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.

  • @TheBananaKing
    19•6 hours ago

    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.

    • @BothsidesistFraudOP
      3•6 hours ago

      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.

      • @TheBananaKing
        3•6 hours ago

        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.

  • @[email protected]
    5•7 hours ago

    I’m not entirely familiar with the controversy, but from your link it appears that the Lemmy.world admin team announced a moderation policy that didn’t go over too well and now they’re reconsidering.

    When someone runs a Lemmy instance, they are the administrators of the instance and have full control over everything that happens on it. By default, users can create accounts and communities on the instance. The user that creates a community is the moderator of that community and can control what gets posted within it. There’s an overlap of authority between the instance admin and the community mod, as they both have the ability to decide what content gets posted, and sometimes that creates issues.

    The issue here seems to be that the Lemmy.world admin team doesn’t want community mods “creating narratives” by removing posts they do not agree with. In their rescinded announcement, they give an example that if a user makes a post in a community about how the Earth is flat, the community mod shouldn’t be allowed to remove it. Instead, the community must respond to the post with debate or downvotes. Mods who remove these posts, instead of allowing debate, would be in violation of the instance admin policy and would be stripped of their moderation powers by the admins. The moderator of [email protected] (and some other community mods) blocked new posts to their community as a protest to the admin decision (which is now on hold).