Over the past months it has become increasingly apparent that the 196 moderation team has a member who does not align with the goals and values of the rest of the team.
196 has a very clear stance on tankies and other authoritarians. No authoritarian apologia of any kind is allowed in our space. It’s not our intent to tell leftists how to be leftist, but we’re not willing to allow somebody we so fundamentally disagree with to moderate our community.
Based on this stance we’ve decided to remove Kittenzrulz from the moderation team.
Why demote Kittenzrulz123?
Kittenzrulz has consistently been opposed to the condemnation of tankies and has made several worrying statements that show that there’s a deep ideological gulf between her and 196.
Furthermore it should be noted that kittenzrulz has not taken part in moderation decisions on lemmy for months, while she is only somewhat active on the matrix (as a mod). This will not be a major change in that sense.
The following is a list of screenshots that should help to showcase what we mean.
spoiler
This one is from yesterday
Demoting Kittenzrulz123
First to be clear we’re not banning her from the lemmy community or the matrix space and she is free to continue to interact with all of us. We still want her around as we think of her as a friend who we care about and want to see happy and healthy, though we understand this decision might cause kittenz some stress.
As of this moment kittenzrulz is no longer a mod of 196. A vote was held and all mods that voted voted in favor of demoderation, with a few mods abstaining (either due to not having an opinion on this or due to being inactive).
And just to make sure everybody is on the same page, this is not a condemnation of kittenz as a person. People can disagree on things and still get along, we’re just not comfortable letting her make decisions on our behalf and want to prevent any further problems we see as a likely outcome.
A moderator holds quite a lot of power. Which is why sadly, power hungry people tend to want to become moderators.
A way to ensure that power isn't being misused is by being extremely transparent. This is the 196 mod team being transparent. I like it.
Does it stir up some drama? Maybe. Is this outcome more preferable over the Tesseract case, where "moderation action" wasn't being made aware to the the user? 100%.
Eh, the OP says they haven't made moderation decisions in months. I would feel differently if this were stopping some active abusive behavior, but in this particular case I think they could've just left quietly.
Moderator actions are public. They are all documented in the modlog, including promotions and removals of moderators. This is nothing like the tesseract situation. All mod actions are all logged, and published in the standard place where anyone expects to find them, and are free to review at any time.
I think moderators upon removal should have the option to leave quietly and on their own terms. I don't think the reasons for their removal should be made into a big public spectacle in a case like this where their conduct wasn't even egregious enough to warrant a community ban at the time.
While modlogs leave a paper trail, they make investigation easier. However, few have the time necessary to routinely check the logs, right?
Removal of a mod and a mod leaving on their own are very different things. Removing a mod is a drastic action. There has to be declarative transparency regarding this instead of people randomly happening upon this piece of information sometime in the future.
Also, a removed mod could be bitter. If they hit first with accusations, then things get complicated.
I feel like there's got to be a decent middle ground between a pinned post that pushes this in front of everyone and requires further mod comments to try and stave off harassment and silently letting anyone who notices find the mod logs and make their own judgements of everyone involved. Like, in the absence of an actual announcement I think people would absolutely come to their own much more inflammatory conclusions if/when they noticed regardless of what the removed mod does, and the removed mod could make things into an absolute shit storm (which they don't appear to be trying to do as far as I can tell, to their credit). But on the flip side, the way this post is set up is also an escalation in its own right and represents a more aggressive use of power by the remaining mods than was absolutely necessary.
If blahaj.zone has an instance business forum then making the full statement there (where it won't get pushed out of sight as fast as the 196 churn would do to a non-stickied post) and linking it may have been wiser, since it preserves the immediate statement without shoving it to the top of everyone's plate, and would still allow a stickied post on 196 itself if the situation escalated and it became more necessary.
I dunno, mod shit is hard and I'm glad I get to armchair quarterback it rather than actually making these decisions in real time. Props to the full mod team for keeping the chaos of 196 from turning toxic and destructive for however long it's been here.