Our sincere thanks to many of you who have reached out to us over concerns about moderation on the My Ballard Facebook group (which is different from our Facebook page). As we announced last night in the group (below), the moderator has decided to step down. We’re now seeking the community’s input on how to moderate this very large and diverse group.
If you’ve been blocked (and you have a connection to Ballard), please request membership again and we’ll let you in. Please don’t hesitate to reach out to us at tips@myballard.com. Thank you for your patience.
Here’s the message we posted last night:
Over the last couple years, the My Ballard Facebook group has grown exponentially, and we’ve struggled with moderating group discussions. To give you a sense of volume, members published more than 17,000 comments and 1,000 posts so far this month alone.
Nearly all group posts begin constructively, but they often erode into name-calling and personal attacks, which are a violation of our comment rules. We’ve even had Facebook itself remove a handful of posts.
To be abundantly clear, My Ballard stands with Black Lives Matter. We oppose systematic racism that still plagues both our country and our local community, and we promote Ballard-area BLM events and fundraisers.
Moderating a community in 2020 isn’t easy. An offshoot of our indie (and wildly unprofitable) news blog MyBallard.com, the Facebook group was designed to be a Ballard news community rather than a Seattle political forum. Volunteering her time, Lauri has been doing her best to keep things on point and civil. But it has become too much.
Despite our urging for her to stay, Lauri has decided to step down as admin and moderator of the group, as she posted earlier this evening. We can’t thank her enough for all her hard work over the years! She’s done an impossible job building one of the largest neighborhood groups on all of Facebook. As you’ve done in comments on her post, please join me in thanking her.
What’s next? That’s up to all of us, and we’d love to hear your ideas. How should this large, diverse group be moderated? As we figure this out, thank you for your patience.
Cory and Kate Bergman
Founders, MyBallard.com
When will you start moderating the hateful comments on this blog?
Ok Karen.
Umm, please define “hate” for all of us. If I disagree with you, is that then “hate”??? Ballard has become Berkley North, chock full of anything but diversity, and choked with nuevo-riche limousine liberals. We’ve all witnessed the results.
Umm, please define “hate” for all of us.
Ballard has become Berkley North, chock full of anything but diversity, and choked with nuevo-riche limousine liberals.
I’m assuming you didn’t post that comment because you “love” liberals.
Just disable all the comments, and then the trolls will have one less place to spew their hate. Facebook is already a toxic wasteland, nothing of value will be lost.
As a lifelong Ballarite, I use this site for news and content, not the deranged ramblings of a few bad eggs.
And who dominates FB? Who get’s fact checked there? Define facts. As a lifelong Ballard resident, I use this site for a LOL, not the crazed ramblings of all the created liberals that keep voting me higher everything.
Yeah, comment sections can be great places of discussion, if they are actively moderated to keep the discussions on topic. Moderation takes a lot of time and effort and it’s understandable that volunteer run blogs just don’t have the ability to do so. In that case it just better to disable the comments.
I’m not a member of that group (I’m not even on Facebook – gasp!) so can someone provide some color around what was happening and why Lauri had to go?