this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2023
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Power mods are one of the main problems with reddit. The same thing is already happening with Lemmy.

This is concerning because it allows for control of what becomes popular content.

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[–] [email protected] 42 points 1 year ago (2 children)

For me personally, I never saw too many powermod-driven issues on Reddit (not that they didn’t occur, just that I didn’t experience them in the communities in which I participated).

One solution was to create a fork; lots of β€œr/actual___” or β€œr/true___” communities were born this way. To Little8Lost’s point, I think this will be even easier on Lemmy.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago

A lot of those community forks on Reddit were more related to the original communities growing too fast and then losing the original feeling than to powermods too (not all though).

[–] [email protected] -2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I've been permanently banned from the League of Legends subreddit for saying a team that had caught Covid wouldn't die because they're young and vaccinated. In a post about them having caught Covid. And in response to someone calling it a fatal disease (which it can be for some, but really isn't if you're 20, vaccinated, and otherwise healthy).

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Though dying may be lower risk for them people could still feel long standing effects from it. Though those are also less likely given they were vaccinated.

Statistics can be a bitch.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I looked up my exact quote, which isn't perfect, but a permanent ban seems kind of crazy.

It's not really lethal if you're vaccinated, especially if you're young.

I wouldn't downplay long Covid. And if I had to do it again, I'd change some things. But saying that once in an appropriate thread seems pretty innocuous to me.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

I mean I don't fully agree with your quote, but permabanning you over that is weird.

Either they were on a powertrip or else they lost a young loved one to covid and were still raw about it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I don’t think you know what literally means

[–] [email protected] 31 points 1 year ago (1 children)

On lemmy, you could literally just start the same community on another server. If other people agree with you about space, the new community will become the "default" one. don't really think anybody even has the ability to become "too powerful" because they are neutered the instant the base url changes.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago

Yes, some people complain about duplicate communities but it's a feature not a bug - it provides redundancy, they can have different spins on the topic and evolution can be at work (badly run a community and it will wither and die while others thrive).

Once we have "multicommunities" it really won't matter if there are similar communities on different instances, once grouped you may not even notice which instance it's on without checking. So we'll have all the pros and few of the cons.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Right now there are people who sign up with an instance like lemmy.world, who then create loads of communities, because they don't fully understand the nature of things and can't quite believe that the URLs for lots of different IPs are available. For Reddit, if you snagged the likes of r/starwars early on, that gave you some power. For Lemmy, it's meaningless: if you just want to moderate 100 communities, and not spend time actually building a Community up, then you'll just be overtaken by the Community at one of the many other instances.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Exactly this. On Reddit, you would end up with stuff like r/TrueStarWars and such as a result of bad mods moderating badly β€” but those communities would have a harder time taking off due to the name being less searchable, and individuals needing to be "in the know" about why one sub has "true" out the front.

With everyone being able to take the same community name, just across different instances, there's a potential for a better, more competitive process to take place instead. It won't be perfect β€” @starwars is going to be in a much more immediately advantaged position than, say, @starwars β€” but in theory the playing field is closer to being level.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn't work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: [email protected]

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (2 children)

A strategy would be to make an alternative an a different server with the same name and bring people over. Or to contact the server admins about them

[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I fully agree that if mods become a problem, there are ways to handle it.

But I strongly disagree that its reddits biggest problem. Most of the moderators there are trying their best to be fair and conductive.

You wouldn’t believe the amount of shit they have to deal with on a daily basis ans the bigotry they’re confronted with.

Anyway, I think there need to be mods here as well and they will make unpopular decisions. Try becoming one yourself and leading by example.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Fuck yes

One of the best friends I've ever had banned me from one of his subs because I was fucking with him as a prank of sorts

The guy poured his time and energy into making any sub he was associated with being as relaxed, friendly, and free of bullshit as possible.

And the dude got death threats.

Reddit ran off the best mods, the ones that really cared. Most of those came here.

Most mods are like him, they're trying to help build something good, and keep it that way. Even the ones that wield the ban hammer often tend to only do so for disruptive assholes like me.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

Thank you for this. It means a lot that some people understand. :)

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

I was a mod for a unpopular opinion sub aimed at unpopular political opinions. It was as bad as you could imagine. At most I'd only have one or so posts a month that i didn't have to remove.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Basically just the Reddit to Lemmy transition. Sounds easy.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

I think we lose sight of why "powermods" gained power: they built the big successful communities. Reddit was largely successful due to some fantastic communities being built up, and that takes work. We need that work on Lemmy just as much as we needed it on Reddit.

Yeah, it's not ideal if a small number of people control a large number of communities but we should understand why they got there, and I think the structure of Lemmy is likely to make it a bit less prevalent.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's impossible here in any broad way. If an admin allowed it to go too far, they end up running off users, and possibly end up defederated if it gets really crazy.

There's already duplicates of half the c/s out there, particularly among the reddit copies.

You might think that power admins could be the equivalent problem, but we've already seen problematic instances be defederated widely.

Pretty much every instance out there right now that has enough users to have power mods already has specific rules against going bonkers with moderation.

It's a different system, a different culture, and the ultimate control is decentralized and distributed.

About the only people that could maybe upend that are the lemmy devs themselves, and it isn't like lemmy is impossible to fork. I couldn't do it, but there's plenty of folks that can. And, let's be real, those guys may be on the radical end of their political beliefs, but everything they've done so far points to them handling the project in a very socialist way. They could have forced the entire thing into an echo chamber instead of making it open source. They could have built in controls that would give them the ability to screw with instances remotely, but didn't.

So, nah, power mods aren't going to be a thing on lemmt any time soon. When it does happen, it'll be on single instances and rapidly handled.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

@Jerusalemspiderman

@dunloap

That does mean we need many instances, and always be creating new ones. We should never settle on one instance. There should always be alternative versions of each sub/community/magazine, just in case power mods become insane at one of them.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago
[–] HobbitFoot 6 points 1 year ago

Moderating is hard and requires a set of skills to run moderation cheaply. You're probably going to have a group of known mods on Lemmy doing the same, just because mods with these skills will be sought after.

A bigger issue is that Lemmy seems to be continuing Reddit's practice of mod rank by time only. The implementation of a guild model would be better for mod governance, as it allows for better discussions of mod policy and allow greater input from the invested community.

Of course, trigger happy bans are still going to happen as people troll and worse.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Nah, once it become possible to group communities from multiple instances into one (aka multi-reddit on reddit - needs another name on the fediverse), power mods will have no power. Someone could just create an instance with the same community name and it could end up in the community group.

[–] HobbitFoot 1 points 1 year ago

That's only if they are chosen to be added. If I create a world politics sub and fill it with anime titties, I shouldn't expect to be auto added to all world politics community groups.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

I do think Lemmy instances should have a publicly-visible setting for essentially stating how many communities someone can moderate maximum.

But I doubt it'll be a problem for a while.

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