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.
Thought experiment: if a mainstream news outlet (is Fox still considered mainstream in the US? I feel like it’s become a fringe outlet that’s become largely discredited) offered to interview Lemmy’s devs or instance admins, how would/should we respond?
Personally, I would never go on a televised interview, or even a phone interview, just for privacy reasons and because I get crippling stage freight. At most I’d write in with my responses to their questions if they asked me to, though I feel that even that should only be done collectively by the entire dev or admin team.
These kinds of interviews can be done well, but people doing the interviews need to have some media training and to have good answers at hand for the sorts of questions that would be asked. This is a good example of a Fox interview done right. So, I’d say the main takeaway here is that these things shouldn’t be done on a whim, and require lots of practice and preparation to do well. And it definitely has to be done by someone who’s comfortable on camera. A written interview is much easier to do, so that should always be the preferred option.
IMO any such changes towards democratization would probably be best suited to a different Fediverse project entirely given how much it alters the structure of the genre of site Lemmy falls under.
I think the real lesson from the whole fiasco is that people shouldn’t place more political expectations on a subreddit than its capable of handling. Reddit/Lemmy has specific uses it’s good for, and things it’s not good at. Upvotes, subcommunities, and central moderation all contribute to the problems with Reddit but at the same time they stay because they’ve proven to be the most effective at doing what Reddit is built to do. Yet the unfortunate thing is that a lot of movements have begun using Reddit in ways it wasn’t meant to be used.
When it comes to making a sort of rallying point for things like what /r/antiwork was going after, IMO the whole structure of the site would have to be re-thought. And while I think we should begin with experimenting with platform design more, I don’t think it’s a good idea to burden platforms which were designed to act as direct alternatives to mainstream platforms with unnecessary features which may or may not work out.
So IMO, it’s better to work on theorycrafting an entirely separate ActivityPub project which isn’t constrained by Reddit-like design and can directly address the issues /r/antiwork was inherently facing from even before this interview.
I agree that a whole new project that’s explicitly designed for organization would likely achieve the best results. I do think it makes sense to keep UX largely the same since it’s been shown to scale well, but the underlying mechanics would need to be rethought.
One point that’s been brought up here a few times is that server admins ultimately have full control of the server, and can even just shut it down. So, a more decentralized architecture would be needed from ground up to prevent this.
The main problem that I think needs to be solved is how to prevent bad actors from ruining a community. This includes external problems like brigading, as well as internal ones such as rogue mods or admins. It has to be assumed that good actors can flip, and there needs to be some process for removing them from power at that point.
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.
I think yes and no to this. Yes because Lemmy as it currently exists kind of has the same thing going on. People who create the communities are the creators and that’s that.
But no, because federating is supposed to be a mitigation here. I know that mastodon.social and pixelfed have sometimes shut down signups to purposely spread the userbase across other servers, and perhaps some rebalancing across credible servers can help here.
That would be my first idea.
I think I would veer away from elections because that could have unintended cultural effects. They could be gamed, create inward looking drama that makes no sense to people on the outside, etc.
I like the brainstorming here though, and I agree that your suggestion would help avoid that problem, but its at the cost I think of bringing on some unintended consequences. If we can lean into existing features that would be my option A.
That’s been my thinking as well, there isn’t a clear and simple solution to the problem. So, it’s interesting to do some brainstorming to see what can be done to address these kinds of things.
This is a federated reddit alternative. The code is open source. If you don’t like how the community is being run you can branch off and create your own group. That was the whole point of lemmy I thought.
Are you talking about forking the entire project or federating? If federating, I agree. If forking, I think that’s not practical for most people. I think some mastodon drama had people saying stuff like “don’t like it, then go fork it!” which I think effectively was a way of brushing off criticism without meaningfully engaging.
The fundamental idea behind work is that certain things need to be done in order for people to live whether people like doing these things or not. We need to produce food, build housing, provide sanitation, healthcare, and all the other things that make a society function. The necessity to do these things isn’t going to go away, and therefore the idea of work will not go away either.
A lot of things can’t just be done at home. For example, compute chip manufacturing, or making things like N95 masks, etc. These are complex research and industrial projects that require a high degree of organization. These simply don’t work as ad hoc efforts where people just do stuff when they feel like it. Basically, what’s described here.
