Sorry to throw this on everyone in the group, but there has been another mod shakeup and it feels fair to address it publicly.
MightBe has been removed as mod from both World News and Politics.
I also unpinned and removed their rule change posts.
The too long; didn’t read is they were pretty hostile in messages to both myself and little cow, and when asked to join back channel discussions in chat, refused, and instead made unilateral decisions without group discussion.
Moderating a group like this needs to be a collaborative experience, no single voice should be establishing rules without some form of common agreement.
They not only refused to engage in that collaboration, but did so in a manner not fitting for being the new person on the team.
And it is a team. I tend to make more public posts than others, because I value the transparency over privacy, but when I do so, it’s a result of a nice private chat among the group.
For now, their rule changes have been removed from both Politics and World News. Back to the stated way of doing business:
World News is for all News OUTSIDE the United States, that’s what the normal “News” is for.
Politics is for US Politics - Somehow I doubt that’s going to be an issue in 2024.
There ARE things the mod team is discussing, and any rule changes will be made as a group effort, and (hopefully!) for the better health of the group and ALL of our participants!
Happy New Year!
No more anonymous alt mod accounts please.
I still don’t understand why there wasn’t a single other user on this instance that could have been modded without legal worries. Really felt like a copout to go anonymous and slowly transition the rest of the team to alt accounts as well.
I just added “mod” to the end of my username for my alt account. Obviously that wouldn’t work if my username had a slur in it or something, but it’s a pretty straight forward fix. It allows me to block idiots on my browsing account, offers a helpful separation between things I say as a user vs things I say as a mod, but subscribers to my communities still know who I am so there’s some accountability.
Not a bad compromise. I hadn’t thought about the use case of wanting to block people personally without affecting the community.
Yeah, if you block someone (not ban them) they can still go to a community you moderate and post there - but you won’t see it. Obviously that’s not ideal from a moderator perspective. I tried just using one account and not blocking people, but there are a lot of trolls/arseholes/bots out there and I just don’t want to see their drivel on my feed - even if what they say isn’t technically against the rules, or doesn’t met the criteria to earn them a ban. And you can’t ban accounts just because you don’t like them (or you can, but that’s not good moderating).
Also moderator decisions are meant to be made objectively and I find having two accounts helpful to maintain that objectivity. A comment from my mod account is official but a comment from my browsing account only carries the same weight as a comment from any other user. Some iOS apps allow you to distinguish moderator comments from your standard comments. That works great but it doesn’t seem to be the standard across all platforms/apps.
Well, I’m not going to out their “real” account, but lets just say if I told you who it was you’d go “Oooooh, yeah, that makes sense.” Having a moderator taking actions under another well known brand a) wouldn’t have been a good look and b) would have likely drawn legal attention that no volunteer needs.
Totally agree and I have a hunch on who the mod was but that doesn’t really matter to me much. I’m not asking anyone to unmask them.
That said, was there really not a single other candidate available that didn’t “need” to become anonymous?
Well that was the thing, they volunteered and everyone involved, Admins and Mods alike, were like “Wow, yeah, welcome aboard, but about that username…”
Maybe that’s the secret… bring people on who don’t WANT to be mods. :)
I was perfectly happy posting the “You are here” Trump trial updates and got the PM that “Hey, we think you’d be a good mod!” and here I am!