Healthy Incivility vs. Toxicity in Online Communities with Venia Logan

[00:00:00] Welcome to Elements of Community, a podcast about discovering and exploring the elements of community.

and each week we talk with a community leader about what makes their community thrive and bring value to both the leaders and the members. Join me as we unpack the magic of the elements of community.

Lucas Root: so For those of you who are listening, Venia and I met because of the CMX Conference earlier this year. And had a really wonderful conversation, where we threw some rocks, and then started really getting deep into understanding each other's perspective on, what community means? And what it is? And what to do with it? And we had some really cool conversations, where we discovered that we could [00:01:00] layer pieces of our ideas on top of each other, and come up with something even better together.

You studied under one of the most impressive community speakers that I've ever met, Martin Carcasson. And I just loved the opportunity to sort of pick apart, and by pick apart, I don't mean find fault in, but I mean understand even more fully and even more deeply. Pick apart the ideas that he introduced to me. So without further ado, would you like to jump in and tell us about you?

Samantha Venia Logan: So, my name is Samantha Venia Logan, I do go by Venia. I've been in community for a really long time since 2011, when I started a nonprofit in a queer space. I've worked to develop cultures and communities that provide safety, security and anonymity to the individuals in them, and that's kind of taken me all over the place. I fell into community, I didn't realize, and I didn't know how to run it. So, I went to Academia and I'm [00:02:00] like, Hey, how do I do this? We're not sure where to put anthropology communication.

So, I did the unconventional thing, and I took them all. While I was taking them, I was so gracious and excited to have incredible professors doing incredible things. Martin was one of them, my time with the center for Deliberative Democracy has really underpins my work in community. It's very much a development and political cultural infrastructure, but those skills translate. They are base level necessary skills for community builders, but they're not really a part of the way that community builders do things.

After a lot of discussion and marketing and doing community management for a really long time, I decided to launch a consultancy all about, building cultural spaces for clients. And then, using those cultural spaces as [00:03:00] examples to co-iteratively build this social science of community brand. that kind of takes all those things loaded into my brain.

And all of those incredible and studies from Elizabeth Williams, Kim Nichols, who works in Primatology, Martin Carcasson, absolutely fantastic. And I was also mentored by people in industry, John O. Bacon, being chief among them. And I'm so lucky to have all those experiences, I'm so lucky to be able to translate them as well.

So most recently, what I've been up to has been a move to Melbourne, Australia. Because I started a PhD on this exact topic, like, after 4 years of doing this, I was actually brought back into the academic fold to actually study, how we can inoculate our online communities from toxicity without battening down the hatches?

I think a lot of community developers order to separate ourselves and be [00:04:00] able to control our spaces in order to moderate them, right? It's necessary in the modern world. We try to keep our own little corner of the internet clean, safe. Right? it's our jobs to do that. But by virtue of potential threat, we often batten down the hatches when something happens. And it gives us a lot of really bad habits of not contributing to the immune system of the public sphere.

so things get

Lucas Root: said.

Samantha Venia Logan: Yeah,

Lucas Root: Keep going.

Samantha Venia Logan: keep going. Yeah. I'm so happy to talk about my research. So, I'm actually under yet another amazing voice in the community sphere, Venessa Paech, Australian Community Managers, introduced me to Dr. Jennifer Beckett. She has that amazing podcast on community signal. Her research, along with Vanessa, is studying mental health and the mental acuities of [00:05:00] individuals in toxic spaces, which is really, really cool.

And based off of their work, which is this concept of recognizing bad actors in incivility concepts, that's not necessarily toxic. We need resistance, we need discussion, and we need to be challenged in our communities. When you get trolls, Ruth Diaz knows so much about this as well.

Lucas Root: I had the coolest conversation with her and we will definitely have a podcast with her, at some point.

Samantha Venia Logan: Yes, I'm so here for that. I'm so excited to tune into that, oh yes. A conversation with her is just one of the most fascinating and invigorating things that you could do. Oftentimes you're just like, what is this world? What is this experience? But a lot of people, just assume, this monolithic brands of trolls is just like, those bad actors over there, [00:06:00] right? But reality is, trolling shows base level in acuities in an individual's sense of belonging.

And at the same time, when that sense of belonging sours, we can see that toxicity translate from Community A that has soured, but still looks perfectly healthy. When you look at communities in the manosphere, for instance, on Reddit, the great Reddit purge was largely due to that. And those communities in Perspective API, like Google's toxicity engine, and in Detoxify, the open source version, they couldn't detect at all, the toxicity of these spaces. Because ordinarily, they're perfectly healthy. That's how they do it, right?

