I was gonna go try to feel righteously validated for a pet peeve of mine over at Unpopular Opinion, but it’s closed. Then I saw this post and it describes some concerns with moderation policies, but the link it references has a bunch of crossed-out text, and I was just wondering if someone is willing to write out the detailed explanation of what happened and what the controversy is.
There’s basically three problems:
1: Tyrannical powermods can make shitty communities.
2: Trolls and bad actors and generally-sociopathic cunts can be toxic and disruptive by sealioning, rules-lawyering and ‘just asking questions’ (aka JAQing off)
3: There’s no fixed set of rules that reliably walks a middle path between the two.
If you have no control over how mods mod, you can end up with nasty little tetanus-wound shitholes - imagine ferinstance if corpo shills took over all the news and politics subs, and banned anyone critical of Elon Musk or Israel.
If you don’t let mods mod, then for instance every support / activism community would be under constant siege from concern trolls and smug bigots with a new little talking point they want to ‘debate’ every single damn day, and we don’t need any more trans kids driven to suicide please and thankyou.
The admins decided that the former was worse than the latter, and said no, you can’t just kick out troublemakers so long as they use pretty language instead of hurling abuse; you have to humour them and allow some of their shit.
see also: the Nazi bar problem
This was a terrible and shitty approach to take, and I am (provisionally) glad it’s been suspended pending further review.
Though in this age of enshittification, I have little confidence that the next iteration won’t actually be worse.
Some specific examples within lemmy.world that prompted this would be helpful (not a request for you specifically, a general request).
A big problem on reddit is debate-oriented communities aggressively stifling debate and banning people for opinions well within the outside-the-internet window of acceptable discourse. So I can see why lemmy.world would not want to go further down that route if it appeared as if it were beginning to happen. Reddit can semi-tolerate it because there enough users to form niche communities if the big ones are terrible. Lemmy has nowhere near enough people.
Unfortunately t can’t all be (1) or (2) because both extremes are terrible.
.world frequently makes the worse decision
I stand by my assertion that personal discretion is the only approach that can’t be gamed.
Trust the mods with the banhammer, and if they do a bad job, replace them outright.
This still leaves you vulnerable to shitty admins, but you would be in any case.