Looks like r/antiwork mods made the subreddit private in response to this post
This fiasco highlights that such forums are vulnerable to the whims of a few individuals, and if those individuals can be subverted than the entire community can be destroyed. Reddit communities are effectively dictatorships where the mods cannot be held to account, recalled, or dismissed, even when community at large disagrees with them.
This led me to think that Lemmy is currently vulnerable to the same problem. I’m wondering if it would make sense to brainstorm some ideas to address this vulnerability in the future.
One idea could be to have an option to provide members of a community with the ability to hold elections or initiate recalls. This could be implemented as a special type post that allows community to vote, and if a sufficient portion of the community participates then a mod could be elected or recalled.
This could be an opt in feature that would be toggled when the community is created, and would be outside the control of the mods from that point on.
Maybe it’s a dumb idea, but I figured it might be worth having a discussion on.
Here’s a github issue for it, with some other threads linked. @nutomic@lemmy.ml and I are both very sympathetic to the idea, because there’s been so many of these cases where a top mod will wreck or subvert an entire subreddit.
Hierarchical moderation is definitely a weak-point that I replicated here for only one reason: I’ve never seen a system of democratic moderation work in practice. You could hold “elections”, but then who approves the voters, and makes sure they’re legitimate, and not double or triple voting? Now you have to institute a reputation system for the voters. How often do you hold these elections, and what initiates them? Who decides when elections are to be held? How do you circumvent people from “faking” reputation scores, or double voting ( creating many accounts, faking content and upvoting themselves, etc ). How do you prevent someone putting forward 3 of their alt accounts for modship, and voting themselves in?
And then doing all of that is somewhat overkill, and only seen as necessary because of reddit’s obsession with subscriber count, even if 99% of those subscribers are inactive. It takes two seconds for people to subscribe to an alternate, and these alternates sometimes explode in activity within a few weeks. I’ve changed the sorting and emphasis for communities away from subscriber count, and towards active users / month, to mitigate that inertia here a bit.
Also a lot of reddit’s issues wouldn’t be replicated on a server like this where the admins actually participate for the health of their server. If a mod goes rogue, and the community dislikes that, we can just boot them and appoint a different one. If a server creator / admin like myself goes rogue, people can just start their own server. Reddit does not give you that choice.
Again I’m not completely against it, I just have yet to see any system of democratic moderation work on forums or online communities anywhere, and that’s likely an unavoidable consequence of internet anonymity.
It seems like it’d require such a level of research that is almost impossible to do it.
Very true. GrapheneOS community sockpuppeting, as I proved, or the recent anti Semite /pol/ brigading observed here, are fantastic examples of how anonymity abusers can work around voting systems and comment/post/user representation numbers.
I call these people “anonymity abusers” because that is what they do, and they do it to me. I experience it and I document it. I have to screenshot everything, and be swift and vigilant. It takes effort. But I do it because I do not want others to face this stuff.
And that also means “democracy” has to ironically stem from morally correct benevolent authoritarianism, because anonymity presents us with this paradoxical situation. There just does not exist any other way for handful humans at the moment. This is probably also why socialism is so important, and demonstrates the problems with rampant individualism in society. Maybe someday with AI and automated systems we could do better, but those are far away in time, and requires AI to also not be morally corrupt or practically faulty.
does anyone know what kind of moderation 4chan has? tbh, if it didn’t attract all racists, nazis in the world, i think that kind of forum would be onto something interesting 🤔
I was a moderator of an image board once and basically they tell you that you should be lurking and if you see anything that breaks the ToC you should delete it and ban that IP if it’s too horrible. Mind you this image board wasn’t so big (it’s not super small, though) so maybe moderation in some bigger one is a bit more serious.
Not the brightest moment in my life, hehe. sighs in depression
I am not fully sure, but from my analysis of nanochan (asuka), 4Chan (hiro, moot), 8Chan (yes not 8kun, I used 8Chan way before shooter incident), 2ch.hk, lainchan and some other chans, many have their invite only admin groups on Discord or Mumble or such services.
As for the moderation, it is as loose as not allowing CP or gore. Rest everything gets allowed usually, making for a nearly free speech zone. The whole concept of anonymous imageboards stands on the shoulders of free speech. And no matter if anyone admits it or not, we are all very chaotic in nature and like the content diversity of chans from an era humanity might never see again. We just tend to have a good moral compass that is not rusty or broken, and we understand the consequences of the immorality that goes on there, and we do not want that tumour to spread.
Aether works like that in theory, but I think that the feature was never created.
r/privatelife founder here. Not a power mod, not a typical Redditor. Just one of you. This is an important comment for this post. Everyone should read it.
I can not just agree to, but I was the lone wolf that hand to, singlehandedly, take up the colossal task of changing the weirdly propagandistic privacy community scene on Reddit.
r/privacy, r/privacytoolsio and now r/PrivacyGuides are all controlled by the same monolith, the infamous trai_dep and his friends. I experienced and documented what was lots of censorship, insults and harassment (still do). I built r/privatelife alone and when I had 26 members (yes, 26, 2 digits), trai_dep attempted to leverage his power to get me sitewide banned. I had to take help of reddit administration, and since then so many people supported me, I have over 10,000 members that are civil and do not induce paranoia in privacy seekers, or engage in conspiracies.
I was alone and had to fight these demons off in what is still an ongoing crusade to sanitise the privacy community of grifters. I want a pro privacy libre culture, and that is my mission. And that is why I put myself on the frontlines for Lemmy all the time. I do not want those problems coming here. I have been a long term Reddit user, and I am old for most people here, and so I know well what goes on in forums and on Reddit.
Reddit has a problem of moderators being overpowered, and Lemmy admins and folks like us must figure out ways to resolve this virtual dictatorship problem, so there need not be cases like that of mine, where a “senior” privacy community moderator gets to brigade their 200K member communities against one person.