Yep. Like it or not, crap needs to be done. Compensating individuals fairly for their contributions to society should be a priority for everyone. Currently, people working in low skilled but often physically demanding jobs are severely overworked and underpaid. We really need to start addressing that, and the whole antiwork approach to this is not helping.
The other big aspect of this is the nature of work. One big question we have to ask as a society is why we work, or what purpose our labour and resources are allocated towards.
Under capitalism, the means of production are largely owned by a small group of capitalists and the purpose of work is to create further wealth for these people. Any social benefit from work is strictly incidental, and much of this work can even be actively harmful to society. Corporate lobbyists are an example of a job that creates negative social value.
I think that the purpose of work should be to create social value first and foremost. Any required work should be directed towards making life better for everyone. The only way we can achieve that is through public ownership. We need to move away from the capitalist model and move towards socialism where ownership of the means of production is in the hands of the general public.
emmy is absolutely no different if you get one or several bad-actor mods on the scene.
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.
I really like the idea of democratizing the mod of a subreddit
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.
Ideally you would have some sort of participation requirement or time limit on the account.
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.
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.
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.
I think the beginning culture of a community has a big influence on what happens downstream,
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.
I also think the structure and features and user experience on a platform have an impact on how people behave on it,
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.
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.
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.
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.
though I also thing there’s a right wing troll thing about always complaining about mods
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There is one system that could prevent mod abuse of communities and it would actually work, I think, but it’s not easy to implement with federation. Every user chooses their own mod of a community to “subscribe” to their moderation work. So, essentially, anybody could apply to become a mod, and do moderation work, but the only people that would see their moderation work would be the people that have “subscribed” to it. No need to move an entire community, just pick yourself a different mod.
This is of course, difficult to implement, particularly with federation, and the devs are already aware of the idea (it’s in the github issue linked by Dessalines).
I like this! I think, like you say, it’s not easy to do, and I think federating/de-federating or subscribing/unsubscribing is an imperfect proxy to your suggestion. What does suck, though is when a community becomes “too big” and, due to a large audience base the cost of mass migration is substantial.
I think of the drift of a place like /r/IAMA - which used to have the slogan " I Am A, where the mundane becomes fascinating and the outrageous suddenly seems normal." It was more about the anything part than anything else.
But it has sense become a promotion platform for celebrities, having almost entirely left behind its original identity.
Or the drift into racist co-opting of half of the joke subreddits. But in those cases they transform and it’s hard to solve by snipping out the mods.
I thought I was gonna end with a clear takeaway here, but I guess not really. Maybe it’s this: insofar as you can stop it by sniping out bad actor mods, there’s a positive there, especially if it can be done without open voting which can be dominated by angry mobs.
does anyone know what kind of moderation 4chan has? tbh, if it didn’t attract all racists, nazis in the world, i think that kind of forum would be onto something interesting 🤔
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
I am not fully sure, but from my analysis of nanochan (asuka), 4Chan (hiro, moot), 8Chan (yes not 8kun, I used 8Chan way before shooter incident), 2ch.hk, lainchan and some other chans, many have their invite only admin groups on Discord or Mumble or such services.
As for the moderation, it is as loose as not allowing CP or gore. Rest everything gets allowed usually, making for a nearly free speech zone. The whole concept of anonymous imageboards stands on the shoulders of free speech. And no matter if anyone admits it or not, we are all very chaotic in nature and like the content diversity of chans from an era humanity might never see again. We just tend to have a good moral compass that is not rusty or broken, and we understand the consequences of the immorality that goes on there, and we do not want that tumour to spread.
I was a moderator of an image board once and basically they tell you that you should be lurking and if you see anything that breaks the ToC you should delete it and ban that IP if it’s too horrible. Mind you this image board wasn’t so big (it’s not super small, though) so maybe moderation in some bigger one is a bit more serious.
Not the brightest moment in my life, hehe. sighs in depression
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: !asklemmy@lemmy.ml
A loosely moderated place to ask open ended questions
If your post is
Open ended
Not offensive
Not regarding lemmy support (c/lemmy_support)
not ad nauseam inducing (please make sure its a question that would be new to most members)
removed by mod
Thought experiment: if a mainstream news outlet (is Fox still considered mainstream in the US? I feel like it’s become a fringe outlet that’s become largely discredited) offered to interview Lemmy’s devs or instance admins, how would/should we respond?