So, there's a clear difference then between incivility in a community and the resistance of that incivility, and toxicity. [00:07:00] The potential for harm in a soured community to translate into the public sphere, and into other community spaces.

Lucas Root: Okay, that's huge all by itself. To you and me, I think, that probably seems so baseline, that's the carpet we walk on. Why don't we spend a minute and just talk about the difference between healthy incivility and toxicity?

Samantha Venia Logan: Absolutely, a hundred percent. It's really, really fun, that's the work of Verity Trott, Venessa Paech, and my advisor, Dr. Beckett. So, I'll actually send over the research, I'll send over the absolutely amazing case study that I've been focusing on.

Lucas Root: We'll put it in the show notes.

Samantha Venia Logan: Yeah, a hundred percent.

Lucas Root: My wife teases me that I argue, and when I'm arguing, it's actually a good thing. It means that I'm interested and excited, and the person that I'm arguing with is worthy of the argument.

Samantha Venia Logan: I know, right?

Lucas Root: She teases me at this. It's [00:08:00] part of that is because, you know, we, as a culture at large, we don't have the language to be able to look at that and say, Oh, I get it, Lucas, you're practicing healthy incivility.

Samantha Venia Logan: Exactly, and healthy incivility is how we challenge culture.

Lucas Root: And as you pointed out, it raises the immune system. When we're challenging culture, we're not looking to take it down. We're looking to build it up even more powerfully, even more strong.

Samantha Venia Logan: And there is an aspect of that very healthy system potentially going wrong, right? One of the most common micro examples, comes in organizational health. And this actually happened to me, this example, times before I went to work at Digital Marketer with Ryan Deiss, I try to credit as many people as possible.

So, you're going to hear a lot of words to your viewers. I suspect that between you and I, we're going to have a lot of show notes. So, that's definitely worth taking a look at. But before Digital Marketer, [00:09:00] I had spent a lot of time being denied, job positions as a queer woman, it was pretty obvious. And in a lot of ways, people would continue saying, Oh, we're just not sure you fit the culture. And I knew that was BS, right? But it didn't have the words for it.

So, when I went to Digital Marketer, I ended up speaking with my HR person as we were setting up paperwork. And she's Oh yeah, there's this really big resistance movement in human resources against this very concept. Which is the fact that a vast majority of software companies and marketing companies and corporate architecture, they don't build communities within their organizations.

They expect that individuals they hire will simply comply and recognize and carry the same values without iterating on them, without challenging them. [00:10:00] So, the culture becomes homogenous and oftentimes toxic. And the key stakeholders are never challenged.

Lucas Root: Okay. Here's what's happening in my brain right now. I understand all of this, but by listening to it, and by the way, This is a thing that happens in community, so we can come back to this very thing that's happening right now. By listening to it, I'm in a position where I can start to reorder my own experiences inside of a concept that I had not applied to those experiences Thank you. even when I have the concept available. There I was in banking and I experienced exactly what you're talking about, I experienced toxic homogeneity.

Samantha Venia Logan: Yeah. Oh, um,

Lucas Root: And have the language or the concept to apply to it. I do now, as a, community expert, as somebody who gets to have conversations just like this, but I hadn't reapplied it and you're helping me do that. Oh, this is fun.

Samantha Venia Logan: I know, Right. it just blew my mind when I was talking to this HR professional [00:11:00] about it. And it honestly, it formed the way I speak with key stakeholders in community. And I hope dear listener, it does for you as well. It's just such an important aspect of community health, both internal with the people who are responsible for funding your community, and also for your members. something you have to make sure your members are capable of.

When you experience challenge, approaching things with empathy, especially when it comes to what you give out, right? You have to go beyond value, because community is all about producing ultimately a sense of belonging, like that's the pot at the end of the rainbow. And I think a lot of people in this modern community context, which has been very businessfied, commodified and tokenized value, value, value, value, value.

We get that from marketing all the time, we have to convert for sales, we have to activate our [00:12:00] members. But this is about doing the things that you can't measure. Doing the things that don't produce an ROI. And that's one of them, you have to be willing to accept and mold to challenge.

