This is inspired by this advice from a few months ago:
Stop giving shitty mods a free pass. Honest mistakes happen; but if the mod in question is assumptive, disingenuous, trigger-happy, or eager to enable certain shitty types of user, spread the word about their comm being poorly moderated. And don’t interact directly with the comm. I think that at least here in the Fediverse we should demand higher standards from our mods.
(Emphasis mine.)
In the past I have used places like [email protected] or [email protected] to call out mods on other subs, with mid-to-almost-high degrees of success, but I wonder if it would be better to have a dedicated sublemmy?
Here are my thoughts on what would make this effective:
- probably shouldn’t be hosted on .world due to the breadth of possible conflicts of interest with admins
- probably shouldn’t be hosted on .ml due to federation hurdles
- mods of the community shouldn’t moderate any other communities of any significant size, in order to make the whole “accountability” thing work
- mods should be willing and able to deal with substantial quantities of garbage posts because there would be a lot of “why won’t c/xyz let me be transphobic/say slurs 😡😡” type submissions which, left unaddressed, would outflood genuine criticism
This is still in conceptual form so I am interested what others think :)
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The last time I encountered a power trip mod, I created another community on the same topic, brought other people who were unsatisfied over, and the new community is much more active than the initial one.
It takes quite a while though.
Yeah, I suppose my idea of a decentralized accountability sublemmy would just help make that process a little more efficient.
Obviously it’s still rough and a mess but I think it’s a fair enough decentralized fit-in for Reddit’s centralized moderation authority.
Not really sure what this will achieve in the long run. Sure, some mods will up their game after being shamed… but would this not just encourage toxic behaviour? People may start shaming mods just because they may slightly disagree with them as opposed to because they are bad mods. Instead of a few bad eggs, we may end up with a chaotic community of people blasting and publicly shaming anyone with differing opinions. Is this the best way to go about this? Obviously I may be exaggerating slightly, but this is just to get across a point to consider. I know you have touched on this issue already, but another thing to consider is the potential bias of mods of this community as well. This is an interesting idea and I would also like to hear other people’s opinions on the matter.
There is also the deep asymmetry of effort. Nearly all moderators are volunteers that put in largely invisible effort every day, for no return. As all humans they sometimes make mistakes and can also have a bad day.
On the other hand there are people that put almost no effort in, but are deeply offended by any moderation action against them and will rise a huge stink about it.
These two factors together make people very reluctant to volunteer for moderation duties in popular communities, which is a major issue for the health of the Lemmyverse as a whole.
Yes, I agree. Not only would the proposed community be full of baseless claims etc. But also it may deter potential mods.
ACAB includes mods. These jobs attract the kind of reddit/lemmy users who want to have power over a petty fiefdom and abuse it. Good mods only get shamed for ridiculous reasons like “Wouldn’t let me be transphobic” and “enforced the rules”. Bad mods get shame they deserve. Mods get paid in power over others, and as an anarchist, I personally seek to ensure that power is constantly questioned, and abolished if it’s abused.
I say all this as the owner of a sublemmy, and I expect to be held to the same standard.
As an Anarchist myself: this is the most absurd take on ACAB and moderation I have heard in a while.
And apparently you have been lucky to not have had to deal with bad-faith concern trolling that some narcissist like to do online.
What kind of anarchist uses ableist slurs? People with NPD are not your enemy, they are not the source of conservativism. They’re just kids who were abused and are trying to live life as adults without having a mental breakdown over not being good enough. Statistically they are poor, have few friends, and have terrible health problems. Because NPD is a social disability. It interferes with holding a steady job, holding a steady friend group, holding a steady lack of desire to kill oneself. People with NPD are exactly the kind of person you want within a leftist group. They’ve been failed by the system and they understand the system’s flaws. They understand the mechanisms of abuse and have a stunning gift for identifying and calling out right wing bullshit. And they fight like hell against what they perceive as injustice.
You should be trying to get people with NPD to join our movement, not using slurs that degrade them and accusing reactionaries of mental disability.
They understand the mechanisms of abuse and have a stunning gift
… for abusing others, yes. Thanks, but no thanks.
Oh, you’re one of those people who thinks a mental disorder makes someone abusive. You know, a conservative.
Is this elaborate satire? :)
No, this is anarchism
ACAB includes mods.
This is anarchism? Come on now…
These are valid concerns that could certainly prove problematic without further insight. :) Thanks for sharing.
No problem :) . Thank YOU for posting. This can cause an interesting discussion.
Most large instances have a support community. That seems like the suitable place to raise a moderation issue with specific a community on the instance.
Yes, but at the same time, it depends on the instance policy as a whole.
