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.

@dessalines@lemmy.ml @nutomic@lemmy.ml

  • m-p{3}
    8·
    3 years ago

    You can modify comments

    Technically no, they cannot modify comments, at least not through hacky workaround like modifying the CSS and that wouldn’t show up if you’re using New Reddit or a mobile app. The only thing they can do is remove it, or attach a community award to it.

    Only Reddit Admins can modify comment, and we all know how well that turned out.

    And saying that mods aren’t content creator is reductive. One can be both, not all mods are simple jannies.

      • abbenm
        1·
        3 years ago

        I think that little episode sucked, but it wasn’t sufficient reason to bring on the amount of hate it did, and it was kind of opportunistically used by angry mobs.

        The background context was that mods were bringing down the hammer on places like /r/thedonald and /r/fatpeoplehate, (my timeline may be a bit off and those are just illustrative, stand-in examples). The spez thing was weaponized opportunistically by people looking for anything to put reddit mods on the defensive. They wanted to do that because reddit mods were taking action against toxic behavior of terrible communities.

          • abbenm
            1·
            3 years ago

            I agree that it’s bad, and should be reacted to in proportion, and as I said, there’s a lot of context that suggests that people were taking a legitimately bad thing but nevertheless taking it out of proportion for reasons that didn’t have anything to do with the offense.

            I think one of the weird only on the internet style biases that gets exploited by angry mobs is i the nability to take stock of things in proportion to their relative merit.

              • abbenm
                1·
                3 years ago

                Nope! Moreover, that wasn’t even close to reasonably implied by anything I said. But I am saying the reaction was disproportionate to the offense and the reasons driving that disproportionate reaction were culturally driven and opportunistic, and that these are important pieces of context in which to understand what happened.