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.
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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.
feedback on my solution
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?
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.
Literally nothing is stopping you from creating communities or even an entire instance that follows that principle…
If you want to do it, then do it.
And if people want it, they’ll participate.
But even if they do, I don’t think you’ll get the result you expect and want
I think this is the single best answer here. Probably requires a dedicated instance so there’s an admin who keeps an eye on things and has the power to enforce decisions. But that should be possible to achieve.
IMHO, most Lemmy mods are fine. And it doesn’t take years to advertise your community. The end.
Most Reddit mods were fine at one point as well. In your estimation, if I wanted to start a Lemmy community for something niche say bonsai tree triming, how long would it take to get enough people for real discussions?
1 week. Advertise and I’m pretty sure bonsai people will come. If they don’t exist or are not there, you will have no discussion anyway.
I’d love to see it if you’re willing to demonstrate
I’m not because I don’t have time for this. Feel free to do it. Back in the late 90s we had small communities and it was fun. No one wondered how we could attract hundreds of people from other forums.
Sadly it is no longer the 90s
Therefore mods are elected by the users who generate the highest upvoted content in a community.
wow, that may be the worst idea for the direction of lemmy since the Tesseract guy. bravo
How should it be done better?
I don’t even like leaning to heavily on moderation. I want emphasis to be on users ability to curate their feed.
There is no need for elections, cause you can just choose whichever admin or mods you want. It’s not a democracy, you just choose what you like best and everyone has the same choice. That’s better than democracy cause nobody has to compromise.
If you think mods or admins are doing a bad job, choose different mods or admins or become your own admin.
How do you choose without losing the community?
Obviously being a corporation means they’re terrible no matter what. […] Even if Reddit was 100% community owned
It would still be a corporation. Do you realise unions, non-profit NGOs, churches, and every legal entity that isn’t a literal human, is a corporation?
toxic mods ruined Reddit
No they didn’t. At most they ruined their community. But anyone can make another community on Reddit. Doubly so here on Lemmy.
Wow you got me I used the popular definition of corporation and not the technically correct one good job /s
If you feel like mods haven’t ruined Reddit you must have not attempted to post on a popular community for at least several years. Go try it.
What do you think the popular definition of a corporation is? Like, just publicly traded companies or something?
That will just make sure that it will be impossible to create niche communities about unpopular ideas, if (the same) majorities can decide mods everywhere. To take an analogy from the offline world: democracy is a very good and necessary thing for running a government because there can be only one government in a specific territory. But corporations are not (normally) run democratically, instead we allow different ones to compete and people to be customers or employees at whichever of them does things best. Lemmy communities are like corporations, not like governments: there can be more than one of them and we can individually choose which ones to be parts of.
The status quo is roughly fine in this regard. We’ve had the concept of moderators being appointed from above since I started to be on the Internet at all (more than 20 years ago), back then it was on a lot of independent forums.
Corporations should absolutely be run as democracies with the employees getting votes imho
Therefore mods are elected by the users who generate the highest upvoted content in a community.
FUCK NO!
Votes are never an indicator of quality.
How should it be done better?
My second solution, which may be too radical, is simply do away with mods. Each community gets a threshold of upvotes to downvotes and anything that’s outside of that range is removed.
There are some obvious downsides with this idea. Sometimes content needs to be rapidly removed. It also opens ideological communities to attacks where good content is removed because people who disagree with it downvote it
Lemmy is open source. You could start an instance and run it this way, as a trial.
I’m not sure it would work. It’s very hard to effectively replace volunteer effort with an algorithm.
Yeah trialing it on specific instances first is definitely a good idea.
Sounds like the easiest idea to put in place.
Easy yes, but the flaws will need to be addressed. Maybe mods have limited removal powers?
