My personal opinion. The "moderation team" isn't a "team" in any sense of the word. VerbFlow/Proud Cascadian just keeps appointing people mods without any consent or advance notice. And sometimes he disappears for months. I happen to be one of the first mods appointed (which I think is why my name appears so high on the list in the sidebar), but I found out I was a mod by randomly visiting my profile page one day and seeing /c/fuck_ai there. There's no forum where the mods get together to make/discuss moderation policy decisions or anything. The only rules off of which to make any moderation policy decisions are the sidebar and the pinned threads in /c/fuck_ai written by VerbFlow/Proud Cascadian, and they're... not exactly precise or comprehensive. It's hard to even really call them an enumeration of "the rules" in any sense.

All that to say, nothing I've said in this thread is the consensus of the moderation team because there is no consensus among the moderation team. If there was a feature to let me remove my moderator badge from comments, I'd utilize it. There is an option to "speak as moderator", but I think that does... kindof the opposite of what I'd want? (Like it'd make the moderator badge bigger and meaner looking or something. I dunno.)

If I was the sole moderator, or if I was sure the other moderators would agree with this action, I might have considered whether any particular moderation action was warranted in this case, but the moderation situation for /c/fuck_ai is... well, to call it "disorganized" would be to greatly understate. Everybody who does any moderating just kindof goes off of their own judgement in the moment, and again the "rules" (if they can even be called that) are severely lacking as anything to base any decisions off of. There are things that are clearly ban-worthy, obviously. (Obvious blatant spam, CSAM, obvious trolls of various sorts, stuff that's obviously 100% opposite of the aim of /c/fuck_ai.) But is all pro-AI sentiment disallowed in /c/fuck_ai? Speaking as someone who wants a community where that's the case, I'd love to say yes, but I didn't found the community and the one who did seems... relatively tolerant of pro-AI sentiment given some of the pinned posts. And the rest of the mod team doesn't doesn't have anywhere to weigh in on that question. So... I mean, I'm not going to be the one to start taking any sort of moderation actions to repel every hint of pro-AI sentiment without some level of assurance that I'd have the backing of the rest of the mods in doing so (even if on some level, I'd really love to just update the sidebar to make pro-AI sentiment expressly against the rules and then subsequently ban/delete all pro-AI sentiment and tell people to go create their own community for that if they want to just so I don't have to see it here. 'Cuz I don't. At all. But again, that's really just... like... my opinion, man.)

I dunno. Maybe the mods who want to be mods (and I'm sure there are plenty of /c/fuck_ai mods who aren't really interested in modding, because they weren't asked before they were appointed) should get together and establish some way of establishing some consensus or something. I haven't really had the bandwidth in general to do anything like that, but I think it's fair to say it's sorely needed.

Absent a feature to remove my mod badge on a per-comment basis, though, maybe I should either 1) try to initiate some effort to get the mods all on one page, 2) step down as mod, or 3) not comment in a way that might be interpreted as a statement of the consensus of the mod team. I haven't thought through which one of those if any I should do.