EDIT 2: Ruud has posted some guidelines for community moderation
EDIT: I want to clarify that the purpose of this post isn’t to call anyone out in particular, and I think it’s best to approach this issue with a gentle hand. Users who are doing this aren’t necessarily ill intentioned, but may not realize the negative affect their actions may be having on the instance, hence why it’s important to have this discussion. That being said, I removed the link to the user originally mentioned in this post to avoid any possible witchhunts.
Original Post:
I’m not sure what to call them, but I’ve noticed a few instances of users on this server creating dozens, and in some cases over a hundred different communities, and doing absolutely nothing with them. No sidebar description, no logo, banner, welcome post, or anything.
I understand that some people may be doing this in good faith in an effort to make sure that these spaces exist in the first place. That’s fine and all - as long as you’re allowing other community members to step in and help maintain and grow these spaces you’ve created, I don’t really have a problem with it.
However, I think there are a good amount of people who are grabbing communities… just to squat on them? For some odd reason?
Take a look at this user’s account [redacted]. Doing a little poking around, it seems they’re an account that’s owned by a [redacted] company based in [redacted]. They also don’t have a single post or comment on record. So… Why do they own over 100 communities, many of which are simply duplicates of existing, popular Reddit subs?
I think the biggest problem here is that we may have users who want to create, cultivate, and grow communities that they feel strongly about, but when you go to set up a community only to find that it’s owned by someone who isn’t putting in any effort to make it a place for discussion, or outright doesn’t care about it at all, it’s going to discourage people from wanting to contribute in that way. First impressions are important, and these users might be turned off of Lemmy from an abundance of seemingly dead or spam communities.
What do you guys think? Is this an ‘issue’ worth thinking about, or will it sort itself out with time? I know it may not be super important in the grand scheme of things, but it’s a question that’s been on my mind for a few days now.
I think it’s basically a gold rush. Being the mod of a major sub got you some bragging rights but also commercial advantages.
I went to register a community for my city yesterday and found that somebody, just 2 hours prior, registered it along with easily 100 other popular subreddit names as well. I assume he just wants to benefit by being there already when the users eventually arrive.
My vote (if we even get one, lol) is to limit registrations to a certain # per day/week per account - perhaps 3 your first day and then 1 per day after that for now. Then after some time, enable some type of auto-expiration if the sub isn’t being actively used or moderated by that user - with some kind of warning process ahead of course.
Ultimately its up to the instance owners but I think its worth thinking about as early adopters what we want out of a technology like this. Or we could just wing it and hope for the best.
I personally hate any hint of people, groups or company’s trying to capitalize on the internet. Not the people shouldn’t earn money here or fund their projects. But I do think everything I want out of the internet is ruined by the introduction of groups trying to turn it into full time jobs. They all start to copy who was successful last week making content pretty much the same everywhere. It introduces heavy censorship since Pepsi doesn’t want to advertise next to unbecoming things that give potential customers the vapors. Lemmy seems like it’s built for users, not companies, marketers or interns at marvel inc to advertise their latest movies for free.
Reddits fall is directly related to how it attracted advertisers. Many times in ways that people didn’t even realize. Many posts were secret commercials made to look viral. Christmas was brutal with tons of posts showing off cheap alibaba merchandise followed by comments like “oh cool where do I get one” or T-shirt sellers acting like they bought a new shirt for their spouse.
My hope is lemmy is built to reject this stuff because they have ruined every space I have ever enjoyed. I have seen posts saying how this feels like 2000 era internet and I agree. It will feel like that until we allow those accounts in. Then we lose the fun again. It would be nice to reject those types but then how does this place grow. They control growth which is why reddit became dependant on them
You could also require a certain amount of activity in the community -posting, commenting etc