10 Years After Final Post, Tom Coates’ Everything in Moderation is Still Great

Posted by Patrick on October 13th, 2014 in Resources

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Everything in Moderation One of my favorite community management blogs hasn’t published a new post in 10 years.

Last Wednesday marked 10 years since Tom Coates made his final post at Everything in Moderation. From September of 2003 through October of 2004, Coates made a total of 18 posts – 11 of them in October of 2003.

A mention of the blog was included in the earliest drafts of Managing Online Forums, going all the way back to 2004. The blog was not updated, but the link in the book stayed, as the book grew in length and became more published while publisher after publisher declined to release it. When the book was published in April of 2008, that mention remained because I liked the blog so much.

I forget how I discovered it, but once in a while, when I’m thinking about this profession, it’ll pop into my head. Coates shared a lot of value in those 18 posts. Here are my favorites:

“On four types of moderation…,” where he discussed pre-, post-, reactive- and distributed-moderation.
“Welcome to Everything in Moderation.” In this post, I think he does a great job explaining the promise and purpose of moderation.
“On stealth moderation or ‘Blame the technology’…” This is a discussion of moderation tactics like simulated downtime, global ignore, etc. That was a very new concept for most people.
“On building killfiles into your communities…” A great look at the problems caused by the ignore function offered to users by many community software vendors. Ignore functions work great on sites like Twitter and Facebook, but to this day, they still fail for online forums and hosted communities – for the same reasons hey did back in 2003.

Coates has continued to write and reflect on the community space through his blog, Twitter account and elsewhere. But Everything in Moderation is a great little snapshot, with lessons that are still applicable today. You can read the entire blog within a few hours, and you’ll be a better professional for it.

Thank you for sharing, Mr. Coates.