Lucas Root: I'm a member of an online community, this is true. Right now, I like the people that are in it, I like, showing up, I like contributing, I like what I get out of it. The founder came to us and said, I'm going to 5X the price next year. But my intention is that I'm going to 50X the value and I said, I'm out. Because the truth is that I'm not there to make money.

You just said it, I need to make money, that's how the world works. If I can't pay my bills, then it doesn't this computer goes away, like my internet goes away, I can't connect to those people anymore, like I have to pay my bills, but I'm not there to make money. I'm there to share ideas and to be inspired by really cool people inside a really exciting container, I'm there to feel like I belong.

Samantha Venia Logan: Exactly, yeah. I think in a [00:13:00] lot of ways, doing that was exactly what it means when we say, the goals of an organization are not the goals of community, and the goals of community who could care less about you, right? They'll just emigrate, they'll find that concept elsewhere.

The last thing you want to do is cause a diaspora that leaves you behind. So maybe, consider the goals of the community and the things that are unmeasurable that produce you. a sense of community health void of ROI. You need to do those first.

Lucas Root: A sense of community health void of ROI.

Samantha Venia Logan: Yeah, and this, does move into that concept of incivility as an internal vector of souring. Because we often view, again, that brand, that 4chan kind of knowledge, the way that we talk about quote unquote trolling in communities [00:14:00] has such a low resolution, that we do forget that the souring of communities is just as much an internal act as it is a external vector. of attack, right?

Lucas Root: Typically, it's almost entirely internal.

Samantha Venia Logan: Yeah. In a lot of ways, the poisoning of incivility, which is perceived by these communities as an attack on our values, our goals, our experiences, our practices, and the artifacts that we intend to produce. We often view this incivility as an attack, and it might well be, right? But if we don't handle it authentically, and empathetically, to better understand, and distinguish the difference, the souring of our community can come from anywhere.

Lucas Root: Are you familiar with Wolff's Law?

Samantha Venia Logan: I'm not.

Lucas Root: It's a body law, it says literally the body grows in proportion to the stresses placed upon it. And [00:15:00] we as a multicellular being are a community all by ourselves. We sort of internally prove it, if we stress ourselves in ways that are healthy, we grow stronger. And if we stop stressing ourselves, literally, you can sit on the couch all day and stop stressing yourself. And what happens? Well, You die young.

Samantha Venia Logan: That escalated real fast, but I can absolutely see the set there. I think in a lot of ways, that really sets the hallmark, your community does need to be challenged. And it grows that way, there's an internal immune system that keeps it healthy. And the problem is, If you continue with this analogy, this concept of infectious disease and vector control.

And for those who don't know, vector control is essentially, understanding how diseases and viruses spread through cultural exchange. We just came out of a pandemic, right? So, I'm being very sensitive of this fact, but when we isolated, when we battened down the hatches, it protected us from those [00:16:00] viral setups. But think about the dilapidating mental health of not having those cultural connections, right?

Lucas Root: It was horrible, It was horrible. suicides were up. I think, 4X in the United States in 2022. An absolutely monstrously huge number. Potentially still less than would have died from COVID, but so huge that it was terrifyingly high.

Samantha Venia Logan: Yeah, exactly. And when you consider malaria in the south, and you consider tuberculosis, these diseases, these issues, they can absolutely be controlled via this concept. People have been inoculated to herd immunity, but herd immunity doesn't work the way that we described it during the pandemic. There are certain vectors where we have to be active about not spreading diseases.

The town pump concept, the idea is to be able to culturally control the spread of diseases and infections. And in the natural sciences, there [00:17:00] are two aspects here, we batten down the hatches, we isolate ourselves. But we have other options, right? We work together, we communicate, we talk in order not to spread these things, and there's also this internal concept. And I think that this might be an issue, because we need to build the cultural acuity necessary for this. Where the biological concept breaks down is that, we don't really have a cultural equivalent to apoptosis, the cellular act.

Lucas Root: No, we don't.

do

Samantha Venia Logan: a cell flowers. Dying.

Lucas Root: No,

No, it's not just dying, it's seppuku.

Samantha Venia Logan: yeah, It is intentional death in order to protect other cells, and we don't have that. The growth of homogenous souring communities can go completely unmeasured, and therefore completely unhandled.

Lucas Root: [00:18:00] Hmm.

Samantha Venia Logan: And the great Reddit purge was us realizing the platform had cancer.

Lucas Root: We we now have a cloud of understanding around healthy incivility, and that there is a difference between healthy incivility and toxicity. How do you tell the difference? How can you see it?

