How to Handle a Crowd: The Art of Creating Healthy and Dynamic Online Communities

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Don’t read the comments. It’s advice that feels as old as the internet, yet more relevant than ever. The tools we once hailed for their power to connect people and spark creativity can also be hotbeds of hate and harassment, and platforms like Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, and YouTube are under fire for either too much or too little moderation.

In How to Handle a Crowd (on sale August 18, 2020; Paperback; Tiller Press; $16.99) digital thought leader, former tech journalist, and current consultant Anika Gupta explores everything from the trenches of Reddit to your neighborhood Facebook page and explains what makes some online communities tick—and others explode.

Over the course of two years of graduate research at MIT, Gupta interviewed moderators who’d worked on the sidelines of gamer forums and online news comments sections. She spoke with professional and volunteer moderators. Some of these moderators were known to their communities, while others were entirely anonymous. In How to Handle a Crowd, she builds on that initial fascination and connects it to new and important issues around how we use the internet to create community. Readers will discover how to grapple with and navigate our new world of online etiquette and virtual communities, especially as they give rise to important new voices in activism and change.

Gupta shares the intel in How to Handle a Crowd from the people who have built and sustained fascinating online communities in our unpredictable digital climate, and dives deep with activists, organizers, journalists, and executives to find out what strategies work best for them. Is there really such a thing as a recipe for success? And how does the complex labor of online moderation shape our world—and the people who do it?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Anika Gupta is a digital thought leader whose research on online communities spans several industries. A former science and technology journalist, she currently consults on online community research and strategy. In 2019, she was honored as a member of the Online News Association’s Women’s Leadership Accelerator, a program that finds and trains women media leaders for roles as leaders in the industry. She has a Master’s degree in comparative media studies from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. Her journalistic work has appeared online in Smithsonian, Fortune, The Guardian, and elsewhere.

This giveaway is being brought to you by Tiller Press, an amprint of Simon & Schuster.