasn’t a there there for me. And, most importantly, there, to this day, I don’t think in a full encapsulation of who I am, there is a there for me. I go in often, I’m not alone, but I may be the only of my specific background in a room. I might be the only person with my specific sense of experiences in a room, often. And especially post having like a job in tech and a job in news. And these are decision-making rooms. What became important for me is that I didn’t want to have the conversations that I had been taught to have, which were, “Prove that you deserve to be there, and then make it so everyone knows that you are of a certain class.” Because what I actually want to have is, like, these are actually really simple things, and these are tools, and these are mediums designed for everybody. So if you are saying you are going to design for anybody, and you cannot understand me when I try to speak as clearly as possible but in the voice that I speak when I am comfortable and with myself and fully aligned with all of my experiences and my full self, you are not doing your job. This isn’t my fault. SWB Yeah. [30:00] SH Code-switching is a very real thing, but there is also a lack of looking at how for a lot of folks and for a lot of things, you speak multiple languages and there are multiple layers to how you speak. You are forming your use through who you are. And what does it say about these platforms and these places that they can’t support you being your full self? And I find too often at certain engagements when I talk to people, specifically within tech and sometimes journalism, there is a deep, deep jump into jargon, into non-understandability, and I’m just like, “No! We are going to talk about it using language everyone can understand, because that’s what we’re supposed to do.” So we can talk about scale, we can talk about pipeline, we can talk about design, I’m conversant in all of that. I’m conversant in all of that in almost three languages. At the end of the day, am I still dealing with a Nazi or am I not? Am I still dealing with an inaccessible piece of a tool, or am I not? If I am still dealing about that, and me and you have sat here for three hours having a conversation that makes us both feel very smart, but then we didn’t do no shit, we weren’t successful! For me it’s like, you can or you can’t. And how are you communicating to people about whether or not you have the ability? How are you communicating to people about whether or not they can expect this of you? And a lot of this is not even — it’s funny to talk of language, it’s not necessarily about what your answer is, it’s about how you talk to people. So you get a lot of this, it’s like, this person is speaking on high and is telling me that they can or cannot do this thing. Or they will or will not do this thing. Because they don’t think that I deserve to actually know, straight up, that you don’t actually have the capacity to deal with the fact that Nazis are coming for me? Or it’s not on your number-one to-do list? But you wonder why people are mad?” SWB Right, right, yeah, like, “Oh let’s definitely spend 30 minutes explaining to you why we haven’t done it yet,” instead of just saying, “You know what? This isn’t one of our priorities.” Like at least if they were honest about where it sits on the priority list, it would be refreshing in some ways. SH And in some ways I think sometimes they’re not even sure. Like, “it is a high priority, but we have no idea of how to attack it.” OK then. So if you don’t know how to attack it, and you’ve been working on it for how long? Maybe you need some new people in the room to answer that question for you. You might want to talk to some new people. I don’t know. That might be an option. SWB Right, like perhaps there are people with expertise that you don’t have and that you have not previously recognized as even being experts in the first place. So, you know, something you talked about a little bit in there that I was really interested in and I’d love to go back to a little bit more is you talked about sort of your upbringing and going through this really intensive Prep program and it being very much about, you know, I guess I would put as like bringing you from where you’re from, bringing you to a more privileged and richer, white culture. And it sounds like one of your frustrations is this idea that that is only happening in that direction. Right? It’s like, OK, we can give somebody like you some new opportunities or give you access to these communities that you maybe otherwise wouldn’t know how to get access to, but there’s not a lot of effort to go to those communities or to understand people there or to meet people where they’re at. Is that part of the way that you would see that problem? SH Definitely! And it’s something where I’m always very particular to talk about is that, yes, in a lot of ways I am more diverse