I’m afraid that is going to be the case anywhere there is moderation… even here.
I’ve definitely seen some emotional mods on Lemmy who relish in throwing gas at the fire before a ban and posts from people complaining about them. Hell, I have experienced it first hand. And it doesn’t look like anything is ever done about abuse. The sad thing is that Lemmy can change this but doesn’t look like it wants to.
“Post removed. Reason: Rule 1” No other explanation given and nobody oversees the moderation. The standard is on the floor. I’d be more than happy to volunteer if there was a auditing system in place. We to police the police, per se, and do so in a fair and transparent way.
It’s human nature … and it’s also politics and marketing
In the non political communities, the people with the most time take the opportunity to moderate. Unfortunately having time on your hands is not an indicator of wealth, ability or status. A percentage of these people are just internet addicted individuals that spend all their lives online. And a percentage of these people see moderating as way to give them power over others.
The other dynamic I see happening is politics and marketing and propaganda. In the political communities, important messages need to be pushed by state organizations or groups to push a message or react to opposing views. We like to think that we are a tiny independent bubble in Lemmy but the more popular it becomes, the more professional and dedicated marketers will migrate into the service.
It’s all human nature … the human nature to be in control, to have control or to exert control.
And like you say, the only way to moderate it all is to moderate ourselves and others on a continual basis.
“The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.” -Thomas Jefferson
We will never achieve a free form social media that can be open, inclusive and safe for everyone … we have to realise that we have to always be fighting and advocating for one, otherwise we will always run the risk of giving room to those who want control over everyone and everything.
I’ve seen it happen here already.
This is absolute bullshit.
I used to be a mod on /r/soccer, and there were strict rules around duplicates, and on keeping things related to football news and OC. It’s the most popular sport in the world, and when you’ve got enough subscribers to fill multiple stadiums, just “posting anything football” doesn’t scale. You also end up with a huge amount of content about the most popular teams, and when there’s a long-tail of fans from other leagues/countries you isolate a lot of people.
I can happily say that in the time I was a mod there were no questionable decisions. The mods went out of their way to verify decisions, discuss them with others, and reverse any bans if the user acknowledged that they’d broken rules. What the mods got in return was:
- Probably 5-10 death threats a day. No hyperbole.
- A handful of script kiddies that tried to spam the sub with offensive content, CP, and stuff that obviously breaks the rules.
- One stalking attempt on a mod that resulted in the police getting involved, a potential arrest, and a kid getting kicked out of school.
- Several people getting pissy, starting their own subs, and then realising that keeping things on topic and stopping people posting “Paul Pogba skills compilation 2015-2020 Despacito Remix” several times a day is quite tricky…
Funny enough, pretty much every decision was made by reports. Four reports triggered a message in modmail, and we just followed what users had reported…
Yeah your experience matches mine. Id really encourage people to not blanket trash on all mods. It is a lot of work that goes into moderating communities and it is either done by people who love the community, or by someone who loves that power dynamic. I’m not saying all mods are perfect, but give a chance for individual mods to prove themselves. It’s generally a thankless job, especially lately. By trashing on all mods we’re just going to scare away the good intentioned people and all that is left are the power hungry ones.
How does moderating like that work? Do you guys take shifts? Is there a group chat?
Everything is done via modmail. Users report posts/comments, and the reports go into a queue that basically says “this comment has been reported due to X”. As a mod, you go into the queue, review the content, and decide what to do. Very occasionally, you’d look at the new posts, but very few people did this, because reports would usually come into modmail within minutes. In terms of “power”, all that was different from being a normal user was some extra buttons, and modmail.
Often we’d be called out for banning people, or deleting things. This was almost always the admins, because I assume people had broken rules that had incurred their wrath, or they had been caught with duplicate/spam profiles to get around bans. We got a lot of shit for one ban…which was the kid that got in trouble with the police for stalking a mod at their place of work.
There were about 15 of us, and we were told to basically do as much or as little as possible. All the rules were community driven, so users got a say in what rules to add (don’t accept this source, no compilations, no news from years ago to confuse people, etc).
Sadly, with such a popular sub, a post that clearly breaks rules might get 300-500 upvotes before it’s removed, and you get the typical “but everyone likes this post, why remove it?!”. In my experience, users don’t care if it breaks the rules, until they care it breaks the rules. There is no winning when you’re a mod.
I did it because I used the sub for a decade, and wanted to give back while.i had been laid-off from work (COVID times). I definitely don’t regret it, and if Reddit weren’t so shit I’d do it again.
Lemmy ain’t any better
Since Lemmy is federated, anyone can start their own instance so it’s easy for users to migrate if the admins on one instance decide to start banning everyone they don’t like.
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That doesn’t make the end result any better.
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Reddit never assigned mods until the exodus. Almost all communities had people who created them as the mods.
