Personal Reflections
Over the past few weeks I've found myself engaged with Beehaw in a fundamentally different way. The explosive growth necessitated shifted timelines, had me prioritizing replies and moderator actions in a different way and in general greatly shifted what parts of the website I spent most of my time on.
This shift changed my perception of the website. I didn't have as much time to spend reading the awesome interactions which resolved themselves, where people were nice to each other and to check out the cool discussions going on. I spent a lot of my time answering questions, devoting a bunch of attention to the neediest, the loudest, or simply whomever was just in my inbox. I ended up stepping into a lot of conversations to help try and defuse or deal with difficult people and directing efforts on helping (collaboratively!) to establish a strong moderation ethos. I recently found myself reflecting on this and realizing I was missing out on the very environment we came here to establish and that I need to set better boundaries for myself.
In order to prioritize my own mental health I'm going to establish the following boundaries for myself:
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I am going to spend more of my time on the site browsing and commenting and less moderating and responding to every question that comes my way. If you ping me to ask a question that other people have already asked or can be answered elsewhere I'm probably not going to answer it anymore.
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As much as I want to treat all of you with the respect and kindness you deserve when intervening as a mod or admin, it's not sustainable at this scale because it quickly becomes all of the time I spend on this site, so I've put together a code of conduct below to help guide expectations of how interactions with myself and other moderators might look.
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I really don't have the time or energy to take suggestions phrased like demands or to entertain anyone talking shit about this place. Instead of suggestions phrased like demands, I'd ask that they are phrased as requests or even better as a plan of action (how are you going to help us accomplish something better, together?). Instead of talking shit, you're free to highlight the flaws you see (ideally in Beehaw support), so long as you're also providing suggestions on how to fix things. Venting about this platform just to vent that it doesn't fit your ideal situation doesn't do the community any good on this platform. Or any platform we're federated with, frankly. If you ever feel the need to vent about this platform then do so to your friends, in DMs, on email, by punching a pillow, or by whispering sweet nothings to the wind on top of your roof- venting here just makes the place depressing and toxic and I don't want to participate in that environment. I want an uplifting, positive space where we enable each other and treat each other with respect.
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It's upsetting to see how certain individuals react to moderators and admins stepping in to try and keep this place safe for minorities or to ensure that there's peace. This is tiring to everyone involved and not sustainable. As much as I like the idea of helping each other become better, some people need a lot more help than we can offer and I think some of us don't have strong enough boundaries on how to engage with that in a healthy manner (I know I've got issues with being taken advantage of because I love pleasing others). To that end, we've drawn up a draft code of conduct to help people understand some healthy boundaries that need to be specified.
Purpose of the Code of Conduct
The purpose of this code of conduct is not to establish new rules (our only rule is to be nice), but to frame what nice behavior looks like so that stronger boundaries can be both respectful and enforced. I've spent a lot of mental and emotional energy educating and diffusing situations on Beehaw in the last few weeks and this is a structure we're providing to show you how to be respectful of the time of the moderators and admins and how to get the best results out of an interaction with us. If we tell you to disengage and you imply that I'm being a fascist for doing so, we're no longer going to bother continuing to try to defuse the situation as some of us have been, because you simply aren't treating us with good faith. As much as I'd like to give everyone the benefit of the doubt and to always assume good faith even when they're angrily replying to me, none of us can do that at the scale we've already reached. I've seen a lot of people treating me and other moderators with bad faith and I don't want any of us becoming cold and calloused to our users as a defense mechanism to deal with the abuse.
In case you didn't notice, this post is also a link to the code of conduct.
I think Lemmy needs instance moderators, or super moderators, basically. People who enforce instance wide rules, but don't worry about the rules of local communities. Further, these users would not have access to some of the gnarly system administration stuff that an admin would have. I totally understand right now the low number of admins on large instances like this purely as a technical requirement. The more admins you have, the more security holes your instance has, purely from a social engineering perspective. But moderation and system administration are very different tasks, and the fewer admins you have right now, the fewer top-level moderators you have.
I know "power mod" is a loaded term for redditfugees, but I think the problem was less "this moderator does moderator action across too many communities" and more "none of these communities are well moderated because no one here locally in the communities leads the moderation." I'd be curious what other people think
Yeah, I think Lemmy needs a lot more granularity over roles. Currently there's two rules outside one of a user : Admin (You can literally do anything that is possible) and Community mod (Remove comments/posts, ban community-wide).
We need people who can remove comments/posts site-wide, ban site-wide, do application approvals. None of this can currently be delegated without giving full powers.
I think that "power mods" are more of a perception than a reality even on Reddit. There are a handful of examples that people tend to bring up, but I'd wager that the vast majority of reddit users never had any issues with power mods (or if they did there's a decent chance that there's more than one side to the story), and I know that in a few of the examples people like to repeat there's more to the story.
I agree that Lemmy really needs a site mod role. Right now, only the Admins can issue sitewide bans or purge users posts or post contents. That means that admins have to step in any time a user is a problem in more than one community (and if they're a problem in one place they are more than likely going to be a problem in more than one) or if illegal content is posted (I haven't really encountered this, I know it has happened).
(I've long thought the same, about power mods, and mostly think the Redditor mentality of "power tripping mods" comes from users who consistently get moderator action taken against them for being shit. The only moderation team I ever had any trouble with was AmITheAsshole where I got banned for saying the other person in the story, the non-OP person was the asshole)
I used to think like you. In my 12 years on Reddit and like a dozen thousand comments, I had zero problems for the first 10 years.
Then, over just the last 2 years, I got:
So either I've turned "shitty" in the last couple years, or something else has changed.
I'd be really wary of that approach. People deserve an explanation and a chance to correct their mistakes, not getting marked once and presumed guilty in all their future interactions. If you asked me how many mistakes someone should be allowed to make site-wide, I'd say as many as they are willing to correct.
A site-wide mod role might be beneficial to reduce the workload for Admins, that shouldn't change the approach to modding, though.
I'm certainly not advocating jumping straight to sitewide bans for ordinary users who have a bad interaction, I don't think we ought to change our moderation approach or anything.
However, a lot of the bans I've seen so far have been for things like spam, trolling, or being outright hateful. Those are cases where the user is probably being a problem instance-wide, not just in a particular community. Now, if we continue to grow and we add more specific communities we will probably have more examples of users who are problematic in certain communities and not others, but for now that hasn't often been the case from what I've observed.
Because of that, it seems like it would be helpful for there to be a set of mods that don't have full admin access but have the ability to do things like hand out sitewide bans. That would keep the admins from being pulled in every time a spammer or troll needs to be yeeted.
To me "power mod" means someone that uses their moderator/admin powers to bully users. I've been banned from FB groups for citing city ordinances and for pointing out that a post was made by a scammer.
The legal advice mod gave me a vulgar and derogatory flare because I argued that the smell of marijuana coming from your neighbors house is a nuisance.
If a moderator has the ability to shape the narrative on a platform and uses their powers to harass people, they are a "power mod"
I've never heard the term but I would have thought of it more like a "power-user" if you said it to me in passing. Rather than somebody who is power-tripping.
Don't mean to derail but I thought that distinction was interesting.
I have found the "official" definition.
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Power%20Mod
But actually it's whatever you want it to be(e)
I've known this to mean a power-hungry power-tripping asshole of Reddit that doesn't care about other people. They just want fake Internet points (i.e. karma, upvotes, awards, etc). A typical sociopath exploiting other human beings for their sick fucking amusement.
I don't know if those crappy moderators are ever going to walk again after you butt slammed them from the top rope like that
If they want to swim around the bottom of the barrel of human refuse, then let them.