Looks like r/antiwork mods made the subreddit private in response to this post
This fiasco highlights that such forums are vulnerable to the whims of a few individuals, and if those individuals can be subverted than the entire community can be destroyed. Reddit communities are effectively dictatorships where the mods cannot be held to account, recalled, or dismissed, even when community at large disagrees with them.
This led me to think that Lemmy is currently vulnerable to the same problem. I’m wondering if it would make sense to brainstorm some ideas to address this vulnerability in the future.
One idea could be to have an option to provide members of a community with the ability to hold elections or initiate recalls. This could be implemented as a special type post that allows community to vote, and if a sufficient portion of the community participates then a mod could be elected or recalled.
This could be an opt in feature that would be toggled when the community is created, and would be outside the control of the mods from that point on.
Maybe it’s a dumb idea, but I figured it might be worth having a discussion on.
Here’s a github issue for it, with some other threads linked. @nutomic@lemmy.ml and I are both very sympathetic to the idea, because there’s been so many of these cases where a top mod will wreck or subvert an entire subreddit.
Hierarchical moderation is definitely a weak-point that I replicated here for only one reason: I’ve never seen a system of democratic moderation work in practice. You could hold “elections”, but then who approves the voters, and makes sure they’re legitimate, and not double or triple voting? Now you have to institute a reputation system for the voters. How often do you hold these elections, and what initiates them? Who decides when elections are to be held? How do you circumvent people from “faking” reputation scores, or double voting ( creating many accounts, faking content and upvoting themselves, etc ). How do you prevent someone putting forward 3 of their alt accounts for modship, and voting themselves in?
And then doing all of that is somewhat overkill, and only seen as necessary because of reddit’s obsession with subscriber count, even if 99% of those subscribers are inactive. It takes two seconds for people to subscribe to an alternate, and these alternates sometimes explode in activity within a few weeks. I’ve changed the sorting and emphasis for communities away from subscriber count, and towards active users / month, to mitigate that inertia here a bit.
Also a lot of reddit’s issues wouldn’t be replicated on a server like this where the admins actually participate for the health of their server. If a mod goes rogue, and the community dislikes that, we can just boot them and appoint a different one. If a server creator / admin like myself goes rogue, people can just start their own server. Reddit does not give you that choice.
Again I’m not completely against it, I just have yet to see any system of democratic moderation work on forums or online communities anywhere, and that’s likely an unavoidable consequence of internet anonymity.
The main problem is that Lemmy is still using a client-server model, so the person or organization who controls the server, can always censor or block local users freely. Federation helps with this mainly by making it much easier to move to another instance. Things like voting for moderators cant solve that, unless it is in a p2p model (which would be a lot more complex).
A middle ground could be to use p2p as a data archiving tool. This way there could be a public archive of the activity from the servers that’s not tied to any server, and if a server goes rogue it would be easy to spin up a new instance from the archive.
Glad to see you’ve already be thinking about it, and those are all excellent points. It is hard to make a system like that in a way that precludes it from being gamed, and voting would require tracking user reputation in some way as well. I imagine it’s something that would need to be tried and refined over time if you do decide to give it a shot. No matter how good the system is, people will continue to look for different ways to game it. So, it’s always going to be an arms race between loopholes being discovered and addressed.
I also very much agree with the emphasis on active users over subscriber counts. Ultimately, it’s the people who actually participate that make the community what it is. Although, jumping communities/servers might be a bit trickier once the scale grows. And this would be an important aspect from activism perspective. If there were a million active users in a community, and it was being used for real world agitation and organizing, then a rogue mod could potentially do a lot of damage.
Thinking a bit more about it, I wonder if a simpler solution than voting could be to allow making communities with restricted mod powers instead. For example, could make it so that community can’t be deleted, mods can’t take it private, etc. And as you note, if the admins are actively participating then they can be used as arbiters for issues like rogue mods. You’re right that this is a big difference from Reddit, and if server admins go rogue then there’s really nothing you can do about that with software anyways. So some trust is ultimately necessary.