Samantha Venia Logan: Absolutely. Right now, I'll be honest with you, that's the point of the PhD because, if there is a community out there who actually measures bridging capital. Social capital theory is like the core of our job, Bordeaux, Putnam, Peter Block, it's the core. We have to know what this means. So, if you don't know what it means, it would behoove you to learn.

Lucas Root: Stephen, Stephen MR Covey, who was on this, and wrote The Speed of Trust is the same thing, it's bridging capital. He didn't use the word, but yeah.

Samantha Venia Logan: Exactly, and Tara Hunt. There are 3 kinds of bridging capital as a very quick primer, right? So there's bonding capital, the way that we [00:19:00] get to know each other, learn more about ourselves, and build stronger bonds. Linking capital, is how we get to know people around us. How do we start those relationships, communicate with other people? How do we manage multiple connections?

And then, there's the outlier, there's bridging capital. And this concept is, how do we share information across the various communities we are a part of? Which results in the movement of information, knowledge, people, and architecture, reputation, right? Bridging capital, because we've been so spending so much time focusing on bonding capital, it's DNA of our communities. We're not measuring this last one, right? There's no high resolution concept for it.

Lucas Root: I don't think we're really measuring linking capital either.

Samantha Venia Logan: Yeah.

Lucas Root: I think we could, [00:20:00] but I think we aren't.

Samantha Venia Logan: I think, there are tools that allow you to view linking capital, but most people are not exposed to them. Network charts have existed for a really long time. There's this incredible talk that introduces it from CMX, maybe 2017 by Ben Leong. He's the expert senior community manager over at Envato, his work and his presentation from 2017 CMX, 2018 maybe, highly recommend giving it a, watch through, because he explains how these

Lucas Root: Maybe

Samantha Venia Logan: networks work.

Lucas Root: Could you bring him on here?

Samantha Venia Logan: Yeah, a hundred percent. oh, That would be so exciting, pretty much any time I hear Ben speak, I'm over the moon, same with Travis King. Anyway, we have this concept of linking capital and we're aware of it. It's what community intelligence platforms are working toward. Common Room, TalkBase, originally, Orbit, but I think they got bought by Postman now. Fredo is another example, we have [00:21:00] these platforms now, which is great. And they measure largely bonding and linking capital.

But even now, I would say, that they don't have a high enough resolution, because there isn't really a focus on social currency, and bridging capital enough for us to understand the difference between incivility and toxicity. We get it in our relationships, we know when someone is toxic, we know when someone's going to be a problem, and we moderate those actions. This is entirely a moderative, facilitative exercise, but the reason, the state of moderation is where it is, it's because, we don't have that high enough resolution measurement.

That's my hope, by the end of this PhD, just like the social currency metrics theory that I built. I'm hoping that we will come out of this, having a measurement for the phases of community incivility, those internal attacks, and not [00:22:00] attacks really, but we want to measure how it sours, right? We want to measure the souring efforts, and we also want to be able to measure incoming attack factors.

Lucas Root: Let's put this into a conversation where people understand it. Some of the people who are listening are academics, and are totally going to understand everything you just said. I think the vast majority of my listeners are actually business owners. And if we don't help them out, they're going to zone out.

When you put a contact into your phone, there's a cost. And the cost is at the very least, the amount of time that it takes for you to sit there with your phone in your hand and go like this, cause let's be honest, people still use their phones. And that cost is high enough that cost itself, just doing this for 13 seconds to get somebody into your phone is so high, and it is high.

and I'm sort of talking out of both sides of my mouth here because, 13 seconds of thumb play on your phone shouldn't be that much, but it is, it's huge. It's so high that you limit the number of people you're willing to put into your cell phone intentionally. Because you're just not [00:23:00] willing to do that all the time. And so, most people have less than a thousand contacts in their cell phone. And there are very, very few people in the world that are willing to go over that number, very few people.

Now, the number between a thousand, right? That's the people with whom you have linking capital, not necessarily bonding capital yet, you haven't necessarily gotten there. The cost of doing this for 13 seconds is not high enough for you to have bonded with that person, but you have linking capital. You have exchanged cell phone, you've put in this much. And to us, in our current day and age, in the way that we live, and how important this tool is to us, that actually means something.

Samantha Venia Logan: Absolutely.

