I’m splitting this into two parts. First identifying the issue. And second my personal idea for a solution. I’m hoping for a lot of discussion so please be clear which part you are responding to.
Part 1: The problem
Reddit as a platform has many flaws. Obviously being a corporation means they’re terrible no matter what. But their platform is also flawed. Even if Reddit was 100% community owned the platform would still be flawed. The number one thing that is ruining Reddit are the tyrannical mods.
Each community on Reddit is a dictatorship. Whoever is arbitrarily in charge of a community has full unrestricted power to do whatever they want. The people who are actually creating the content and sharing it are totally at their whim. I understand that modding is a difficult and thankless job, but toxic mods ruined Reddit and Lemmy will do the same if it’s not addressed.
Lemmy’s answer is to allow people to create their own instances. Don’t like the mods at World? Go make your own Lemmy, with blackjack and hookers. But that’s not sufficient. It takes years to build up a community to have enough people for meaningful discussion to happen, and nearly all communities or instances fail. We absolutely need a way for mods to answer to the users.
Part 2: My solution
My solution is simple. Lemmy is built on the community. Everyone helps run it. Therefore mods are elected by the users who generate the highest upvoted content in a community.
Elections should happen on a schedule and, if a community is particularly upset with a mod, a vote of no confidence can be taken.
I understand that this will be a huge undertaking. But I truly believe that we need to fix this issue for Lemmy to thrive long term. Or else we’ll just end up with another Reddit.
So your probelm with the platforms is not the platforms themselves, but people? Because the mods running communities here aren’t too different from the refit communities.
As for your second point, you want karma farmers to run the communities?
As I said, Reddit is a corporation so it will never be good even if their platform had no flaws.
I’m open to feedback on my solution, please provide your opinion on how it can be improved to address the weaknesses you’re seeing.
He gave you a good one but I’ll explain: there is no karma here. But spammers have a lot of accounts, which would mean one spammer would be able to elect himself which is not what we want.
Yeah that’s true. I guess I’m assuming people aren’t upvoting spam. What could be a better way to qualify who is allowed to vote for a community’s mods?
Mods are volunteers. Not paid civil servants. Community mods are also not there to win a popularity contest. They are there to enforce the rules of the community. Not everyone is going to agree with any mod on every decision.
Mods are human and can make mistakes. Contacting a mod if there is an issue usually works more often than not. Attacking a mod, threatening a mod, being abusive to a mod because you see a situation differently is not the best way to go about discussing anything, and normally does not help the situation.
You are free to leave the community, start your own, and mod it the way you feel it should be done. Communities do not need to vote for qualified mods. Too many interpretations of what constitues qualified for a community run by volunteers.