Your Community's Problem Members Aren't the Problem
Community management inherited its vocabulary from law enforcement: codes of conduct, violations, bans. Dr. Ruth Diaz comes from a different tradition. As a clinician, she was trained to ask what a behavior is expressing before deciding what to do about it. When she moved from therapy into community design and conflict resiliency consulting, she brought that habit with her—and it produces a conclusion that should unsettle anyone who has signed off on a ban-first moderation policy.
The troll, she'll tell you, is not the problem. The environment is.
I sat down with Dr. Diaz recently on my Clocktower Advisors livestream to talk about how we moderate online communities—and whether the standard playbook is actually making things worse. Dr. Diaz works primarily in immersive VR spaces, where the dynamics of belonging and disruption play out in extreme close-up. But the framework she's developed applies directly to the B2B customer communities, professional association forums, and branded online spaces where executives are increasingly making governance decisions with real reputational stakes.
The Diagnosis We Keep Getting Wrong
Most organizations treat disruptive behavior as a character trait. This person is a troll. The solution is removal.
Dr. Diaz's background as a clinician points somewhere else. She studies archetypes—patterns of behavior that tend to be temporary and shaped by context rather than fixed features of who someone is. A person acting out in your community may be responding to something in the environment, not expressing their permanent identity. "Sometimes our behaviors can change briefly," she told me, "as almost a reflection of the social environment more than a reflection of our personality."
This matters for how you respond. If bad behavior is just who someone is, removal is the right answer. If the environment is producing it, removal doesn't solve anything. It just clears the symptom while the underlying problem stays.
Dr. Diaz goes further: the disruptive individual is rarely the whole story. "I don't look at the individual person as a dragon," she said. "I look at the group as the dragon, and that individual person is the mouthpiece of that fire." When someone says something hostile about your product or organization in a community space, they are almost always expressing something others in the group feel but haven't said out loud. Your response to that one person, she notes, "could ripple back into the rest of that creature"—either redirecting the energy productively or confirming to everyone watching that dissent gets punished.
For executives thinking about community governance, this reframe has a practical edge. The member you ban may have been your early warning system.
What Happens When You Get Curious Instead
Dr. Diaz spent over a year conducting what she calls the Troll Project—interviewing active trolls, mid-troll, in VR environments. She would walk up to people in the middle of harassing others and ask, simply, whether they had a moment to answer some questions about trolling.
Nine out of ten times, they stopped immediately. They'd step back and engage.
"What I started to understand," she told me, "was this is not an expression of attachment to that identity. This is a painful expression of need." When she acknowledged the need without immediately condemning the behavior, a conversation became possible—one that "starts the negotiation on how to be part of this space better."
She illustrated this with a story from a VR space where she encountered someone moving through the environment drawing crude sketches, clearing out every conversation they approached. Rather than leaving or reporting them, Dr. Diaz said hello. She asked whether they liked to draw. She offered to take them somewhere others were drawing. She eventually introduced them to a VR artist whose work transformed the encounter entirely.
"Maybe this is the first expression of art for this guy," she reflected. "He's trying to get people's attention and he's actually repelling people."
The technique she used she calls asynchronous communication—responding not to the hostile surface behavior, but to the person underneath it who still wants to belong. It requires practice and presence. It is not a policy you can automate. But it is a skill that community managers can develop, and one that pays dividends in community health that ban queues never will.
The Problem With Your Code of Conduct
Dr. Diaz is, by her own description, a nerd about codes of conduct. She has collected screenshots of thousands of them from online spaces of every kind, tracking how they change over time. Her observation: most of them don't change at all. And most of them are written in a tone that signals prosecution rather than belonging.
"Code of conduct elicits almost a militaristic, institutionalized frame," she told me. "Guidelines are more like shepherds, they're like wings. They're saying hey, there's a cliff there, let's not go so close. But they're all about the flow."
The distinction is not semantic. A code of conduct assumes a punitive justice system. It puts the worst-case scenario front and center—essentially advertising to new members that transgression is expected and will be prosecuted. Guidelines assume growth and repair. They leave room for the small conflicts that Dr. Diaz argues are essential to a healthy community: "Micro expressions of conflict are important to demonstrate corrective, healthy, transformative culture."
Her practical challenge to anyone managing community rules: replace flat prohibitions with affirmative language. Instead of "we do not tolerate harassment," try "we encourage non-violent communication" and "we want to be involved in a culture that can be genuine and honest and also respectful." Treat the document as a living draft, not a legal exhibit. Revisit it with your most engaged members. Change it when the community's norms evolve.
She also draws a distinction that matters for how companies think about community leadership. Businesses tend to cultivate influencers—members with reach and visibility whose primary loyalty, she notes, is often to themselves. Real community leaders are different. They show up when friction rises and help others find steady ground. "They will be born naturally, constantly," she said. Finding and investing in those people is more durable infrastructure than any moderation policy.
The Governance Argument
Dr. Diaz works primarily in VR because she sees those spaces as a preview of where all online communities are headed. The less information people have about each other, the more they fill gaps with projection and assumption. The more a platform is designed purely for engagement or profit—without investment in social dynamics—the more likely members are to get stuck in cycles of conflict with no path to repair.