Lucas Root: So, that's linking capital. Now, bonding capital is the next step beyond that. It's not having actually called the person, but rather it's knowing that you can call the person and what for. You know what, I can call that person to come over for dinner. No, I can't call that person to come over for dinner, but I [00:24:00] can call that person to read an article and proofreading and give me thoughts. But this dinner partner over here, I can't call them for that, right? So, that level of relational understanding, that's bonding capital.

Samantha Venia Logan: Yes, absolutely. And then the concept of bridging capital, like, we do this all the time, right? You and I personally have done this, ad nauseum, right? You just said something and it's ringing in my mind from this other community. Oh, you should go join them, or you should go talk to this person. And it allows us to trade or transact between our online communities, information, relationships, and that social capital. So, when you think about Oh, this person needs to meet this person, that's bridging capital, right?

Lucas Root: I have an idea. I think, one of the reasons why we don't measure bridging capital well is because, we still think of it as a commodity rather than as a core [00:25:00] facet of relationship. And by commodity, I mean, it's a thing that we should think of as monetizable all the time.

Samantha Venia Logan: I think in a lot of ways, the social capitals have been tokenized really heavily. And as it stands right now, the tokenization of bridging capital feels like it doesn't have equivalent value. Because the commodification is not as useful as bonding capital. That's a problem, we look at lifetime value all the time, this concept of individuals returning to our communities over time, which increases the likelihood that they will buy, right? That's really useful to a fiduciary stakeholder.

Lucas Root: And that's purely bonding capital.

Samantha Venia Logan: Yeah. But when you consider taking someone from your community and connecting them to another community, that's a threat to that purchase. In many cases, it may not be like, it's a very good thing for organizations to [00:26:00] collaborate, sometimes that collaboration is great, that's the purpose of networking.

but we call it networking. Right, Building and structuring those relationships beyond the concept of personal connection. Networking at scale, is not really happening in a large majority of communities, and when it does happen, we're not measuring that. And oftentimes it's that bridging capital, the information that connects one person to another, that acts as an attack factor for toxic members. And we view it as a very good thing, right? They're struggling with that thought they're going to go elsewhere. And if that elsewhere happens

Lucas Root: Not even necessarily voice it. They haven't been able to be heard.

Samantha Venia Logan: Exactly, and I won't bring up spiral of silence theory, but I'll leave that also. It's a very important socio political concept. I won't bring it up too much, but that's the academic definition [00:27:00] of, how individuals lose power, and lose voice in our communities, and they go elsewhere for that.

And if it happens to be a dissenting opinion, that is harmful to the dominant context, the public sphere, right? If that is harmful, but that opinion has not given time to breathe, when it was small, they're going to find somewhere toxic. And they're still a part of your community, right? They want someone else to agree so that they can feel confident bringing it up later in your space. That's bridging capital, right? We don't have a measurement for it.

Lucas Root: Yeah, that's what they want. It's weird to think about that. What they want is to go somewhere else, not to leave and be gone, but to find support to come back and help you build back stronger.

Samantha Venia Logan: Exactly, and the souring process, the homogenization of a community, can be [00:28:00] borne out of not handling the empathy of incivility. Once that souring process happens, Again, we don't have apoptosis, right? it leaks out, it spills over, right? And it hurts other communities.

There's potential harm that you

Lucas Root: to be enjoying that you pointed out.

Samantha Venia Logan: Yeah,

Lucas Root: for a long time. Like, that is exactly the perfect like, that is the perfect breakdown of herd immunity.

Samantha Venia Logan: exactly. Right.

Lucas Root: Perfect breakdown.

Samantha Venia Logan: Thank you.

I've been thinking about this infectious disease concept for really, really long time. Not sure if you can tell. And I think it maps really, really well, and for those who are familiar with my work, I have used the cell as an analogy for building communities. Because it really does work very well. I think a lot of people like to talk about the orbit model, right? Where it's you have these [00:29:00] connections in an outer sphere and then it connects closer and it connects closer.

But no one actually thinks about the way that each boundary actually works. It's just, as a person comes closer, they're activated to be a better member in your community. But in reality, those boundaries are membranes, like a cell. There's a concept of transparency, how easy is it to see past that membrane and know you want to transgress it? Then, there's another concept that we ignore even more, porosity.

And then there's the concept of transgression. We've brought that up, right? First you want to, then it's gotta have a certain level of friction. Sometimes it's high, sometimes it's low, that's a good thing. You're protecting the health of yourself. But the actual process of transgression is them going through a funnel, or them meeting the right person. And you have to make sure that you manage the health of that membrane, because [00:30:00] that's where things sneak through. That's where they get through the cracks.

