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 !lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world or !196@lemmy.blahaj.zone 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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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 !modlog@lemmy.world and it immediately made a downturn 🥲
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. :/
https://lemmy.world/c/modlog exists
TIL! pinging @Soullioness@lemmy.world to see if they’re active and/or have thoughts.
cuz yeah my most recent callout post went to !196@lemmy.blahaj.zone 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Is this elaborate satire? :)
No, this is anarchism
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.
