This was originally posted as a comment response in [email protected].
Back in December, the instance hosting 196 (lemmy.blahaj.zone) announced that, as part of its mission as a trans-friendly space, harassment based on gender or neopronouns would remain** prohibited—even if the user in question was suspected of being a troll. Users were asked to disengage, block, and report suspected trolling behavior rather than bring harassment into a community already vulnerable to that kind of bullying.
There was a small backlash to the policy from some users. This led to a number of “toe the line” posts that weren’t outright gender-based harassment but strongly signaled an intent to misgender or harass in the future. Blahaj admins promptly removed all offending comments during this wave of dissent.
Important to note: The majority of the Blahaj and 196 users supported the policy, upvoting and praising the admins for creating a safe space for trans individuals.
By January, the backlash had mostly subsided, and the trolls causing issues had moved on. While the 196 moderators, including @moss and their team, did agree with the specific neopronouns policy, they remained unhappy with the broader policy of respect for trans identities. They cited “personal differences” and expressed discontent with instances where Blahaj admins directly removed comments which harassed or openly expressed intent to harass trans identities, feeling that it overstepped their role.*
Yesterday, @moss and the 196 moderation team enacted a major decision without consulting the community. They locked [email protected] and instructed users to move to [email protected].
This move was extremely unpopular. Many users strongly dislike lemmy.world for various reasons (a complicated topic better unpacked elsewhere). The announcement post was met with widespread backlash, and @moss eventually locked it. In response, a few users created a new community on Blahaj: [email protected]. The new community quickly grew in size and activity, with most users opting to stay on Blahaj rather than migrate to lemmy.world.
It’s clear @moss and the 196 moderators underestimated the community’s attachment to its home on Blahaj. By attempting to uproot the group without input, they alienated much of the community. As a result, most users have moved to the new Blahaj-hosted community, which has already become the more active space.
TL;DR:
@Moss and the 196 mod team tried to move the community to lemmy.world without consulting anyone. The decision was extremely unpopular, leading to backlash and the creation of a new Blahaj-hosted community that most users now prefer.
*This paragraph has been edited after receiving correction or clarification from @[email protected]. You can find that discussion here.
**”Remain” being the key word here. Blahaj has openly held the same trans-focused policies as always, and the admin Ada was simply reasserting her position here.
Yeah. Slashdot had a wonderful system which randomly assigned the then-version of moderation duties in very small allotments, periodically, to users who had been around for a while and had popular content. So most of the moderation was done democratically by the users, but in a way that was highly resistant to people trying to game the system to abuse moderation powers.
The system was so different that it’s hard to compare or say how well it would work now, but I thought it was a really good idea.
As I recall, a lot of that was in up votes and down votes, with Slashdot only giving out a limited amount per person per day and capping the max at +/- 5.
I don’t think it would work for a Reddit clone. There would also need to be a way to provide a way to validate users who should vote on a sub, since you wouldn’t want someone to make a million accounts to drown out the rest of the users in a sub.
Slashdot had way more users and issues with attempted abuse than Lemmy does currently. It’s easy to forget, but it was a pretty big platform, they had to get their tech way in advance of the cup-and-string “functional I guess” moderation that Lemmy currently offers. I think that was the exact thinking behind limiting it to people who were creating content, and having the selection process be a little opaque, and having a lot of randomness and a small amount of power at a time.
I’m not talking about votes, there was something up beyond that. I honestly don’t even remember the details, but everyone had a certain number of votes per day, and then certain users would get randomly selected to get something like 3 moderation actions very occasionally. I don’t even remember the details, but I’m pretty sure it was a step above just being able to vote which everyone could do.
https://slashdot.org/faq/metamod.shtml
The first round of moderation seems tied to up votes and down votes, you just needed to provide a reason why instead of just clicking a button.
The second round of moderation was tied to how people voted in the first round.
So, most of the public facing moderation activities were really focused on up voting and down voting, with some of the down voting triggering other mod action.
Metamoderation! That’s what it was. Right, so I guess in modern terminology “M1” was voting, “M2” was a user report, and then admins did what we would today call “moderation.” So it was a little different from how I remembered. I just remembered the voting and moderation generally worked quite well. Of course that might just be the different culture of the internet at the time. It also only worked well up until some of the admins went on some total bender of a power trip and more or less torpedoed the entire site, from which it never recovered.
If you want to map how Slashdot works as a model to Lemmy, Slashdot would be its own instance defederated from the rest of Lemmy with heavy restrictions on posting and the use of individual communities being more of a filter for content.
The site and the content of its site were designed to be seen by everyone as a uniform audience. Communities and instances on Lemmy are fundamentally not designed that way. Even then, Slashdot made sure that older accounts were the ones to enforce rules via up voting and down voting, preventing an Eternal September. Lemmy is not designed to do that.
Dude, why do you keep injecting into a conversation on the differences between Lemmy and Slashdot, repeated insistences that Slashdot does NOT work the same as Lemmy? Yes. I know. That’s why we’re talking about the different approaches. Or, that’s why I’m talking about it, at least.
I feel like some people on Lemmy are sort of addicted to being smarter than the other person, so they need to explain things to them. (I mean, I definitely am.) But yes, in case it wasn’t clear, I’m aware that Slashdot was different from Lemmy. Thanks.
You brought up Slashdot for comparison purposes.