It would appear I’m hitting some kind of character limit… here’s the rest of the post

Moderation

It’s likely that in the future I’ll need to create another philosophy post dedicated specifically to this topic. I think in the long term moderation is likely the most important aspect of this instance and key to ensuring this community stays a nice place. Moderation is a tricky subject and something that I don’t think any platform on the internet has managed to figure out.

Rather than try to summarize about our current philosophy on moderation I’d like to focus on some issues we’ve seen (some of which we may not have an answer to yet). To provide some background on the kind of stuff I’ve moderated, I’ll provide some examples- besides this website I’m currently a moderator for several discords running the gamut from small personal groups of real life friends, to internet communities from other websites, to communities focused around specific high profile musicians (and moderating their twitch channels). Years ago I used to actively moderate large and small subreddits, including some default subs. In general as my life has gotten busier and I’ve grown disenchanted with moderating in favor of simply participating in communities which are nice, and because of such I’ve slowly withdrawn from most of these responsibilities.

As many of you new folks are refugees from Reddit, some of the problems I’m about to outline are likely problems you’ve seen with moderation. Reddit has an issue with a certain type of individual being drawn towards moderation and a subset of them really ‘succeeding’ in the accumulation of moderator power. Some people like to refer to some of the most prolific individuals who moderate on the website as part of ‘the cabal’. Some of these individuals are deeply emotionally invested in the platform in unhealthy ways or are seeking validation through their wielding of power and some of these individuals misuse it due to these factors. Some are also simply fairly regular humans who were around at the right time and place or otherwise social in the right way and ended up in their position. I’ve seen more drama than I really care to remember or waste mental bandwidth on. What’s important here, however, is that there’s a social component to this. These ‘cabals’ form because groups naturally occur and synthesize around power. This is true with nearly any community of a certain size, be it your local chapter of an international institution, your government, a meetup group, a convention you like to attend, or any other large gathering of individuals. Checks and balances of various sorts can and should be wielded to help prevent the slow corruption of power but I don’t think this is a problem we’ve managed to universally solve or that any solution doesn’t consist of both pros and cons that the community needs to decide are appropriate for it.

Most communities self-police in some manor based on seniority. People who’ve been in a community for a long time are often seen as wise, as sages, or elevated to places of power. Our elders often know a community extremely well and can help provide context for the various factions within a community, the diverse opinions it represents, and can offer measured responses on the most likely outcomes or best solutions. However these elders are not infallible and any community needs to adapt to the changes building in said community from its amorphous organization- people join and leave throughout a communities existence. Fresh ideas and new viewpoints can carry a community to new heights and bring important changes. New blood breeds needed innovation and helps to center oppressed or unrepresented voices. There needs to be a balance between the old and the new to keep both sides in appropriate check. If you focus the too much on the opinion of elders, you end up with issues of seniority and cliquey behavior. If you focus too much on the new voices, you risk the community splintering or imploding on itself from a lack of stability or trying to cater to too many conflicting voices at once.

Solutions to ensure fair moderation often center the voices of the individuals in each community and give them the authority to govern themselves. As an anarchist at heart I deeply want this community to be able to govern itself at multiple levels. However self-governance is difficult. Often people like to point to elections as a way to self-govern. Without even naming some of the issues with elections I’m sure most of you can look at existing elected governmental officials in nearly any country and easily identify at least one person who highlights issues with this process. By its very nature, election often becomes a popularity contest, rife for abuse in a plethora of ways that humans which are good at social skills often use to their advantage. Ideas like sortition may offset some of these problems but also have their pros and cons and perhaps most importantly I don’t want to burden anyone who’s not interested in moderating with that responsibility. I think people would be well served to examine the social groups which exist in their lives which aren’t governed via direct democracy and to spend a bit of time considering what model is most appropriate in each sphere of their life. I certainly don’t want to receive medical care from an individual which was elected by the vote of non-medical professionals. The same would be true of legal advice. Big thinkers in activism often find themselves at the center of movements precisely because they are experts on the topic, not because they’re great at marketing themselves. I personally would like my moderators to be educated and skilled in moderating, and elections don’t always center these values. Ultimately we haven’t decided on a sustainable long-term solution to moderating, and have been choosing active members in communities which seem to embody or align with our ethos to elevate to a moderating position. As it is, we have not had a ton of need of moderating content, but we understand that this need will grow in step with the size of our community.

New users, and maintaining our promise

I want to draw attention back to our ethos, our core value - to be(e) nice. We’ve seen our little website rapidly expand, quadrupling in size in less than 72 hours. We want to support this growth because we think it is useful to keeping interesting people around and populating the website with content that we’re all interested in. However, the most recent flock of individuals was primarily driven off of Reddit due to API changes. Up until this point, people who had found our community were directed towards it because they were upset with the way social media on large platforms was playing out. While I suspect that many of you, and perhaps most of you also reviewed our ethos and philosophy, some individuals probably found their way here simply from the list of Lemmy communities or because someone happened to drop them a link. Luckily, so far we have not run into a lot of bad behavior, but we need to balance growth against the support of our ethos because we are an explicitly nice and safe space. This means that while we are doing our best to accommodate all of the new growth, we need to be mindful of whether the communities are appropriately monitored and whether we have enough individuals paying attention to and starting conversations when questionable behavior arises. We’ve already updated our registration process to reflect this and have started more aggressively denying applications which do not signal that they are in line with our ethos.

Ultimately, we are a bunch of hobbyists volunteering our time to create a community that we wish to see on the internet. This is not our job and we do not wish to make it our job. We don’t have unlimited resources and we don’t want to look to capitalism to solve that. We may push back against suggestions or not make changes simply because they are not sustainable with our current level of involvement. We’re doing our best to honor others who wish to volunteer and to listen to the community’s voice, but every time more people are added we’re also necessarily adding complexity to managing the website. We ask for your trust, your patience, and a little leeway in order to balance what we’re trying to do here with our capacity.