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.
There is no “if”. Should Lemmy grow even 1/100th as well as its founders hope, then it will become inevitable that such people join. The probability approaches 1 the larger it gets.
My country just recently voted Trump into office. The office with the big red button that launches a few thousand nukes. The office in charge of the reserve currency of the world.
Democracy might be better than some other -ocracies, but the problem with it is that voters are stupid. This isn’t me being mean to voters, it’s because you can’t not be a stupid voter. There’s never a smart vote to make.
That only gamifies it. You live in a world where video game players brag how they’ve scored achievements that literally require them to play for 48 hours straight, or to do some obnoxiously boring task every evening for 6 months. Any kind of requirement that isn’t literally impossible will pose no obstacle to the sorts of people you hope to keep out of modship. Downvote me if you like, but you know that I’m right.
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I was denied being allowed to be elected as a moderator on an SE site because I joked in my little self-nomination. Was told that meant I wasn’t “serious” about the site.
They elected some other jackass. 3 weeks later he’s closing/deleting my questions because they’re “list questions”. I point out how the question is framed in a way that correct answers would have a finite (and small) number of elements, thus not coming even close to meeting the criteria of a list question.
His response? “Yeh, but more than one more person might answer it, meaning it would be a list of answers”.
If that sounds as dumb to you as it does to me, then you can see why I’m a little reluctant to thinking that democracy will fix online moderation.
This is a big IF, but IF instead users had a way to create referenda to have a mod removed, that might go much farther towards fixing moderation, than voting for them to become moderators ever would. Because with SE, once elected, they’re there fucking things up for a long time, and nothing short of public outcry over some felonious proclivity will cause the SE admins to budge.
That sounds stupid and bad. What’s frustrating there is people not exposed to accountability (paradoxically happens in “democratic” elections of mods), people can just be confidently wrong and contemptuous. I do like the idea of mods having some accountability (though I also thing there’s a right wing troll thing about always complaining about mods that makes me hesitant to follow that sentiment too far), but some other way than votes to elect mods is probably for the best.
Well, if this feeling of yours becomes pervasive enough, then it becomes a part of the culture here, that you can’t complain about mods. By extension, you can’t even complain about the concept of moderation.
In truth, whichever faction is the smaller and thus vulnerable to moderation is the one that complains. That just happens to be the right at the moment, since technology (and technology websites) skew young. If they were in charge of the moderation, they wouldn’t be complaining about it, they’d be embracing and celebrating it, and the positions would be reversed.
This isn’t inherently partisan. It’s procedural. Like when Congress complains about the filibuster. Right now Democrats hate it, because it’s used against them. When the Republicans pick the majorities back up in the midterms, they’ll want to get rid of it and Democrats will tell us that it’s the only thing standing between us and doomsday.
That one flipflops because it fluctuates between advantageous and disadvantageous. But moderation is controlled by only one side, and they retain it.
I mean if the only available choices are that we swing from one extreme to the other, then sure. We can always extrapolate from reasonably stated opinions to unreasonable extremes and then only talk about unreasonably extrapolated caricatures.
There’s a middle version where it’s perfectly doable to identify bad actors who pressure mods with the intent of normalizing tolerance for bad activity.
I’m old enough to remember when the dominant cultural influences on the internet were left: Howard Dean, the “netroots”, the advent of blogging and media criticism, online activism in response to the Iraq war. This cultural criticism of mods did not exist at the time. With 2014-2015 and the onset of gamergate, complaining about mods became the norm, and gamergate and the politics of cultural reaction eventually became intertwined with the right wing, and the complaint about mods, and new narratives about “free speech” in the context of online platforms emerged. It’s not the case that there has been a consistent swinging of the pendulum back and forth, really, and it’s not the case that arguments re: moderation were equivalent.
I’m having a lot of “yes but no” feelings in this thread, and here is another one.
I think the beginning culture of a community has a big influence on what happens downstream, and choices you make in the early days can have long term ripple effects. I also think the structure and features and user experience on a platform have an impact on how people behave on it, and I think there’s a whole grab bag of incentives and disincentives - removing then re-adding karma for text-only posts, disabling downvoting from a user’s comment page, etc. The very existence of upvotes and downvotes, or the way disocverability works, and on and on.
I don’t think that lowest common demoninator is necessarily inevitable, or that if you believe it is that you should use it as a rationale for not doing anything to make it as good a platform as possible. But I also agree with you, that resorting to votes gamifies, and exposes the irrationality of online mobs, which are some unintended consequences.
I guess I think there really are things that can be done (e.g. strong modding, community norms and rules that set a cultural tone), maybe some structural things, but I also believe in the structure as it is now. But I don’t think the democraticizing thing would work as intended.
It does, but culture is funny. It gets transmitted from person to person, with the larger group’s culture overriding the smaller group’s. This means that when growth hits a certain rate, the once larger group can find itself overwhelmed with the incoming group’s culture.
You won’t be able to control that, either. Or shape it. If you try to throttle the growth, then another curious thing happens… you sap everyone’s reason for wanting to be part of the network. This was reddit once (and Digg before it, and Slashdot before that, etc). When Reddit hit that growth peak, despite the cultural damage, it still felt good to be a part of it… before, there were only a few subforums, and only broad topics were available. Sure, no one minded if you posted something really niche to the big subs (culture still hadn’t completely gone to shit), but the chances of someone else there who also enjoyed whatever that niche thing was were small. So when it got big, and suddenly there were enough people who enjoyed it to have an actual subreddit on it, that (at the time at least) outweighed any cultural erosion.
Until you get the shitfest that it is today.
Some online forums went the other way. The growth never hit that level where cultural erosion occurred… but they then never got big enough to maintain their userbase. Kuro5hin, for instance (that one’s interesting… they had some of the same factional splits you see here already, which just sapped their userbase even more, Hulver left and created Husi, and a third of the users went with him).
In the end, whatever initial culture you initially had is not that important after all. It will either be lost because growth annihilates it, or growth won’t sustain and users drift away.
But people have more influence on the structure and features. Thus, they’ll change the the site until bad features abound.
Like, right now. Though moderation is almost certainly the worst approach, you have people here clamoring for more of it, not less.