than the average person who shows up to a lot of these things. We’re not going to lie about that. I am, by virtue of being black and female, even though I am a cis, able-bodied person, I am more diverse than the people you usually have in there. [Sings] That being said [finishes singing], I’m still an Ivy League graduate. I’m still a person of a certain education. I’m still the kind of person who would survive and go through all of these things. So when you say that I am diversity, let’s all be clear here: you ain’t doin’ that well, fam. You’re not doing that good. So what bothers me is not so much that people are creating exclusionary products, that is problematic to me in and of itself, but often what truly, truly disturbs me is that they’re exclusionary and nobody seems to know that they are. So everybody’s like, “Yeah, we make this for everybody!” And I’m like, “According to what?!” You can make a really great business just off of catering to you and your friend set if you know their income, if you know their strides. And that is so, to me, completely acceptable and wonderful, and if you can make a business model off of that, awesome! The issue I have is that there are people who are like, you don’t admit that you’re making it just for your friends. You really think everybody lives like this, and you do not have a feedback loop for anybody to tell you you’re wrong. SWB I know that you’ve talked recently about losing weight and the shifting way that people treat you since then. [35:00] Can you tell us a little bit more about what that’s been like? SH Sure! I mean, I had what is called a vertical sleeve gastrectomy, and they cut out half of my stomach, because I have a condition called polycystic ovarian syndrome. It’s very prevalent, usually among lower-income African American women. And it can lead to anything from sensitivity to insulin to death, and it’s not well-studied. And when you live in a fat-phobic society, I was experiencing problems all my life with my reproductive system. And finally there was a just a moment of, OK, I have to get this done. I have to be able to live my life in a really specific way, and if I want to have children, I need to be able to do this. So I went from being about a size 26 to a size 12, 14. I’m on the teetering edge. And it is not accidental to me in any way, shape, or form, that people are kinder to me. People are nicer to me. People also occupy my space more, so that there is a lot of this where I’m like, “Oh I understand what women say now, when they say that there is a lot of physical imposition,” because — I’m very tall, I’m about 5’11,” but I was also about 350 pounds. So I never dealt with people trying to physically impose me, because that was not necessarily a fight they thought they could win. Now at about 230 pounds, I am — I look more like an average woman. And I realize that people will be up in my space more. Men will try to physically intimidate me more. And it was never something I thought about. And it also makes me very aware of the idea of … there are times when I see my ideas get accepted better. They are just accepted more readily because I am in — I look different. You don’t understand how badly you’ve been treated until you stop getting treated that badly. SWB You’ve done so much work to bring this thinking to tech and to media and to start conversations that I think are painful and difficult for people in those industries. What are you hoping to do next? Like what’s on your radar that you really want to focus on this next year? SH We might be denying amazing people the ability to fully live their lives. We might be denying amazing folks the ability to fully express themselves, to fully deal with the work and the joy that they have in themselves, and that is… that is what — if somebody was like, “What really like pisses you off?” I’m like, “That’s what pisses me off.” The idea that we’re not — we’re creating a world where folks cannot be their full, amazing selves. And that is something that we have to look at. And what I hope this year is to do more work that allows folks to be their full, amazing selves, to be fully present, fully active … in their work and their joy — and that allows that for me too. I’m not above anybody. I’m part of that set. SWB Yeah, that’s amazing. Well, I, for one, definitely want you to be able to live your full life and be your full self, and also continue to do the amazing work that you’ve been doing for the community that you come from and for all kinds of marginalized communities. So I’m so thankful that we got to talk to you about all of this today. SH Yeah! I’m always glad to talk [music fades in] with you about it. JL [Music fades out] let’s keep the awesome going: we got any Fuck Yeahs this week? KL Heck we do! Our Fuck Yeah of the Week is Ladies Get Paid. It is a newsletter I just signed up for, and it’s not just a newsletter, it’s