So after a run in with a moderator yesterday I’ve had some thoughts I felt I wanted to share.
I won’t name them here, you are welcome to look at my comment history and make up your own mind.
In this instance a user posted some misinformation. I don’t think they intended to, they merely perpetuated a myth, they clearly simply knew no better.
I tried to respond diplomatically, they doubled down, other users piled on, the downvotes are plenty and then I responded with an article citing evidence supporting my assertions.
I also stated that the burden of proof lies with the claimant and asked for some context on why they seemed dead set on the lie they were aping back, asking if they subscribe to other myth based beliefs, religions, etc. That post was unceremoniously deleted with no notice to me and no reasons given… until the user pointed out in another post that they are the sole mod of the community and warned me that they were “not afraid to ban” me should I “cross the line” in a very *‘I’m the sheriff of this here town’ *tone. Which gave me a chuckle.
That’s my side of the story, it’s all there if you want to draw your own conclusions. It really doesn’t matter who is right or wrong in a ‘someone is wrong on the internet’ spat but I did spot a chink in the fediverse through this incident.
The real point here is that this kind of behaviour is one of things that made Reddit fucking awful and I’d hate to see it flourish here in the fediverse.
I don’t have the solutions just some suggestions that I’d be keen to hear others opinions on:
- No moderation without representation. IOW: mods should be democratically elected.
- Mod elections should be annual and no mod should enjoy that status for life.
- There should be a mechanism for inducing a ‘no confidence’ mode election at any time otherwise the communities are likely to splinter into “real_” communities just as they did on Reddit which no community in the fediverse can currently afford.
What say you my brothers and sisters and everything in between? Is there a way to safeguard against cronyism, corruption and other frailties of the human ego?
You are aware that the ModLog is visible and we can see you’re a liar. Right?
Mod logs can and are purged. So I see you left that out
I left it out because it doesn’t happen. Your blatant alt that’s evading a ban can fuck off now
you sound like someone who enjoys having arguments, when you have arguments with people sometimes they don’t want to talk to you anymore. It’s the cost of your personality.
Attacking someone’s position as mythical, religious, is combative… and wont be welcome in every community. Even if your right, being combative isn’t going to help convince people your right.
if you want to have constructive debate with people, try to respect their positions, and the experiences that got them into the positions they are in now, even if you disagree with the position. If nothing else, being polite to people will make third parties who read the discussion later more receptive to your ideas.
As far as your meta-moderation ideas go, lemmy is federated, you can always create a new community and moderate it to your liking if you find the current communities inadequate. The ultimate referendum in any society is being able to replace and abandon old corrupt systems.
This comment seems to be the first reply. I don’t get a “just for argument sake” or a combative vibe from it, nor does it mention mythology or religion. A later comment does call the source for anecdotal (and provably false) information “idiots,” which is unnecessary and likely grounds for mod action or warning.
I don’t really read anything wrong with the mod saying to keep it clean, though the thinly-veiled threat of, “I’m a mod here and I’m not afraid to ban you,” is poorly worded at best.
I completely agree with you about politeness. At the end of the day, I think that, judging methods alone, OP was out of line with his comments about the mods friends, but correct to point out bunk facts.
If I was OP, I’d probably edit my comments to remove the name-calling, but as a Lemmy user, I want these discussions to take place to provide fact-checking for hearsay and debunked science. Politely, whenever possible.
I’ll try to be more polite in future. Moving goalposts, cherry picking and doubling down on proven falsehoods is frustrating though so I’ll admit that I lose my patience at times.
I didn’t read anything except OPs post here, where they self characterize their interaction using mythology and religion.
Thanks for digging into it!
Yeah, OP was going off on a wild tangent about LSD in a sub about shit talking Teslas…
And the mod explicitly said “this has nothing to do with this sub” and OP kept insulting the mod and asked to be banned.
The mod finally deleted a single comment from OP, and OP is really really upset about it.
I honestly don’t know why the mod didn’t just ban OP, he was literally asking for it
Moderation is sometimes about finding the smallest touch that keeps the conversation going forward. People have bad days, etc.
And a day or two ban to cool off fixes that, and communicates that the behavior is unacceptable.
Clearly OP didn’t learn any lessons if a day later they’re making this post.
That is my takeaway too. Think I’ll just block OP preemptively because this kind of self important drama is ludicrous.
Just did as well, I don’t think I’m going to miss anything important
Everything up until your actual suggestion is not on-topic for this community, IMO. This feels like a post that was created mainly to vent about the run-in you mentioned.
Your suggestions will run into the same issues as democracy in the real world, and then some. For one, you’d need to ensure that each human person only gets to cast a vote once, and not multiple times through alt accounts.
Additionally, not everyone might be interested in the mod election campaigns that such a system will undoubtedly incur, but for the purpose of upholding democracy they’d have to be.
The real point here is that this kind of behaviour is one of things that made Reddit fucking awful and I’d hate to see it flourish here in the fediverse.
Too late, I’m afraid, it already does.
No moderation without representation. IOW: mods should be democratically elected.
Mod elections should be annual and no mod should enjoy that status for life.
There should be a mechanism for inducing a ‘no confidence’ mode election at any time otherwise the communities are likely to splinter into “real_” communities just as they did on Reddit which no community in the fediverse can currently afford.
How do you enforce this? You would need the admin’s cooperation. What if the instance admin is also the mod? If someone starts a community, is it fair to take it away from them, if you don’t agree with their moderation?
There really isn’t any way to prevent all this, it would have to be built into the platform itself and it’s too late to do that now. Furthermore, there are very few communities large enough for people to even want to vote for mods.
Yes, looking over the responses I agree with the consensus that my ideas are naive at best. Thanks for your thoughtful post.
The market will decide whether mods are in the wrong or not. If you feel like you have been wronged by power tripping mods then feel free to start your own instance and own community and people will join if the situation is that bad.
Having an election for mods is redundant when federated networks are democratic by their nature and how their users use them. Having an “election” is potentially less democratic because it’s an arbitrary vote rather than letting people vote with where they decide to hold their accounts and the subscriptions.