Personally, I would never go on a televised interview, or even a phone interview, just for privacy reasons and because I get crippling stage freight. At most I’d write in with my responses to their questions if they asked me to, though I feel that even that should only be done collectively by the entire dev or admin team.
These kinds of interviews can be done well, but people doing the interviews need to have some media training and to have good answers at hand for the sorts of questions that would be asked. This is a good example of a Fox interview done right. So, I’d say the main takeaway here is that these things shouldn’t be done on a whim, and require lots of practice and preparation to do well. And it definitely has to be done by someone who’s comfortable on camera. A written interview is much easier to do, so that should always be the preferred option.
IMO any such changes towards democratization would probably be best suited to a different Fediverse project entirely given how much it alters the structure of the genre of site Lemmy falls under.
I think the real lesson from the whole fiasco is that people shouldn’t place more political expectations on a subreddit than its capable of handling. Reddit/Lemmy has specific uses it’s good for, and things it’s not good at. Upvotes, subcommunities, and central moderation all contribute to the problems with Reddit but at the same time they stay because they’ve proven to be the most effective at doing what Reddit is built to do. Yet the unfortunate thing is that a lot of movements have begun using Reddit in ways it wasn’t meant to be used.
When it comes to making a sort of rallying point for things like what /r/antiwork was going after, IMO the whole structure of the site would have to be re-thought. And while I think we should begin with experimenting with platform design more, I don’t think it’s a good idea to burden platforms which were designed to act as direct alternatives to mainstream platforms with unnecessary features which may or may not work out.
So IMO, it’s better to work on theorycrafting an entirely separate ActivityPub project which isn’t constrained by Reddit-like design and can directly address the issues /r/antiwork was inherently facing from even before this interview.
I agree that a whole new project that’s explicitly designed for organization would likely achieve the best results. I do think it makes sense to keep UX largely the same since it’s been shown to scale well, but the underlying mechanics would need to be rethought.
One point that’s been brought up here a few times is that server admins ultimately have full control of the server, and can even just shut it down. So, a more decentralized architecture would be needed from ground up to prevent this.
The main problem that I think needs to be solved is how to prevent bad actors from ruining a community. This includes external problems like brigading, as well as internal ones such as rogue mods or admins. It has to be assumed that good actors can flip, and there needs to be some process for removing them from power at that point.
removed by mod
I think yes and no to this. Yes because Lemmy as it currently exists kind of has the same thing going on. People who create the communities are the creators and that’s that.
But no, because federating is supposed to be a mitigation here. I know that mastodon.social and pixelfed have sometimes shut down signups to purposely spread the userbase across other servers, and perhaps some rebalancing across credible servers can help here.
That would be my first idea.
I think I would veer away from elections because that could have unintended cultural effects. They could be gamed, create inward looking drama that makes no sense to people on the outside, etc.
I like the brainstorming here though, and I agree that your suggestion would help avoid that problem, but its at the cost I think of bringing on some unintended consequences. If we can lean into existing features that would be my option A.
That’s been my thinking as well, there isn’t a clear and simple solution to the problem. So, it’s interesting to do some brainstorming to see what can be done to address these kinds of things.
removed by mod
This is a federated reddit alternative. The code is open source. If you don’t like how the community is being run you can branch off and create your own group. That was the whole point of lemmy I thought.
Are you talking about forking the entire project or federating? If federating, I agree. If forking, I think that’s not practical for most people. I think some mastodon drama had people saying stuff like “don’t like it, then go fork it!” which I think effectively was a way of brushing off criticism without meaningfully engaging.
removed by mod
obvious spoof of the real “Jesse” :
https://lemmy.ml/u/masu
redundant comment I made here because I’m not using that mode often :
… display comments only without posts
I think the r/workreform sub is cringe, we are anti work. Work reform is good too, but not the end goal.
The fundamental idea behind work is that certain things need to be done in order for people to live whether people like doing these things or not. We need to produce food, build housing, provide sanitation, healthcare, and all the other things that make a society function. The necessity to do these things isn’t going to go away, and therefore the idea of work will not go away either.