like a community. And it’s really awesome because in the newsletter, which comes weekly, you get news and info and all sorts of great heads up about webinars and workshops all over the United States. Like meetups to get drinks and advice from peers and potential mentors, it’s really cool. And it sort of covers everything from like practical advice for how to take advantage of a vacation when you’re not, let’s say, really good at letting go, like me. So it’s just — it’s really nice, and I think it’s also cool because it shows you where things are in not necessarily real time but it’s like, “Hey, there’s a thing tonight,” or “There’s a thing tomorrow.” And you could go there and learn how to negotiate better. JL I see there’s a “Ladies get drinks in Hawaii”! KL Oh, we should do that one. JL We should definitely do that one. [40:00] SWB So the entire thing for Ladies Get Paid, it’s about, like, teaching women negotiating skills and that kind of thing, or what? KL Yeah, it’s like negotiating how to get more money or a raise, or step into leadership positions when you’re not sure, you know, how to quite do that. SWB I totally love this idea and I’m going to check it out, because I know on the show we’ve talked about things like wage equity a bunch of times, and sort of like some of the issues that we’ve had ourselves. A couple of episodes ago, you were talking about kind of being backed into a corner by a boss and like asked to agree to salary in a phone booth room, as opposed to having any time to think about it. And I think, you know, so many of us could really use some of that feedback from other people and practice having these conversations when they’re in sort of low-stakes environments. So I think that’s like a perfect complement to stuff that keeps on coming up on the show. KL Yeah, absolutely, it’s just really nice to know that there’s a whole bunch of resources out there for this and ways that you can actually talk to other people who are going through the same thing and people that you could learn sort of techniques from. SWB So do they have like a chapters in different cities kind of thing? KL Yeah, I know there’s one in New York and they actually just — they did their first conference, which was kind of cool. And that was, I think, just in the last month or so in New York. And they’re taking that on the road. So they’ll be in Seattle next. But I know that there are meetups and stuff all over the place. SWB So that’s a pretty cool concept for anybody who was sitting at home, listening to one of our previous episodes where we were talking about wages and talking about, like, how do you have these conversations with your friends? Try to find a community like that, and if there isn’t one near you, maybe it’s time to start creating these kinds of things. KL Fuck yeah. SWB & JL Fuck yeah! SWB That’s it for this week’s episode of No, You Go, the show about being ambitious—and sticking together. NYG is recorded in our home city of Philadelphia, and produced by Steph Colbourn. Our theme music is by The Diaphone. Thanks to Sydette Harry for being our guest today. If you like what you’ve been hearing, please go ahead and give us a rating on Apple Podcasts, and tell your friends about No, You Go. We’d love to have them here! We’ll be back next week [music fades in] with another great guest [music ramps up to end].

It feels like the quality of discourse in the United States, and many other countries, gets worse every single day. Especially political discourse. But in online community settings, it is possible to identify the the threads to civil discourse and neutralize them. The National Institute for Civil Discourse (NICD) gives tools and tactics to elected officials, the media and the public, in an effort to help everyone engage in a more civil way. NICD director of social media Tracey Todd joins the show to discuss a series of common threats to civil discourse, and how we might approach them. Plus: The impact of Donald Trump on discourse Has civility become a buzzword used by those who aren’t actually civil? Where Tracey finds optimism in discourse right now Big Quotes “What we saw, with the implementation of the 24 hour news cycle, was this ravenous need for information at all periods. Which then, in turn, makes certain items pressing news that ordinarily wouldn’t have become top news in previous years. … I think that has added to the vitriol because there’s so much information. There are so many voices, and we have a number of people who are appealing to their baser instincts to really cut through the traffic.” -@TraceyTodd “We’re seeing hate actually be validated from the highest office in the country, so I think we sit at a very dangerous juncture in our country and in our dialogue.” -@TraceyTodd “Facebook is a news provider. Twitter is a news provider. Snapchat is a news provider. There’s a responsibility there in the