That's a design problem, not a people problem.
For executives responsible for branded communities, the implication is uncomfortable but clarifying: a ban-first moderation policy is not neutral risk management. It is a design choice with consequences. It signals to your community what kind of space you believe you're running. It shapes whether members feel safe enough to bring real problems and real feedback—or whether they take that energy somewhere else, or nowhere at all.
Dr. Diaz frames the alternative this way: build for courage, not just compliance. The metric she proposes is Time to Courage—how long does it take for someone in your community to say something honest, difficult, or vulnerable? A community where that number is high isn't safe. It's sterile. And sterile communities don't generate the trust, retention, or advocacy that justified the investment in the first place.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Time to Courage, and how do you measure it?
Time to Courage (TTC) is a community health metric proposed by Dr. Ruth Diaz as an alternative to tracking compliance and violations. It measures how long it takes for a member of your community to say something honest, difficult, or vulnerable—to ask a hard question, challenge an assumption, or share a dissenting view without fear of being shut down. A community with a high TTC isn't safe. It's silent. Measuring it doesn't require a dashboard; it requires paying attention to whether real conversations are actually happening.
What is the difference between community guidelines and a code of conduct?
A code of conduct is built around prohibition and enforcement. It tells members what will get them removed and implies that transgression is anticipated. Guidelines operate differently—they describe the kind of community you're trying to build and invite members into that culture rather than warning them away from its edges. Dr. Diaz argues that guidelines create room for the small conflicts and corrections that healthy communities need, while codes of conduct tend to suppress them.
What is the Troll Project?
The Troll Project is a research initiative led by Dr. Diaz in which she spent over a year interviewing active trolls—mid-troll—in VR environments. Rather than reporting or avoiding people engaged in harassment, she approached them with curiosity and asked them questions about their behavior. Nine out of ten stopped immediately and engaged. Her finding: most disruptive behavior is an expression of unmet need, not a commitment to destruction. The project's central argument is that curiosity is a more effective moderation tool than control. Learn more at thetrollproject.com.
What does "the group is the dragon" mean?
It's Dr. Diaz's reframe of how we identify the source of community disruption. Most organizations focus on the individual acting out—the problem member. Dr. Diaz argues that individual is usually expressing something the broader group feels but hasn't said. The group is the dragon; the disruptive member is just the first one to breathe fire. This matters practically: how you respond to that one person sends a signal to everyone else about whether honesty and dissent are welcome in your community.
What is asynchronous communication in community management?
In Dr. Diaz's usage, asynchronous communication means responding to who someone is rather than what they're doing in a given moment. When a member is hostile or acting out, the instinct is to mirror or match that energy—to warn, punish, or remove. Asynchronous communication means holding the possibility that the person still wants to belong, and speaking to that part of them instead. It's a technique she developed through her clinical background and field-tested extensively in the Troll Project.
Why does community culture inside a company matter for an external community?
Dr. Diaz is direct on this point: if the company building a community doesn't have a genuine internal culture of belonging, the external community will reflect that absence. Members pick up on whether the organization running the space actually values two-way relationship or is simply managing an audience. No moderation policy compensates for that deficit.
This conversation originally aired on Clocktower Advisors' Talk About Your Community livestream. Dr. Diaz's conflict resiliency and community consulting work can be found at figureitin.org. Her BridgeMakers project is at bridgemakers.world.
ABOUT Dr. Ruth Diaz
As the developer of the Deepen Orient Transform (DOT) Model, Dr. Diaz combines psychological frameworks with XR innovations to create inclusive digital communities. She has designed numerous virtual worlds for social VR, including culturally-focused spaces for Meta, and leads ‘The Troll Project‘ to address un-belonging in virtual communities, and the BridgeMakers project to foster inclusive community building in the multiverse. She is also authoring ‘Conflict Culture (and what to do about it)‘ to introduce her conflict resiliency tool.
Show Notes
Playing with Identity (4:17): Ruth Diaz introduces herself and her worth within conflict resiliency. Starting as simple as choosing a virtual avatar shows intent and energy behind those decisions. VR is almost like entering another world, where each space may have different rules. It can become a chaotic environment when people from various cultures, customs, etc, are now confronting each other.
Fire Breathing Dragons (19:06): How do we deal with people who are spouting fire metaphorically within a community? Conflict resolution aims to stamp out problems quickly, versus conflict resiliency looking to provide the tools for the community to withstand problematic people. Reframe the idea of creating a ‘sterile’ environment and instead creating the culture of taking care of one another.
Codes of Conduct (30:10): We live in a world of black and white rules. However, new people entering and misunderstandings affect the norms that test the rules. Ruth suggests creating some cushion and revision within the code of conduct to represent fluid values. Having the bravery to be curious about the ‘problematic’ individuals invites an opening for understanding and belonging.
Time to Courage (38:58): There is an informal metric called ‘Time to Penis’ within game design modification that explores how quickly users will construct a penis when given the freedom to do so. By flipping the conversation, how long does it take someone to have a brave and courageous conversation exploring the why? Rather than creating the sterile space of control, a connection can be made by finding the need - for attention, for support, for community.
