Any negativity in the community is a red flag for many people. If new users have not yet contributed anything significant to the community nor built any relationships with other users, they have a few reasons to stay on the platform. If they experience any negativity towards them or other people, they leave the community.
A community manager needs to keep an eye on the first two or three posts where each new user participates and moderate all negativity. If you see any issue in how regular users interact with a new user, edit or delete their posts. If you intervene to delete or edit, you need to contact the authors of the posts and explain to them the reasons behind your actions. If the users disagree, kindly ask them to initiate a meta discussion. This helps keep new users in the community and sets an example for regular users on how to deal with new users.
Some software platforms allow administrators to automatically block the content that matches certain filters or route that content for additional moderation. Be sure to configure these filters. A friendly attitude towards each other is the necessary minimum to build a community.
This is a fragment of a draft of the book “Lessons Learned While Working On Stack Overflow”. Read the full book on kindle or the paperback version.