messages that are spread using those platforms.” -@TraceyTodd “I think we’ve seen civility utilized in ways where, whenever it’s convenient for a political side, that’s who will be the champion of civility. Which I think is really dangerous, because that’s a hollow civility. That’s not really civility. It’s really that you want to quiet the other side.” -@TraceyTodd “I think there has to be a re-acknowledgement of the fact that a fact is a fact. Two plus two always equals four. There’s not a contention as to what that is. But I think now everything has become so malleable to where we think anything is subjective, and it’s open to interpretation, when it just isn’t the case. We also have to look at these groups that are utilizing [the perceived] amorphousness of information to spread their agenda. What is the ultimate goal of misinformation and disseminating information that will be less than true? There has to be some ambition behind that.” -TraceyTodd “Likes and those sort of approval markers have become the currency for everything from advertisers to your self-esteem for today, so you’re having people doing whatever it takes to receive those individual approval markers and whatever it takes to stand out is often appealing to more base instincts or unsavory things because it goes back to ‘If it bleeds, it leads,’ which is essentially saying sensationalism wins out every time.” -@TraceyTodd “When you value something, you’re less likely to try to ruin it.” -@patrickokeefe “I think the incivility is the symptom of the larger sickness, which is economic uncertainty and political anonymity, where people feel anonymous to these politicians that they’ve voted in to represent them. I think those are the core issues that fuel the incivility, the vitriol, the hate, the harassment.” -@TraceyTodd “It’s always a mistake when companies that deal with user generated content of any kind don’t prioritize policies and enforcement of those policies early on. When they try to do it later, it is so much more difficult because the culture and the expectations have already been set. Frankly, some platforms have only themselves to blame and perhaps even selfishly so. Like the reason some of them don’t prioritize these issues is because they want to get as much traffic as quickly as they can, and they see community standards as a hindrance to that because it leads to them turning some people away. And then when they make their money and they want to be respectable, they try to change and it’s a nightmare.” -@patrickokeefe About Tracey Todd Tracey Todd plays a leading role at the National Institute for Civil Discourse to encourage a social media environment where Americans can not only connect and have civil dialogues about the issues facing the nation but also feel connected to creating outcomes from those discussions. Related Links Sponsor: Higher Logic, the community platform for community managers Tracey’s website National Institute for Civil Discourse, a nonpartisan center for advocacy, research and policy, where Tracey is director of social media “Danger of ‘Civility’ Being Used as Pretext to Shut Down Debate” by Tim Steller for the Arizona Daily Star, where NICD executive director Carolyn Lukensmeyer commented that we haven’t seen this level of political division since Reconstruction Rebecca Newton, Jonathan Bailey, Lara Harmon, Elizabeth Koenig, Rachel Medanic and Sue John, all of whom contributed threat suggestions to this episode Community Signal episode with Andrew Losowsky of The Coral Project “A Guide to Crap Detection Resources,” maintained by Howard Rheingold and Robin Good “How CNN and The New York Times Moderate Comments” by Patrick, where David Williams of CNN commented on anonymity “How One Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine Sacco’s Life” by Jon Ronson for The New York Times Magazine, which Tracey cited as an example of posting something online without thinking of the actual repercussions Wikipedia page for censorship of Facebook, mentioning China’s censorship of the social network after it was used  as a tool by activists OpenGov Foundation, a “fiercely apolitical non-profit 501(c)3 organization dedicated to serving those who serve the people in America’s legislatures” Countable, providing U.S. citizens with concise summaries of legislation Hoaxy, which visualizes how claims spread through social media Snopes, a fact-checking website, that has been identifying untrue claims since 1994 PolitiFact, a Pulitzer Prize-winning fact-checking website Rest in peace, Prodigy NICD on Twitter Transcript View the transcript on our website Your Thoughts If you have any thoughts on this episode that you’d like to share, please leave me a comment, send me an email or a tweet. If you enjoy the show, we would be so grateful if you spread the word and supported Community Signal on Patreon. Thank you for listening to Community Signal.

