This is the Trustroots vision statement:
“A world that encourages trust and adventure.”
These are a couple of the rules on trustroots.org
- Be friendly and know when to stop messaging someone.
- Be yourself, helpful, kind, responsible and respectful of others.
Behaviour that is not respectful, is rude, aggressive, or discriminatory, does not belong on Trustroots.
First member ban
To that end, Trustroots banned a member today for the first time. The decision wasn’t taken lightly, but it was taken quickly. We received a report, discussed with both members involved, and ultimately felt that one member was clearly behaving outwith the Trustroots spirit.
We hope that over time we can build features that reward respectful behaviour, and disincentivise the opposite. It looks like the network is reaching the size where trust features are becoming increasingly important. We hope to experiment with some innovative ideas in that space over the next year.
Responses
I think a lot of people would appreciate knowing what sort of behavior resulted in this ban.
Was this Internet behavior, or was it face-to-face?
Can you provide any further information?
My primary feeling is that we don’t want to spend too much time or put much focus on this. If folks are clearly outside the bounds, then we’ll ban them. But we’d prefer to spend our time building stuff that moves Trustroots forward.
This case was about online communication which was very rude and aggressive.
Proactive and engaged, but fair and not too extreme “management/curation,” is absolutely the best way to foster growth and user quality! Excellent post CM, and good-on-yer for sharing the recent experience, in order to guide future ones!
Thank you for the transparency!
[…] is growing, we’ve just passed 25’000 members. We recently issued our first member ban. Until now Trustroots has been focused around the hitchhiking community. As we grow, we want to […]
the invitation only method might not be bad even in the long run, it goes in line with the notion of friend to friend or web of trust. i like that these models focus on peer to peer (organic) growth and avoid policing and admin as much as possible. there’s probably some creative tricks to be find in that direction.
Too bad that this happen when I’m just about to treasure the world by myself. Truly hope I receive the invitation.