I just wanted to float the idea, and I’m also not sure how workable it would be in practice. It’s obviously a bunch of effort to implement and test a feature like this, so it’s worth thinking about the merits before investing the time into implementing it.
I think your suggestion provides some good balance, you’re right in that, even in a decentralized platform, there has to be some local trust/centralization. I find trusting the server admins easier than the community mods, so shifting some of their powers could be good. Additionally, if migration tools are to be developed, a community could fairly easily move itself to another instance, in case the trust on the admins cracks.
Right, since there has to be trust in admins of an instance it might make more sense to move more power to the admins, with federation being a fallback if the admins go rogue.
100% agree. Especially since communities really do “live” on a server. Another server can have a backup of that community’s history (IE federated content they see on their own server), but if the original server dies, then so does the that community… and it would have to be re-created.
Fortunately besides deleting all your own content, even mods cannot edit or actually database delete anything but their own content. Even a community delete is just a boolean flag, and communities can be undeleted with no harm done.
But yes there’s so much with democratic moderation that has never been tested or implemented, that its completely unpredictable. I’m not sure I would want lemmy to be a test-case for that potential instability, I’d rather have other projects figure out something that works first.
Completely agree with all that. I don’t think this is an urgent concern and, as you note, there aren’t really good examples of the idea having been implemented. It’s something to keep an eye on, but likely not worth trying to pioneer.
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It seems like it’d require such a level of research that is almost impossible to do it.
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Very true. GrapheneOS community sockpuppeting, as I proved, or the recent anti Semite /pol/ brigading observed here, are fantastic examples of how anonymity abusers can work around voting systems and comment/post/user representation numbers.
I call these people “anonymity abusers” because that is what they do, and they do it to me. I experience it and I document it. I have to screenshot everything, and be swift and vigilant. It takes effort. But I do it because I do not want others to face this stuff.
And that also means “democracy” has to ironically stem from morally correct benevolent authoritarianism, because anonymity presents us with this paradoxical situation. There just does not exist any other way for handful humans at the moment. This is probably also why socialism is so important, and demonstrates the problems with rampant individualism in society. Maybe someday with AI and automated systems we could do better, but those are far away in time, and requires AI to also not be morally corrupt or practically faulty.
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Another anonymity abuser hiding behind other instances. Sigh.
proof
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proof
Reported. Bye bye.
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@dessalines@lemmy.ml I need to alert you on this one. This user @TheAnonymouseJoker@narwhal.city is not the same as me, the moderator of c/technology or c/privacy or c/privatelife.
We have an example of yet another clever impersonation attack, this time using other federated instances.
comment
their account
disabled that account from here
looks like deleting the comment didn’t go through though
Thanks a lot! These anonymity abusers are horrible.
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Another imposter troll.
Completely agree. I went into more detail elsewhere in this thread but I think the whole question of democratization is just going to lead to feature creep and is better suited for a separate Fediverse project if done at all.
IMO people are overreacting to the effects of the interview; if there’s any lesson, I think its that putting your all your eggs into the Reddit basket for something like antiwork rather than IRL was a poor idea fundamentally.
There are robust ways to do that. I’ve had discussions about it on Lemmy, so I could find the technical term again if necessary. The idea is to have everyone vote at the same time, and pass a turing test (for example a captcha) during a particular timeframe.
But I had thought of a different possible solution for lemmy. There could be a top-level namespace shared by all instances. So there is only one global “antiwork” community. There can in fact be many with the same name but when you search for c/antiwork you will be redirected to whichever one has the most active users / month. Other communities with the same name can still be found through their URLs. But if there is a mass exodus from the global community to a different one, the new one will automatically take its place in the global namespace.
For the other problem of mods deleting things, tags will help. So you could have a setup where nothing can ever be deleted, only tagged as “deleted”. Users have to turn on “deleted” in their filter and all the posts which were purged will become visible, along with all the deleted spam posts.