According to our guest on this episode, much of the news industry is engaged in a battle they can’t win, a fight over eyeballs and ad revenue with companies like Google and Facebook, where the terms will get worse and worse as time goes by. The answer? Community. By building a community that values the work that they create, they can wrestle back some of the control over their audience and receive support directly from the people who consume and appreciate the product they are creating. Andrew Losowsky is the project lead of The Coral Project, a collaboration between Mozilla, The New York Times and The Washington Post, that is helping news organizations build better communities and more loyal readers through tools, research and strategy. Among our topics: Forcing a layer of community over traditional journalism vs. providing newsrooms with a cogent plan Why they are building Talk, an open source comments platform Are news organizations better served by hiring another reporter… or a community pro? Our Podcast is Made Possible By… If you enjoy our show, please know that it’s only possible with the generous support of our sponsor: Higher Logic. Big Quotes “[Forcing community on newsrooms] is saying to journalists that they have to spend time in the comments without actually giving them the tools or the training to be able to do so effectively. … It looks like saying, ‘You need to ask your readers for help’ or ‘You need to crowdsource this’ or ‘Why don’t you go and talk to people at this event or in these comments?,’ without actually giving any strategy or thought to it. What you end up with is journalists who are very resentful of having another task placed on top of them. A task where they don’t see the connection between their journalistic work and this community work that they’re being asked to do.” -@losowsky “If you don’t understand and have a real commitment to community as part of your journalistic mission, as part of the strategy of what you’re trying to achieve in the totality of the newsroom, not just within one corner of the it, then it will, ultimately, always fail. We’ve seen this repeatedly. For me, a little part of me dies when I see that happen because what we’re really missing is the kinds of connections that journalism needs, in order to survive.” -@losowsky “Community is not a choice. The choice is what you do with it.” -@patrickokeefe “Right now, so much of the news industry’s revenue model is based around advertising and creating clickbait in order to get the numbers that will then get enough eyeballs on the advertising. I think this is a really shortsighted strategy. … Over half, I think, of the online advertising money goes directly to Facebook and Google. This is not a battle that the news industry is going to win. The terms are going to get worse and worse as you move forward from that. It really is antithetical to community because what you’re saying is, ‘I want people to come here, and I don’t care where they come from.’ Versus trying to build a community who value what we’re doing and will pay for it.” -@losowsky “If somebody flags a thousand times, and you’ve only ever deleted two of the comments they’ve flagged, then the next time they flag, maybe you don’t bring it straight to the moderator’s attention until somebody, who is more reliable as a flagger, does flag it. Then on the other side of that, if somebody is really good at flagging, if they flag 100 times and 90% of the time they end up flagging something that you end up deleting, they’re as good as our moderators. If they flag something, maybe we should just pull it for the moderator to look at immediately and just not have it there in the stream.” -@losowsky “The [real name] issue really comes down to whether or not people will behave better because of real names or maybe they will behave worse. If a name sounds like the person might identify as a woman, that can really change and worsen peoples’ behavior towards them. If there’s no way of hiding, if there’s no way of being anonymous, then you could be encouraging a great homogeneity in your community as a result, or/and encouraging different kinds of harassment and abuse.” -@losowsky About Andrew Losowsky Andrew Losowsky is originally from the UK and, since the age of 18, has lived in Hong Kong, Spain and now the U.S. In 2003, he became the editorial director of an indie Spanish editorial startup that built communities around original content. Andrew co-ran a biannual festival of independent publishing in Luxembourg, bringing together magazine makers from around the world. He has also been a John S. Knight Fellow at Stanford University and worked on product and editorial at News Corp and The Huffington Post. He co-created a pop-up magazine (created by a community of people stranded by a volcano), a community museum on a street, a printed time capsule, a human-sized board game about city development and a card game about community management. Andrew used to run an indie magazine subscription service and has written several books about design, print, visualizations and doorbells. He is currently the project lead at The Coral Project. Related Links Sponsor: Higher Logic, the platform for community managers Andrew’s website Wikipedia page for le cool, an indie Spanish editorial startup where Andrew was editorial director “Colophon 2009: A New Seriousness” by James Pallister for Creative Review, about the biannual festival of independent publishing that Andrew co-ran Stranded, a pop-up magazine