Some instance admins prefer to not interfere with how mods handle their communities (which is also a valid stance, I’m not criticizing it), but that means that in the end it wouldn’t have that much impact. And most of the users wouldn’t probably see the posts in the support community.
This would be a perfect solution I think, if most major mods and subs weren’t hosted on .world and .ml.
The conflict of interest is real and intense; I have been told directly that certain problematic .world mod activity cannot be addressed because the mods in question are close friends with instance admins.
Thanks for your thoughts :)
The world admins are some of the most garbage people on the whole fediverse.
I think it’s essential to have one or more communities like this. There were a few on reddit – watchredditdie, declineintocensorship, and more. The admins shut them down. I was unsuccessful in getting them to move over to Lemmy.
Absolutely the same things happen on lemmy. It’s to be expected from both mods and admins. We need to have a place we can go to find out “which are the bad communities & instances”.
The main problem I foresee is that those “watchredditdie and declineintocensorship” subs seemed to be well modded and mostly populated with intelligent people. In contrast, lemmy seems to have quite a lot of trolls, unintelligent people, and likely astroturfing. That will make things more difficult.
You should host it on lemm.ee, it’s a large instance with a hands-off admin who doesn’t believe in censorship.
I’ve recently had a couple of totally unrelated negative interactions with an extremely self-rightious “powermod” who has control of a few of my favorite communities.
This sounds like a good idea, since if I was to start shitposting about my experiences with a powermod, they could just remove my posts and ban me from the many communities they control.
But, it could just turn into a cesspool of vendettas and hivemind whingeing about mods x poster dislikes. Ironically, this community would require great mods to not just be a hate circlejerk.
yep, posted to [email protected] and it immediately made a downturn 🥲
So, do you plan to use this one? Shouldn’t it be elsewhere to prevent Lemmy.world power tripping mods to escalate to their admins, and have that community removed?
https://lemmy.world/c/modlog exists
TIL! pinging @[email protected] to see if they’re active and/or have thoughts.
cuz yeah my most recent callout post went to [email protected] and a lot of people got really upset at me for being “off topic” 😓 (it was effective btw, yay!)
Hey! Didn’t even know you could ping people. I’m not super active but I’m here every so often. What’s up?
kind of already answered my question, just wanted to see if current moderators for !modlog were sufficiently active :) thanks for popping in to answer
Active enough considering the scale of the community.
In the fediverse, admins and mods are the masters of their domains. Any illusions aside are just that.
A couple of thoughts on the timeliness critique.
One of the big reasons that the removals, reports and comms take forever is because the mod tools are trash. People simply don’t see the notifications until they log in to the web app and look in the header.
Another reason that stuff takes forever is because people don’t volunteer to mod. Lemmy world videos has had requests for moderators out for weeks. Next to know one wants to volunteer their time to help the community.
If we want fast moderation, we need more eyes. Especially since Lemmy doesn’t really do a great job of sending notifications.
Hmm it almost seems like you are responding to a different post? I didn’t really say much about timeliness here. :) This is more about corrupt or inappropriate moderation activity.
Sorry, long day and I’m pretty tired. I mistook “comm” as communications, not community.
ah understandable! thanks for sharing your thoughts and hope you can get some rest :)
Thanks!
!modabuse
Appreciate the effort in responding, but I count 20 instances that defederate yours, covering several thousand users. That kind of hobbles the functionality of this as a concept. :/
Have you ever thought about or would be interested in, creating communities like that, but on your main instance ? (Assuming you’re on the bigger ones that are federated with everyone)
You’d be able to be the mod obviously, and maybe that would help garner discussions about your concerns.
Nope not really that wouldn’t be good for my health (:
Fair enough.
I know you’re not directly asking me for advice, but I guess one thing to keep in mind (Regarding why moderators are shitty sometimes)
Is that literally anyone, ANYONE, can make a community. It’s also not a paid like job or anything, (Which I know you are aware of that fact also)
So they aren’t beholden to anyone or anything regarding their ‘practices’ no accountability. So they literally don’t give a shit really. There’s no pre-screening required or emotional equity test performed in order to be an admin or a mod.
So you’re gunna come across a lot of uptight, mentally unhinged people who more then likely lack, or have zero control of their own personal lives. except for their community or instance on lemmy.
That ends up turning out with the issues you’re dealing with. They end up taking content or comments they don’t like personally. And lash out with the removing and banning with zero follow up.
They don’t even hold themselves accountable for their own actions. So of course, unfortunately, you won’t get an explanation.
If you ask me, people seriously need to chill the fuck out. Lemmy doesn’t pay your bills ok. It’s a hobby. It’s supposed to be fun
I mean my God. It’s just taken to a limit sometimes that it doesn’t even need to go in.
Anyway, take care man. Wish I could be of more help.