And it doesn't matter how opaque and how difficult it is for you to make that membrane, you batten down the hatches, you strengthen those membranes, that doesn't make you safer, right? You can over moderate a space, and not solve the problem. Insular minority communities who have fought tooth and nail to survive, not necessarily through healthy action.

Lucas Root: And they were successful, and we look at that and for very good reason, in a very real sense, we reward that with positive long term memory, like we've turned them into immortals.

Samantha Venia Logan: And think about the harm, like it's done great things too, but think about the harm it's done to the public sphere. And I should probably explain public sphere as well. Right? So the public sphere is the,

Lucas Root: [00:31:00] do, one of my absolute biggest pet peeves, like it drives me crazy every single time I see any public servant get in front of a microphone and talk about their community. There's your silver platter. Oh,

Samantha Venia Logan: yeah,

Pretty much, it's just the status quo. And in a lot of ways, the status quo is, those places of public conversation. When you flash with people you would not otherwise have met, and that's a great thing.

Lucas Root: it's the best.

Samantha Venia Logan: But we've lost it recently, like the fun thing about the public sphere, it came from this thinker in the 1960s who still exists today, and is still contributing to discussions of online people, but we don't think about that.

Like he's, at the end of his career, no, we're going to lose Jürgen Habermas, but in 2022, he published a [00:32:00] concept reflections on the public sphere. I'll leave it in the show notes, y'all. If you're interested, he discussed his 1960s theory about how democratic discussion broke monarchies? That was the public sphere. And now, in 2022, the fun thing about it is that this fantastic, brilliant concept was wrong.

it wasn't wrong because the theory was inaccurate. It was wrong because it was broken down by the time he published. It was broken down, it doesn't exist, it does not reflect reality. Not because the theory is wrong, but because reality abandoned it, that's important.

Lucas Root: Oh, interesting. Yeah, that's true. And we here today, we're not consciously aware of the fact that you can't have open, honest, discussions with [00:33:00] somebody who disagrees with you regularly. You just can't have it.

Samantha Venia Logan: Yeah. And now we're back to Martin Carcasson, I really wish that his talk wasn't a workshop, I really wish it was published on CMX's YouTube channel. So that, like it was there, but it wasn't recorded. But, Martin has

Lucas Root: amazing I

Samantha Venia Logan: many recordings so much conversation about how to

Lucas Root: far enough back in my linkedin, I took very detailed notes and posted about it. That's how you found me actually.

Samantha Venia Logan: Yeah, I really wanted to know how the latest CMX went? Because sadly I wasn't able to make it. So anyway, yeah, and I can wax on about Martin so much, really deliberative democracy and solving really tough problems locally, knowing those skills and being able to translate it into your online spaces. That is absolutely unequivocally going to be a inoculative [00:34:00] process against toxicity. Because it directly allows you to tackle incivility and understand where it's coming from. Is it healthy or is it not?

Lucas Root: When we think of tackle, we think of football or rugby. We think of a person being down and out. And the play now moves on without that person. What we want is something much closer to a white blood cell. We want to surround it and fully incorporate it in our understanding cells.

Mm

Samantha Venia Logan: exactly. Exactly. In my analogy, I actually attribute the three social capitals, bonding capital is like DNA. It allows you to transgress membranes and outward, it needs protein, it needs health. So, people have to transgress those membranes like nutrients. Linking capital is very much the organelles of the cell.

How do those organelles function [00:35:00] together, and contribute to the overall health and well being of the cell? Bridging capital, those are white blood cells. They make sure the bloodstream is healthy.

Lucas Root: And part of that means, that I need to take in this thing that I'm bumping into, that's external, You know, that's alien. Not in a bad way, but I have to take it in and I have to understand it and I have to learn about it. And here's what the body does next, the white blood cells tell every other cell in the body what's going on, but it doesn't stop there.

So now, the entire body understands this new thing, and either knows how to deal with it itself at the cellular level or knows how to ask help for it,

Samantha Venia Logan: Exactly.

Lucas Root: more. We don't just stop there. We actually start telling other bodies around us about it. We do it through our sweat, we do it through our pheromones that mostly communicate through something that we don't see in our noses.

So, when I get close enough to you to shake your hand, you and I are actually exchanging information about the diseases that we've had. So that, our body [00:36:00] is more capable of managing those diseases tomorrow. Because the process doesn't stop when the white blood cell understands this new thing that it bumped into.