co-created by Andrew and a community of people stranged by a volcano The Museum of Westminster Street, a community museum on a street, co-created by Andrew Urbanology, a human-sized board game about city development, co-created by Andrew Cards Against Community, a card game about community management, co-created by Andrew Books authored by Andrew The Coral Project, a collaboration between Mozilla, The New York Times and The Washington Post, where Andrew is project lead, dedicated to designing “products to meet essential needs of journalism through effective online communities” Bassey Etim, product manager for community at The New York Times, who was involved in The Coral Project at the earliest stages Greg Barber, director of digital news projects at The Washington Post, who was involved in The Coral Projectat the earliest stages Community Signal episode with Bassey Etim Community Signal episode with Greg Barber Community Signal episode with Mary Hamilton of The Guardian Community Signal episode with Talia Stroud of the Engaging News Project Community Signal episode with Sarah Lightowler of CBC Ask, The Coral Project’s tool which allows you to ask your audience a specific question and then manage and display the responses Community Signal episode with Rachel Medanic, which Andrew cites when talking about the difference between community and engagement “Turning Content Viewers Into Subscribers,” a research paper by Lior Zalmanson and Gal Oestreicher-Singer for MIT Sloan The Information, an online publication that promotes a “high-powered community” as a subscriber-only benefit The Financial Times and The Economist, two outlets that Andrew says are investing heavily in community Talk, The Coral Project’s open source comments and community platform Details on The Coral Project’s plugin architecture Sherloq, which “uses the latest advances in deep learning and natural language processing to detect hate speech and cyber bullying” Sherloq’s plugin for The Coral Project’s Talk Project tracker for The Coral Project’s Talk, showing upcoming features “‘Trust,’ the First App from The Coral Project, Debuts” by The Washington Post PR, about the Trust tool, which allows you to segment community members based upon various data points “How Community Software Can Use Forensic Science to Identify Bad Members” by Patrick Community Signal episode with Heather Merrick, where we discussed the series of videos posted on Facebook, covering a murder that was committed “Facebook Murder Suspect Has ‘Shot and Killed Himself,’ Police Say” by Merrit Kennedy for NPR “Community Standards and Reporting” by Joshua Osofsky, VP, global operations for Facebook, about the company’s response to the videos relating to the murder “Comment Section Survey Across 20 News Sites,” a research study conducted by Talia Stroud, Emily Van Duyn, Alexis Alizor and Cameron Lang for the Engaging News Project, funding by The Coral Project “Social Media Buttons in Comment Sections,” a research study conducted by Talia Stroud for the Engaging News Project, about how “respect” buttons can increase civility in comment sections “The Real Name Fallacy” by J. Nathan Matias, a summary of research related to effects of real name usage on behavior The Coral Project’s research section “Mozilla-The New York Times-The Washington Post Collaboration, The Coral Project, Moves Forward” by Dan Sinker for the Knight Foundation, about the initial funding and the hiring of Andrew Heroku, a cloud platform-as-a-service that is used as a web application development model The Coral Project’s blog The Coral Project Community The Coral Project’s guides, not online at the time of publication, but should be launched soon The Coral Project on Twitter Andrew on Twitter Transcript View the transcript on our website Your Thoughts If you have any thoughts on this episode that you’d like to share, please leave me a comment, send me an email or a tweet. If you enjoy the show, we would be grateful if you spread the word. Thank you for listening to Community Signal.

While Jeff enjoys a summer frolic, Rebecca and guest host Andrew Losowsky, Senior Books Editor at The Huffington Post, talk about Apple's ebook price fixing, what to do when you love an author but hate their politics, a giant Mr. Darcy emerging from a lake in England, and more. This episode is sponsored by Fire Knife Dancing by John Enright and Audible.com.

Dom Joly joins us in the pod to talk about his new book The Dark Tourist, Kate Mossman describes what it's like to share an ocean liner with a load of people who just want to boogie, and we talk to Andrew Losowsky about "Stranded", the magazine he put together when he was stuck in Ireland because of the Icelandic ash cloud. Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Dom Joly joins us in the pod to talk about his new book The Dark Tourist, Kate Mossman describes what it's like to share an ocean liner with a load of people who just want to boogie, and we talk to Andrew Losowsky about "Stranded", the magazine he put together when he was stuck in Ireland because of the Icelandic ash cloud.

Dom Joly joins us in the pod to talk about his new book The Dark Tourist, Kate Mossman describes what it's like to share an ocean liner with a load of people who just want to boogie, and we talk to Andrew Losowsky about "Stranded", the magazine he put together when he was stuck in Ireland because of the Icelandic ash cloud. Get bonus content on Patreon See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.