/r/StarTrek founder and primary steward from 2008-2021

Currently on the board of directors for StarTrek.website

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  • 48 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • Then moderators make many stupid rules to try to increase quality and overmoderation takes hold

    This is so true. One of the best decisions I made during my tenure as mod of /r/StarTrek was changing the rules to be spirt-based instead of language-based. People will literally try to lawyer their way around the language of any rule, and it leads to mod burnout when they are getting drawn into rules-debates when it’s obvious the person is just trying to get around the spirit of the community’s purpose.

    For example we had a rule that was literally just “be nice”. There’s no wriggling around that because it’s not some legal text. If someone is ““concerned”” about a request to “be nice” or “be honest”, they are not someone we wanted to be around anyway. These are discussion communities, not civil society, not everyone has a right to participate in every single one of them.

    As you said the beauty of the fediverse is that each instance can have it’s own preferred method of discussion.





  • Moderation on the Feviderse is different than on commercial platforms because it’s context-dependent instead of rules-dependent. That means that a user accout (bot or otherwise) that does not contribute to the spirit of a community will not be welcomed.

    There is largely no incentive to run an LLM that is a constructive member of a community, bots are built to push an agenda, product, or exhibit generally disruptive behavior. Those things are unwelcome in spaces built for discussion. So mods/admins don’t need to know “how to identify a bot”, they need to know "how to identify unwanted behavior".






  • Ignoring that it would be impossible to implement on an infinitely-diverse-in-infinite-combinations fediverse, I think we can all agree this “feature” would not be getting many upvotes if people didn’t feel a need (boredom or otherwise) to browse “All”. The real “issue” is not enough “apolitical” content for them (fwiw I disagree but that’s another topic).

    “Stuff in my feed I don’t want to see in my feed” is kind of the exact problem the Fediverse set out to solve. Nothing gets “injected” to a feed here so if you are seeing it, it’s a choice to continue to do so.



  • KDE is the easiest for coming from Windows, you almost never never need the command line or anything “extra” to customize it (beyond what even Windows will allow).

    GNOME (especially in Ubuntu) by default is more Macintosh-like which might appeal to some people, it’s “simpler” but any customizations will require navigating the add-ons (and in my experience inevitably the command line too).

    I think KDE is the one for most people who just want a functioning PC. GNOME could be good for the PC you might make for your parent. Bonus points for an immutable distro which are even harder to break.







  • The moderator to user ratio on the fediverse is orders of magnitude higher than commercial platforms. Even Lemmy.world (a large, loosely moderated Lemmy instance) has again, orders of magnitude more eyes on its content than reddit.

    This means that even if a chatbot gets invented that is impossible to distinguish form a human, mods will more readily be able to tell if it is pushing a narrative/shilling products.