Hi there.
A short introduction: This is an alt account. I’m a moderator here who has been unhappy with the state of news/political discussions here for a long time. The admins have kindly given me the opportunity to see if we can make some improvement the community here.
We will be doing some major revision of the rules left by the previous moderators and will use discussions in this thread as feedback on the direction we should take our community.
This will be an open discussion on the state of our community, the rules and our moderation practices. Feel free to give your inputs.
My goal is to foster thoughtful discussion in our community, and not let this place be a replica of r/politics.
First order of business, immediate rule change.
On !politics@lemmy.world, effectively immediately, we will no longer restrict political discussion to the politics of the United States of America. Discussion regarding of the state of politics from around the world is now welcome.
I will leave this pinned for 1-2 weeks for our team to take feedback and make our proposals then.
I’m probably going to move to another politics community then. I thought they took the old site’s politics and made it less antagonistic here. I don’t like that the admins of lemmy world are involved either. You seem like you want to do well, but I have real concerns now. I might start one on sh.itjust.works and keep the energy that was here.
When it comes to Moderator drama, I would RATHER the site Admins make the call than the other moderators.
If you don’t then the optics are bad. Say I took the initiative and bounced Yobucks and appointed MightBe, the end result, to you guys, would look like I staged a coup and inserted my own cronies to the modlist (which is something that happened more than once on reddit.)
Being able to step aside, reach out to the Admins and go “Hey, I think we have a problem…” is a huge improvement.
There is some meta drama with the admins that’s going on that isn’t obvious. I agree with you in normal circumstances.
Oh, I’m sure there’s all sorts of stuff going on that’s not obvious. So long as it STAYS that way, I’m OK with it. :) Just like we mods have our own channel of communications, so do the Admins.
But the stuff the Admins do that is public, like discussing defederation from other instances, stuff like that? Well within their rights as Admins.
But nobody is telling us as mods “hey, we need you to delete content x” unless it’s a clear violation of lemmy.world policy, like when we had to crack down on copy/pasting full articles in violation of copyright.
I can see why you wouldn’t want to know. But as a user, I want to be able to not have to check if things are deleted or modified for no reason. Good luck for next year, it’s going to get crazy I’m sure.
I’m not in a position to say what the Admins can or cannot do because I’m not an Admin. :)
What I CAN say, as an IT professional, when you have APIs and bots and tools of all sorts, the only real limit is “how much time and effort are you willing to throw at it?”
It’s a little disheartening to hear, tbh. I’ve always thought of all of the instances as hobbyists just doing their thing, but we don’t really know. I do know now that the LW admins can be trolls, I don’t know if Ruud is one of them or doesn’t have the time to check on them though.
Oh would you shut the ever living fuck up?
You are whining relentlessly about the admins and saying they’re doing shit that isnt obvious and accusing them of whatever else.
Where’s your proof? Oh yeah. You don’t have any. Wouldn’t be surprised if you’re YoBucks alt at this point.
I would like to address your concerns. The audience here is very much US centric, so that even with the current rule change, I don’t expect the content and culture here to drastically change overnight. In fact, I would still very much expect US politics to be fairly dominant here in the near future.
And rest assured, we would not want the antagonism here to increase either.
That’s good to hear. I’m more concerned about how much Lemmy World admins are involved, I left lemmy world for a reason.
And what concern would that be? We can not be involved at all? I think we are pretty hands-off. We took action when a moderator broke the site rules.
I mean, your tone is kind of on display right here. From the other thread, you took a mod away which is completely understood. Here, the mod posting this is saying you’re working together. My actual, real concern is that you guys are curating or planning to curate what you want shown like the old place used to do. It’s not a known thing, it’s a concern and you guys don’t do anything to alleviate it.
Again, we’re hands-off. We do have a discord server where all moderators have access to and were every > 2.5k users community has their own channel. We only get involved when we are asked or when site rules are broken.
I personally had issues with YoBuck’s takes since very early on but we never stepped in because he wasn’t breaking any of the site rules. Until today.
