Newsletters

• Community Dev Newsletter (Victoria Tran). Monthly insight into games marketing, social, and community management, with actionable tips, a skill-testing question, and a roundup of resources each issue.

• Community Manager Breakfast (Evan Hamilton). A weekly hand-curated pick of three of the best reads on community building, drawn from across the web.

• The Community Career Upgrade (Nikita Heyland). A LinkedIn newsletter on building and advancing a career in community work.

• Everything in Moderation(Ben Whitelaw & Alice Hunsberger). Twice-weekly need-to-know news and analysis on content moderation, platform policy, and internet regulation.

• The Community Nerd (Jillian Bejtlich). Digs into the science of communities, with deeper insights especially as the social landscape shifts.

Books

• Mastering Community Management: Chaos, Compassion, and Connections in Games(Victoria Tran). A step-by-step, real-world guide to designing online game communities from pre-launch through post-launch, with a practical framework for building kinder, more cohesive spaces.

• Man Up: The New Misogyny and the Rise of Violent Extremism(Cynthia Miller-Idriss, PhD). A leading extremism scholar traces how online and everyday misogyny fuels radicalization and violence—and offers strategies parents, educators, and counselors can use to push back. Sharp context for anyone moderating communities where these dynamics surface.

COMING SOON

• Safety is [REDACTED] (Matt Soeth). Conversations with content experts, technologists, and researchers doing the work of building healthier online spaces—on the premise that improving online safety takes all of us.

• Ctrl-Alt-Speech (Mike Masnick [Techdirt] & Ben Whitelaw [Everything in Moderation]). A weekly news podcast making sense of the latest in online speech: trust & safety, content moderation, regulation, court rulings, and new tech, usually with an expert guest.

• Community Signal (Patrick O'Keefe). A long-running show for experienced community professionals across audience engagement, moderation, trust & safety, and more—built on the idea that community is a strategy, not just a set of social tools.

• In Before the Lock (Erica Kuhl & Brian Oblinger). Two veterans on community, customer experience, and leadership at scale.

• Trust Issues (WebPurify). Conversations on trust and safety and the realities of content moderation.

• Good Game Club (Jude Ower & Mathias Gredal Nørvig). Conversations about gaming's positive impact—mental health, learning, safety, and raising healthier young players.

• Community Conversations (The Community Roundtable). Discussions with practitioners on the craft and business of community management.

• Safe Space — Talking Trust and Safety (Cassie Coccaro & Pailes Halai). This show explores the human side of trust & safety through the personal journeys of the leaders, thinkers, and builders working to protect online communities.

• Digital Thriving Playbook (Thriving in Games Group). A free, research-backed playbook of practical guidance for building and designing healthier online communities.

• GamerSafer Academy (GamerSafer)). A free, hands-on curriculum for Minecraft and Discord moderators, community managers, and platform operators who want to detect high-risk behavior, respond appropriately, and handle serious safety cases with more confidence.

A game can teach the trade-offs of this work faster than any explainer. Both of these put you in the decision-maker's seat.

• Trust & Safety Tycoon (Copia & Leveraged Play). Run the trust & safety team at a fast-growing social network and make the tough calls on policy, moderation dilemmas, and where to invest, all while balancing what your team, your company, and your users need. It's a quick way to feel why this work is so full of trade-offs—there's rarely a clean right answer.

• Moderator Mayhem (Engine with Copia & Leveraged Play). Step into the moderator's seat and make rapid-fire content decisions under time pressure, with a manager weighing in and appeals piling up. It drives home, viscerally, how hard frontline moderation actually is.