I think this is exactly it. Kindness was something built-in from day one, it was core to everyone who was responsible for steering a community. We talked about loving each other and loving the community very often and publicly and loudly. It also came from the top. Scott Jarkoff (co-founder) and especially Eric Kolb (dir of community) are really great people, they encouraged and in fact mandated a general idea of no assholes. Everyone on the community team had a lot of lee way to ban, and we banned liberally and often for anything that was even remotely off tone or out of culture. The cool thing about banning from the admin side is it was build in a "time out" manner, when you banned someone you would generally set a period of time the ban was for, and it was pretty difficult to ban someone for life. Rehabilitation was something we actively promoted. We worked pro-actively to resolve conflicts out in the open. We also made a pretty deliberate effort to instill a culture of positive critique and criticism. If someone posted something that was harsh or to the point, you could generally expect an experienced community member to reply with a suggestion to start with a compliment or something similar. Sometimes someone would even re-write a whole crit for a new member to show how it's done. We tried to humanize the site as much as possible too, profiles became very important, we encouraged people to be very personal in their journals. It was for sure lots of little things, such as around 2005 (I think but don't quote me) the community staff started talking among themselves about having a photo as their profile, not an avatar. The IRC community was also quite large and vibrant, and again the tone was always positive. Pedanticism was STRONGLY discouraged. Every time I was coached by Eric or Scott, it was always super: "you are awesome here is how you can improve btw we love you, be more awesome, you are awesome." - This is what Scott wrote on my linked randomly one day, you can get a sense of the type of dude he is: http://john.je/jIP5 -- As a note, this is the exact same way that the DigitalOcean community was built. :)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13714513