That’s labor though, I get that the dishes need to be washed, but at home for example it’s not done through work.
A lot of things can’t just be done at home. For example, compute chip manufacturing, or making things like N95 masks, etc. These are complex research and industrial projects that require a high degree of organization. These simply don’t work as ad hoc efforts where people just do stuff when they feel like it. Basically, what’s described here.
Yep. Like it or not, crap needs to be done. Compensating individuals fairly for their contributions to society should be a priority for everyone. Currently, people working in low skilled but often physically demanding jobs are severely overworked and underpaid. We really need to start addressing that, and the whole antiwork approach to this is not helping.
The other big aspect of this is the nature of work. One big question we have to ask as a society is why we work, or what purpose our labour and resources are allocated towards.
Under capitalism, the means of production are largely owned by a small group of capitalists and the purpose of work is to create further wealth for these people. Any social benefit from work is strictly incidental, and much of this work can even be actively harmful to society. Corporate lobbyists are an example of a job that creates negative social value.
I think that the purpose of work should be to create social value first and foremost. Any required work should be directed towards making life better for everyone. The only way we can achieve that is through public ownership. We need to move away from the capitalist model and move towards socialism where ownership of the means of production is in the hands of the general public.
deleted by creator
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.
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.
deleted by creator
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.
removed by mod
@dessalines@lemmy.ml another impersonation account here
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.
deleted by creator
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.
deleted by creator
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.
deleted by creator
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.
deleted by creator
There is one system that could prevent mod abuse of communities and it would actually work, I think, but it’s not easy to implement with federation. Every user chooses their own mod of a community to “subscribe” to their moderation work. So, essentially, anybody could apply to become a mod, and do moderation work, but the only people that would see their moderation work would be the people that have “subscribed” to it. No need to move an entire community, just pick yourself a different mod.
This is of course, difficult to implement, particularly with federation, and the devs are already aware of the idea (it’s in the github issue linked by Dessalines).
I like this! I think, like you say, it’s not easy to do, and I think federating/de-federating or subscribing/unsubscribing is an imperfect proxy to your suggestion. What does suck, though is when a community becomes “too big” and, due to a large audience base the cost of mass migration is substantial.
I think of the drift of a place like /r/IAMA - which used to have the slogan " I Am A, where the mundane becomes fascinating and the outrageous suddenly seems normal." It was more about the anything part than anything else.
But it has sense become a promotion platform for celebrities, having almost entirely left behind its original identity.
Or the drift into racist co-opting of half of the joke subreddits. But in those cases they transform and it’s hard to solve by snipping out the mods.
I thought I was gonna end with a clear takeaway here, but I guess not really. Maybe it’s this: insofar as you can stop it by sniping out bad actor mods, there’s a positive there, especially if it can be done without open voting which can be dominated by angry mobs.
deleted by creator
I’ve never used it, but Aether uses something like this + mod voting on top of it.
https://getaether.net/docs/
https://getaether.net/docs/faq/voting_and_elections/#effects_of_an_election_result
deleted by creator
Aether works like that in theory, but I think that the feature was never created.
does anyone know what kind of moderation 4chan has? tbh, if it didn’t attract all racists, nazis in the world, i think that kind of forum would be onto something interesting 🤔
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
I am not fully sure, but from my analysis of nanochan (asuka), 4Chan (hiro, moot), 8Chan (yes not 8kun, I used 8Chan way before shooter incident), 2ch.hk, lainchan and some other chans, many have their invite only admin groups on Discord or Mumble or such services.
As for the moderation, it is as loose as not allowing CP or gore. Rest everything gets allowed usually, making for a nearly free speech zone. The whole concept of anonymous imageboards stands on the shoulders of free speech. And no matter if anyone admits it or not, we are all very chaotic in nature and like the content diversity of chans from an era humanity might never see again. We just tend to have a good moral compass that is not rusty or broken, and we understand the consequences of the immorality that goes on there, and we do not want that tumour to spread.
I was a moderator of an image board once and basically they tell you that you should be lurking and if you see anything that breaks the ToC you should delete it and ban that IP if it’s too horrible. Mind you this image board wasn’t so big (it’s not super small, though) so maybe moderation in some bigger one is a bit more serious.
Not the brightest moment in my life, hehe. sighs in depression
deleted by creator