What’s a Community Monkey?

So what is a Community Monkey, anyway?

Community Monkeys are an organization’s way of saying they need a cattleherder to move the livestock around. Now don’t get me wrong – community monkeys don’t think of their communities as dumb cows. They may, at times, think that there is dumb cow-like behavior, or attach other animal-like labels to what people do, but they do essentially treat their communities like people. People that need to be herded, managed, coddled, or prevented from doing odd things like poop on each other, but people, nonetheless.

A community monkey is mostly modernized for the 21st century in that you will find them most commonly on the Internet, watching over pockets of online anonymity. In the old days, and by old I mean a time when “lol” was a non-sensical babble word, you probably saw community monkeys in certain people-wrangling roles. The teacher stuck watching the kids at recess, or a traffic cop waiting on a highway, or maybe even a hotel concierge. Whatever role they played, there were several common personality traits:

• They were masochistic. Mostly in the name of some ideal or worthwhile thing you couldn’t touch.
• They were tolerant. Mostly to the point of ridiculousness.
• They were insane. This explains the first two traits if you really think about it.

Community monkeys these days are anything from customer service reps, to forum moderators, to glorified community managers whose job it is to wrangle people online. And like their offline counterparts, they are masochistic, tolerant, and insane. This is especially true when you consider that Penny Arcade’s Anonymous Fuckwad theory holds true in every forum and online community out there. I don’t care of the online community is the Blessed Order of Elderly Knitting Circles – if they have an online forum or place to gather, there are always going to be assholes, there are always going to be trolls, there are always going to be people who couldn’t spell out of a paper bag, and there will always be a slightly disheveled, very tired, yet dedicated Community Monkey watching over them.

This is an honest blog about what community monkeys go through every day – an uncensored, unfettered account of what they do and what keeps them going. You might laugh. You might cry. You might never read this blog again after any of its entries. But maybe, just maybe, if you’re a community monkey, you’ll smile and realize there is a place on the big bad ‘Net where someone will actually point out how banning a troll and taking sadistic pleasure in it isn’t so bad after all.

Even monkeys need entertainment.