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Pretty much the only subs that had mods that got them assigned where the main default ones, but that was at the beginning and pretty much all those big sub mods just wanted the power and literally would do anything they could to get in with other big subs as mods even if they didn’t contribute.
Sir, this is a Wendy’s
Sir, this is a Lemmy’s
Sorry but I’m on the mod’s side here. Some content doesn’t belong on some communities. Most people upvote from their front page without even checking what community you posted to. If you allow things based on popularity, every community devolves into deep-fried shitposts
These were the complaints I heard about mods before the API debacle. After all the mods quit or got their 3rd party tools nuked, it was all complaints about repost bots not being removed. I’ve never been a mod, but you couldn’t pay me enough to babysit thousands of angry dorks, much less get me to do it for free.
The feeling of power over others is their payment.
Proudly perma-banned from Reddit for taking the piss out of the far right.
Proudly had comments deleted from lemmy.ml for taking the piss out of the far left.
Perfectly balanced, as all things should be.
Getting banned from Lemmy.ml is like shooting fish in a barrel though. They’re very sensitive.
Hell, they’ll even kick you for shit you say OUTSIDE their instances
Ah so it’s not just me then…
They are as easy to trigger as your average Tumblr user.
Completely unrelated, does anyone remember suck.com? A Fish, a Barrel, a Smoking Gun.
Please don’t call them “the far left”. They’re just pretending, in reality they’re authoritarians defending Russia, China and Iran, while shitting on the West at every opportunity.
Perhaps alt left?
Ooh, I like that one.
Alt left covers way too many factions of people that it could apply to. You have disaffected liberals, anti-woke progressives, left-lib Joe Rogan types, tankies and MAGA communists. MAGAcoms are just tankies who vote for populist Republicans because Bolsheviks and Republicans happen to align on many/social cultural issues and support using the state to crack down on what they consider moral depravity.
Thank gods that doesn’t happen here. Right?
Right guys?
Finally, the original! Thank you kind stranger.
Pretty sure you’re about to get banned.
The rules end up there because people complain about things and then the mods implement a rule to ban the things people complain about. Sometimes they let the community vote on it. It does end up being the vocal minority who the rules cater to sometimes.
And they have to be more or less vague to give the moderators room to decide if the rule breaker did it by accident or is just an asshole. Trolls will do anything to walk the fine line between not breaking the rules and being as annoying as possible.
I mean…there’s very good reasons to respect the wishes of minority groups sometimes (not always). It’s the reason they wrote the “First they came for the communists” poem.
the admins let people like akwardtheturtle have free rein over
hundredsthousands of subs until they protested the API stuffAwkward got banned right? Saw a post elsewhere about it
Awhile back yeah. I saw a post on reddit back then of their post-ban discord meltdown… it was exactly what you’d expect
Oh man, that would have been fun to see.
Don’t worry, it’s been documented: https://lemmy.world/post/455268
I feel like this problem is just part of the reddit/Lemmy model. 15 or 20 years ago, on an internet with different forums under different domain names on different hosts owned by independent admins, no one would ever be mod of 1000 different forums.
The problem is now that people don’t want to go to obscure forums or take the time to register accounts on dozens of websites. Everyone wants to be part of huge social media silos. Things like Oauth account creation might make that easier when users can do things like “sign in with Google.” Federation through sites like Lemmy could make things better since one account can access every other instance, but I don’t see normies ever adopting federated platforms unless each platform has an instance that becomes “The” instance where normies can enter “Lemmy” or “Mastodon” into Google and have that instance be the first result.
The world elites have a huge interest in keeping people in centralized silos because it makes it much easier to control the population when they’re gathered around only a few websites.
Juicy.
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100%
Nah, upvoters are stupid and will often upvote anything with a pretty picture regardless of whether it fits a sub, regardless of whether it’s been reposted 50 trillion times, and regardless of whether it’s complete bullshit. Mods absolutely should delete a lot of posts even if they’re popular.
My number 1 desire for a reddit replacement is some sort of meta restrictions on voting. Ban people from voting for a post if they’re not subbed. Ban people who upvote bad content from voting in your sub. The more and more time I spend on reddit and the fediverse, the more I’m convinced that upvotes as implemented are a broken, shitty way to determine what content I see.
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Sorry bro, the cropping here is very bad, I can’t see what it says :(
You should probably do a better job of cropping your memes bro
Have you even been here 20 seconds? The lack of self awareness is astounding. Wow.
Here after a permanent ban for asking what a post meant. Fuck Reddit.
Welcome to Lemmy Here from a permanent ban last year for … Fuck I don’t even know just pissed off the wrong mod
That’s their M.O.
Fuck these mods too.
That r*ddit mod or admin is looking a little skinny. Did they do the impossible and actually stand up and walk away from their computer?
Now that you mention it, he is pretty skinny for a reddit mod. A bit too handsome as well. Hmmmmm
Jesus Christ, your Fedora must be huge 🤣
Getting offended in a shitposting group are we? That’s a paddlin’