What are your plans about stepping in in the future? When my comments were disappearing and no one deleted their comments, one of your admins was pretty aggressive and also seems to have been lying about what can and can’t happen on the admin side. I don’t have trust in you guys right now and as I said, your first comment’s tone was pretty shitty here as well. I would prefer not to start up the shitjustworks politics community, but as you can tell, I’m ready to go if I have to. TBF, it probably wouldn’t be a threat to you or the others anyway. But why do you guys care so much about being the biggest or only one to go to? It’s odd. The defensiveness and aggressiveness don’t fit and aren’t necessary.
I’ve looked through that thread on your LW account and I don’t see any aggressiveness? Rooki was doing his best to help you and clear things up: https://lemmy.world/comment/5946853
Lemmy software is buggy man.
Ok?
This is not the original but okay. Have a great day.
Disappearing comments is what started this whole drama in the first place. Someone disagreed with Yobucks, had their comment removed, then reached out to me in a PM going “Hey, why was my comment removed?”
I told them the truth, I wasn’t involved, but I’d look into it.
Found the comment was removed, but looking at the modlog, nobody had reported it, which was odd. Generally we don’t just remove comments unless someone reports them.
Then I looked at the message chain, saw the problematic comments by the other mod and put 2+2 together and hit up the admins going “Hey, I think this one is out of my league…”
This is why groups of this size have multiple moderators. If you feel you’re being treated unfairly, reach out to someone else. If you feel the entire mod team is dumping on you, a) there might be a reason for that, but also b) that’s where the Admin team comes in.
I haven’t seen the reddit style problem of an entire mod team being out of control. I hope we NEVER reach that point.
Thanks for explaining that. That’s why I’m weirded about the lemmy world admins, that’s what happened to me from them. They then show a thread where the original comment was changed. I trust you guys, not the lemmy world admins. I think you guys have been and could continue to be doing a great job and then they can come in and change whatever on a whim, like they just did. I really liked this community and the way you ran it, sad to go.
Edit: When I say “just did”, I mean how they changed a comment and then linked to it as evidence with the entire attitude of a troll. The mod being removed seemed justified.
IMHO, curation is something that happens on smaller communities, before they reach critical mass and can survive on their own two feet.
I mentioned this in the World News thread where we established a new rule limiting how many posts per day a single person could make after one person dominated the front page with 19 posts at once.
I feel like I’m dominating the conversation if I submit more than 3 posts at once, and it’s not in my best interest, or the interest of the community, to dominate the conversation.
In a tiny community that’s growing? There’s no choice. It’s post or die. I have that in two tiny communities that were dead before I took over and I would LOVE for them to stand on their own without my help and just be a mod, but that’s probably months away and does not apply to large communities like Politics and World News.
When I say curate, I’m being very generous. I’m saying delete comments that they don’t agree with or want seen.
I can’t speak for the other mods or admins, but the only comments I find delete worthy are a) reported by other users and b) break communuty or site rules.
First, my time is valuable and I’m not going to scroll through comments looking for stuff to delete, I have better things to do.
Second, when stuff does get reported, waaaayyy too often it’s two users engaged in a slap fight and doing the whole “imma report you!” “no, imma report you first” thing.
If it doesn’t break the rules? I leave it alone. If it does? Maybe everyone needs a time out to cool off.
Moderation is probably 1/2 keeping things on track by deleting obvious spam and abuse and 1/2 telling the kids to settle down and go to their room.
I get it and that’s why I think you’re doing a good job. Not a fan of modding in general and I have mad respect for those who do it well. I am not thrilled with the Lemmy World admins.
I wouldn’t be surprised if that is an admin disguised as a regular user. I share your concerns and I have already started to look elsewhere. This feels even worse than reddit.
I can assure you that I was not and am not a LW admin.
Why post from an alt account then?
Yep, and that’s really hard to do. I’ve deleted all my comments on politics and have moved away.
I made an account on lemmy.today (US server that doesn’t block instances or accounts) so in a few days I’ll transition to that and delete everything over here.
I still want to block threads, but I’m glad you found one that suits you.