>> but there are plenty of internet "lifestyle businesses" that can communicate with their user base much much better.
> Like..?
MetaFilter [1] does an excellent job of owner-moderator-user interaction. Here are some key features:
* Because of the size of the site, they don't have to rely on community moderation - and the moderators they do have do a very patient and professional job. You don't get capricious or childish deletions, you get the feeling moderators think carefully before deleting posts, and they're always willing to explain their decisions. There's nothing like wheel wars or moderators trying to kick out other moderators.
* There's a $5 signup fee so regular bans work - no need for things like hell bans/shadow bans.
* There's a section of the site called 'metatalk' [2] where things like policies, bugs, moderator actions etc can be discussed. Metatalk posts tend to get read by mods pretty quickly; the top post there has a reply from the site's main developer within 2 minutes.
* Between Metatalk and the mods chatting in the site's normal threads, people feel they know the moderators [3]. Matt, the site's owner, seems like a reasonable guy.
As such, people are much less worried that the site's owners are trying to fuck them over - because the site's owners have an established history of not doing that.
[1] http://metafilter.com/
[2] http://metatalk.metafilter.com/
[3] http://metatalk.metafilter.com/17338/Does-MeFi-have-a-privac...
