Aaron Gertler 🔸 comments on My life would be much harder without the Community Health Team. I think yours might too.

[Aaron Gertler 🔸]

I really liked this post and agree with much of it.

I ran the Forum for a while. This involved handling interpersonal conflict. At worst, the conflicts on my plate were things like “an argument between two people” or “someone having a mild breakdown in text form”. These are relatively minor issues on the CH scale, but they were among the most stressful elements of my job; I’d get lost for hours trying to write the perfect moderator response, or arguing with someone in DMs about how I’d resolved a situation.

I’d find dealing with CH situations much more stressful — because of their severity, and because I wouldn’t even get to write a moderator response. I thrive on being able to explain myself, and forced silence/​vagueness would drive me crazy. Instead of “using quotes from a public post to describe why we’ve banned someone for a week”, I’d have “using my best judgment about a story with multiple sides to explain why we’ve made a decision that will have a serious impact on the lives of multiple people, at least one of whom will be unhappy with the decision and possibly share their side on the Forum later”. And I might not even be able to say what the decision was!

So while I don’t know enough about internal CH matters to say that I’d agree with all their decisions, I appreciate that having to make those decisions at all — and face public scrutiny without recourse to transparency — is extremely difficult, and that there is no way to “win” every such decision.