Samantha Venia Logan: The body has developed really strong measures for potential attack factors in immunology. And when novel viruses come up, again, recognizing the sensitivity, I actually say this in the PhD often. I recognize the sensitivity of proposing an infectious disease and factor control analogy to community to the natural world's trauma that we've experienced.

Right.

Lucas Root: The information is fresh in our minds and we're going to be more able to take it in and engage with it.

Samantha Venia Logan: Exactly, yeah. And it maps too well, if we want to solve these problems, if we want to solve toxicity in online communities and on social [00:37:00] platforms, if we want the public sphere back, this is a necessary component. It is insufficient, let's be clear, there's more work to be done. But it's also not something that we've been doing.

So, we can absolutely contribute this and it fits well. I don't want to abandon the analogy cause it's perfect. you know, it's not perfect, but it's, yeah, I've discovered, I have to be a lot more careful with my words since going back to Academia as a consultant, like I'm happy to be bombastic, right? I'm learning to talk like an academic, and I think in a lot of ways that can make things less accessible, so I'm counting on you in that regard. at this point,

Lucas Root: a consultant.

Samantha Venia Logan: I think I do pretty well.

Lucas Root: All right now, so we recognize what toxicity is. We have some idea, that when we see it, it's not necessarily a thing that we need to cut off, it's not necessarily cancer. Although, Reddit did go and do its purge. When do we know that it has gone from a [00:38:00] thing that we can learn from and turned into cancer?

Samantha Venia Logan: Yeah, absolutely. I think, one measurement that we do currently have a standard level fear that we have in our online communities is something called bus factor. And I'm not sure if people have been exposed to this concept. Bus factor is the percent likelihood based upon those social network diagrams been long, right? The percent threat that one individual who has built a reputation in your community might leave, and that the connections they have made will follow.

That's terrifying to communities, right? So, we've committed a lot of effort to measuring that likelihood. Especially in open source, because we don't want our critical contributors to just leave our maintainers in a lurch. And that's happened so frequently. There's this great comment from XKCD about the HTTPS protocol, that S on [00:39:00] the end of the domain. That came from like three contributors in Nebraska who have been supporting that for years upon years. And there was this virus that suddenly hit it a few years ago called Heartleaf. It was basically a hack/virus that was developed. That basically forced security protocols on the internet to just crash.

And almost Immediately within weeks, we had a repeat of the early 2000's Dot-Com Boom until the issue was patched by 3 people in Nebraska. How absolutely threatening and scary that a core element of the internet that everyone has built into their systems, is managed by 4 people so stressed out by their maintenance, that they didn't find that. And they don't have contributors, so, what's the likelihood? What is the fear that they [00:40:00] have that individuals won't contribute to the S. SL Project in the future? So we measure that, right?

It's viewed as this threat. Please don't leave, please don't leave. And when we think about that bus factor, we can also think about when people come in. And they show like this percent likelihood of building themselves to that point can develop lead metrics for asking about that.

Lucas Root: At a corporate level, we don't use them. We only use them on the B2C, on the customer side.

Samantha Venia Logan: Exactly.

Lucas Root: For example, I don't know if you've been through this, but I have. I can actually tell you the number of times that I've left a position and I was replaced by more than 5 people.

Samantha Venia Logan: Exactly. That's difficult, but it's a fear that we have. So, we measure it but also keep in mind, that if you develop lead metrics for that metric, if bus factor can be understood earlier, that might also by definition require that we develop measures for potential toxicity and incivility. [00:41:00] So, the precedent is there, the base is there, we've just never done it.

Lucas Root: So, we know that they're going to leave, but we haven't bothered to figure out why? That is very classic.

Samantha Venia Logan: Yeah. If we think about it, they had to take time to build that, they had to take time to create that influence. And if we understand how that influence is being built and maintained and set up, we can ask whether or not that influence is maybe going to go sour, does this person gaining this much effort? Is that person a healthy individual? And when we think about it in the context of social media, how do Facebook groups, and I've seen this on Facebook, but this is an extremely common strategy used by Russian troll farms during elections.

Profiles, they'll enter those profiles into communities, they'll garner likes, they'll garner things via like just basic passive comments on perfectly healthy things. And then once they've [00:42:00] developed enough influence to create things, they start inviting others to do this exact act. And once they've reached a critical mass, That's when things go bad. That's when, because you failed to see this, it starts overcoming those pages.

