And should be done in less than 6 or 12 hours? Doesn’t this give to much power to one mod? Probably going to get my mod license revoked here. But it is worth saying. And I am not specifically noting NSQ even the communities I mod. I can go in and I am the deciding factor, isn’t that too much power for one person? What if they are on a power trip or something.?
You can’t moderate by committee. You can form rule sets and policy by committee, but that’s actually a different thing.
Lemmy the idea conflicts a lot with Lemmy as provided. Lemmy copied Reddit’s moderation system outright, including horrible design decisions like ranking mods based on tenure and not allowing for levels/powers of moderation. The devs have said outright that they won’t change this because they don’t see a problem with it.
I don’t expect the Leninists to implement moderation democracy.
If someone posts something truly offensive or illegal, it doesn’t make sense to schedule a meeting next Thursday when a quorum can be gathered to vote on whether or not to remove it.
Rules are rules, and if you don’t trust someone to enforce the rules without having their hand held, they shouldn’t be the enforcer.
Mistakes will be made. Moderation is never entirely perfect. If one person keeps making mistakes, they should be removed.
A silver lining I’m learning is when you have a community that’s managed by some raging bitch-queen, another instance will have a sister-community that’s probably only 50 subscribers behind it. Posts on either will both hit /all but you can choose not to confine yourself to someone’s shitty bouncy castle of a kingdom.
Each mod has been granted the same responsibility, to deal with issues promptly. Whichever one sees the problem and responds to it first is just as entrusted by the community as any other mod.
If you feel that a specific mod is not capable of making decisions for the good of the group, then there should be a discussion about whether that person should be a mod.
If you sometimes disagree with the decisions made by other mods, just let it go. You won’t agree with everyone 100% of the time. Leaving or deleting one post isn’t the end of the world. If you notice consistent bad calls, then see above.
It was just in a certain instance I mod. That I am the only one taking care of the reports. And there is no love in why it was denied or a congrats on something the mod team missed. Basically it kind of seems like the start of a dictatorship where one mod who pays attention can rule as long as they are the first on it.
Mods are volunteers, and therefore will moderate however they feel like. The needs of the community might influence what that looks like, but at the end of the day it’s whatever they want.
Reacting in a timely manner but also requiring a majority are both things that we want to see, but they’re also conflicting ideals. Depending on the size of the community it may be an impossible ask.
If a moderator oversteps, the rest of the mod team could take action. If you can’t trust a single moderator to moderate, then maybe they shouldn’t be a moderator.
It’s not a perfect system, but things rarely rare.
Not trying to get in a fight, it just seems like it is rigged against the user and was built on that concept. Is there anyway we can change that? Without a lone mod risking his or her mod rights by speaking up?
Also, if you are concerned with ‘risking your rights’ by promoting a productive discussion, you probably lack the trust inherent to working as part of a healthy team. This may not be your fault, as in many cases abuse is rampant. The key to online communities is they are rarely required in the course of someones life, and you have the option to disengage from them when they are not healthy.
Well it is usually my fault. I came from Reddit. And if I take care of something I usually send a private message to the user providing why I thought the way I did. That way it won’t seem like report abuse. Thing on Reddit was it was always that automod crap and nothing behind it. And if you tried to complain about it, it would be 3 or 4 days by the time an actual mod would get back to you. And by that time everyone just skipped over whatever it was so it was useless.
Federated communities currently have the benefit of very little automated moderator activity, and being much smaller than communities on reddit. What you describe is just an unfortunate reality of communities that have grown too big for their moderation capacity. Another possibility is too little moderation, and both have their downsides. It really is a shame, though. If it helps at all, I believe you’ll be mostly free from those concerns here at the present, in my experience :)
To my understanding, a completely flat power structure is definitionally anarchy, and is a good way of levelling imbalances in spaces people cannot avoid, but groups such as online communities are often projects made with an intent, and moderation teams are the tool by which that intent is maintained. In practise, moderators should be more like gardeners taking care of a flower bush than police or councillors.
I imagine it’s very hard to moderate effectively any other way. A moderation team should be on the same page, and believe that other moderators are acting in good faith. Generally, this means moderators take action justified by established rules and/or guidelines, and document their justification should review be required.
Requiring voting for every, or most actions is a monumental amount of time consuming administration work, as most moderators have other obligations, and live across time zones. Moderator action being required is, inherently, because an act in the community is deemed to be harmful to a community or it’s intended purpose. Swift action is especially important when the act is illegal, or dangerous (exploitation media, doxxing, etc).
A voting system is counterintuitive to the intent of moderation. Communities and forums, both physical and ethereal, are not democracies. Each is created with an intent, here in the ‘lemmyverse’ that intent is often to promote discussion. If I founded a crochet group, and the members decided to instead perform seances during meets, the group would no longer serve it’s purpose. Hierarchy of some kind developing is also unavoidable in any relationship; but a positive hierarchy is understood by those within it to be productive, and well intentioned.
Voting systems are not immune to power imbalances, especially when alternate accounts and moderator inactivity are present. Votes enforced on a software level may be manipulated, or held in a permanent limbo. Whereas unenforced votes don’t mean much other than polling opinion, which is already an option, and already relies on trust in the moderators. Members of a community should trust one another enough to feel empowered to bring up concerns.
TL:DR Nothing is perfect, but healthy communities are built on trust, and no level of enforcement changes that. In a healthy ecosystem, people are free to stop engaging where they do not have that trust, and are empowered to promote positive change. The fediverse is built on this principle, as netizens and communities alike must have trust in their admins, and that same trust applies to every step in the hierarchy. It is also practically impossible due to organisational constraints, or undue demand of volunteer moderators’ time.
Luckily the stakes are mega low. If someone makes a poor mod decision, that’s easy to reverse. If you want a team’s members each able to work independently but aligned, then you achieve consensus by other means: front-loading the work of creating a shared understanding such that any independent decision made according to the shared understanding would be stable regardless of which team member made it. Ultimately, this is a process relying on trust and cooperation. If a team member violates that trust or plays poorly with others, there should be a process or result. And what this consequence is should be baked in at the create-shared-understanding phase so there is no excuse for bad behavior within the team and an easy out if there are problems.
Because of the way it was built. You could make your own version that does what you want though.
