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.
Anonymous boards can be a pleasing experience. I’ve been active on 4chan during my late teen years (and on 8chan for a few months), the comfort of anonymity and the impossibility to develop bias toward specific online identities help people to express their mind openly and without fear of being judged or having your shit takes stickied on your front head for the rest of you online persona’s life - which is something I’ve always liked about these places. How ephemeral their content is. Forming a bond with the board’s hivemind and having a place to vent without the fear of being judged is truly a weird and liberating experience, if it wasn’t for all the trash this setup inevitably attracts. I stopped hanging on there for the vitriolic, racist, bigoted posts popping out every two threads, which luckily didn’t radicalize me, they rather had the opposite effect. And also because I was loosing my ability to tell legitimate opinions from overly articulated propaganda ops and well-masked uninformed takes
Every now an then I still have a look at what some anonymous Telegram chats are up to, they’re the only place that offer an anonymous board-like experience and that are moderated. I too wonder what 4chan would be like without the userbase that makes it what it is