Same act, this is just the community version, right? So for me, it's very easy to do, and it's a technical infrastructure, and it's basically troll farms. This is the community version. We should probably measure that.

Lucas Root: Very cool.

I love it. Okay. I think

Samantha Venia Logan: Thanks for letting me talk about research. I think it was a good

Lucas Root: I was a willing participant. I wasn't just tolerating it.

Samantha Venia Logan: I'm glad. I think it's interesting at least,

Lucas Root: okay. So I like to, wrap up my interviews with three questions.

Samantha Venia Logan: I'm game.

Lucas Root: the first one is for the people who have been absolutely wowed by you. Probably most of whom are academics. What's the [00:43:00] best way for them to find you?

Samantha Venia Logan: Yeah I'm actually doing live report outs in a lot of events. All of which you can find on my YouTube channel.

Lucas Root: What is a report out?

Samantha Venia Logan: Yeah as I'm doing a lot of research, I like to, throughout a year, just really hyper focus on one specific topic, right? In 2022, it was building the community infrastructure. In 2023, it was covering metrics.

How do you develop metrics? In 2024, obviously, it's about the. toxicity thing. So if you go onto my YouTube channel, which is just at socially constructed online, you'll actually find that I have been publishing a lot of videos about this topic and other topics on community management. So if you're interested in leveling up Your skills as a community builder, this is a really great entry point.

It's like the spark notes to what academia is able to contribute to you. So yeah, you can find me on the YouTube [00:44:00] channel. I'm currently in the process of revamping my website and rebuilding some community infrastructure.

So you can stay tuned for that. The easiest thing that you can do is just subscribe to the YouTube channel.

You'll get all of this.

Lucas Root: Nice. Love it. Second question. This is the curveball. What was the one question that you wish I had asked you, but have not?

Samantha Venia Logan: Oh, you know, I wish we had some time to dive into our anthropology nerdom

Lucas Root: oh, I mean, we do and we could turn the camera on again, but yes, you and I have spent truly hours at this now

Samantha Venia Logan: Yeah. We very much have a lot of shared interest in human origins and the core aspects of community building, and I think in a lot of ways, those core aspects of how we came to build communities as humans. They have left a lot of integral flaws and that's okay,

but they are used as factors. So yeah, that's how [00:45:00] I would answer that question. Love to go deeper into that concept,

Lucas Root: nice. Thank you. Third one, and I'm going to partially answer this one for you, but the third one is What would you like to add as a closing note? And the piece I'm going to throw in there is that you have a book coming out soon.

And so People should follow you and keep track of when that happens.

Samantha Venia Logan: absolutely.

Lucas Root: But now you get to say your part.

Samantha Venia Logan: Yeah, 100 percent. So for those in the Northern Hemisphere I'm hoping to get the manuscript in by the Christmas holiday. My

expectation is that it'll probably be summer in the Northern Hemisphere. Of next year that you'll be able to have a hard copy in your hands for those who love the smell of pages, like I do.

Um, am one. I

It'll also be available virtually. I'm very happy to do that. And the fun thing about it is if you are interested in this conversation, the book is quite literally titled The [00:46:00] Social Science of Building Online Communities. So that is all about leveling things up and all of my compatriots, all of my contemporaries, everyone else in the industry, they've talked about the strategies and the tactics and the measures that you want to use. But knowing what strategies, what tactics you need to operate and how to view your community requires a certain level of context. Let's be real. We're in an industry of contradiction. It's your job as a community builder to resolve it. Contradictions in your space. And this book is all about giving you the social scientific chops to do exactly that, to know when those strategies matter. So a lot of our industry has hyper simplified concepts, which is fantastic, right? But that comes at the cost of nuance. I chose to go the opposite direction with this book.

Lucas Root: love it. So what you're saying is that a great community manager [00:47:00] is an artist, not a scientist.

Samantha Venia Logan: A social scientist for sure. And there's this great book by Kristen Luker about social dancing salsa dancing. I apologize. Salsa dancing into the social sciences. It's very much a performative artistic act where we apply knowledge and practice to the art of creating an emotional connection, a sense of belonging.

Lucas Root: Thank you, Venia.

Samantha Venia Logan: hundred percent. I am so excited. I'm so happy. I'm so jazzed by this discussion. So thank you so much for having me on.

Lucas Root: Yeah, me too.

Narrator: Thanks for joining us this week on Elements of Community.

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