I’m splitting this into two parts. First identifying the issue. And second my personal idea for a solution. I’m hoping for a lot of discussion so please be clear which part you are responding to.
Part 1: The problem
Reddit as a platform has many flaws. Obviously being a corporation means they’re terrible no matter what. But their platform is also flawed. Even if Reddit was 100% community owned the platform would still be flawed. The number one thing that is ruining Reddit are the tyrannical mods.
Each community on Reddit is a dictatorship. Whoever is arbitrarily in charge of a community has full unrestricted power to do whatever they want. The people who are actually creating the content and sharing it are totally at their whim. I understand that modding is a difficult and thankless job, but toxic mods ruined Reddit and Lemmy will do the same if it’s not addressed.
Lemmy’s answer is to allow people to create their own instances. Don’t like the mods at World? Go make your own Lemmy, with blackjack and hookers. But that’s not sufficient. It takes years to build up a community to have enough people for meaningful discussion to happen, and nearly all communities or instances fail. We absolutely need a way for mods to answer to the users.
Part 2: My solution
My solution is simple. Lemmy is built on the community. Everyone helps run it. Therefore mods are elected by the users who generate the highest upvoted content in a community.
Elections should happen on a schedule and, if a community is particularly upset with a mod, a vote of no confidence can be taken.
I understand that this will be a huge undertaking. But I truly believe that we need to fix this issue for Lemmy to thrive long term. Or else we’ll just end up with another Reddit.
The voting mechanism is sufficient to be used for moderation.
"But what if… " … yep what if. Still is sufficient.
What a misunderstanding of the nature of the Fediverse and how federation works. The point of federation is more to a connected social network while distributing infrastructure across volunteers.
I will have to be pedantic and note that r/Anarchism on Reddit does elect moderators, but not based on the criteria you suggest. In fact, it’s quite problematic as the skills of linking cool things/writing good posts and managing people like you would as a moderator are quite different skills! While I’ve never ran a Lemmy community or a subreddit, I did run a Discord server once as well as a traditional forum, and the social aspect was far harder than the technical aspect, and I did not know Discord as a platform at all when I did that. The community was a trainwreck as a result.
That being said, a democratically-run instance isn’t a bad idea. I agree with givesomefucks on lemmy.world in that the best way to go about this is to have an instance with that kind of rule set. In fact, there are Mastodon instances that are cooperatives like social.coop and cosocial.ca that could be looked at for inspiration for a Lemmy cooperative, which is what it sounds like you’re looking for to some extent. I think in practice it’d probably look like a very scaled down version of Usenet’s Big 8 Board.
@LemmySuxNow@reddthat.com People don't like change. Most people will disagree with you. Outside of coops the instances are dictatorships people are fine with putting up with because they can easily make accounts on a different instance.
I would encourage you to check out any P2P forums and or look into Reddit styled apps built on Nostr, those would be closer to what you're getting at.
Each community on Reddit is a dictatorship. Whoever is arbitrarily in charge of a community has full unrestricted power to do whatever they want.
Lemmy’s answer is to allow people to create their own instances. Don’t like the mods at World? Go make your own Lemmy, with blackjack and hookers. But that’s not sufficient.
I don’t think it’s insufficient. site admins can replace mods if they see the need for it. and if your site admins don’t take action when they should, you look for a new site with new site admins. or you become your own.
Therefore mods are elected by the users who generate the highest upvoted content in a community.
this is simple but simply flawed. how do you filter dishonest accounts? automated accounts, multiaccounts, trolls, brigading accounts of users coming from an instance with largely different values, …
IRL we have solved these, but we don’t want such an identity system on the internet.
Or else we’ll just end up with another Reddit.
on reddit you couldn’t choose your site admins. here you can. even today it is a very meaningful choice if you compare just lemmygrad, lemmy.world and dbzero
You’ve been here for two months…
far too easy to game a system like that and just because someone makes good posts doesn’t mean they want to be saddled with the burden modding. You said yourself its a difficult and thankless job. How about the community just votes on mods who volunteer and allow an option for a recall vote?
I’m sympathetic to this post and surprised by the massive downvotes… But it sounds like a great deal of work for a questionably better result.
Thank god you’re not the one running it because holy shit, these are some awful takes.
“Whoever is arbitrarily in charge of a community has full unrestricted power to do whatever they want”
So you want to kick out whoever build the community and be in charge with others likeminded people?
All popular community’s would be taken over by groups, bots, data centers, big tech … And used will be brainwashed. Your vote wouldn’t matter at all.
You vote with leaving a community and / or the platform.
Literally nothing is stopping you from creating communities or even an entire instance that follows that principle…
If you want to do it, then do it.
And if people want it, they’ll participate.
But even if they do, I don’t think you’ll get the result you expect and want
I think this is the single best answer here. Probably requires a dedicated instance so there’s an admin who keeps an eye on things and has the power to enforce decisions. But that should be possible to achieve.
OP would just have to be “top mod” and show restraint and only use it to switch over elected mod.
Stupid easy, I just don’t think OP would be able to do that. They’d go hands on and it’d be a shit show no one would want to partake in.
So your probelm with the platforms is not the platforms themselves, but people? Because the mods running communities here aren’t too different from the refit communities.
As for your second point, you want karma farmers to run the communities?
As I said, Reddit is a corporation so it will never be good even if their platform had no flaws.
I’m open to feedback on my solution, please provide your opinion on how it can be improved to address the weaknesses you’re seeing.
feedback on my solution
He gave you a good one but I’ll explain: there is no karma here. But spammers have a lot of accounts, which would mean one spammer would be able to elect himself which is not what we want.
Yeah that’s true. I guess I’m assuming people aren’t upvoting spam. What could be a better way to qualify who is allowed to vote for a community’s mods?
What could be a better way to qualify who is allowed to vote for a community’s mods?
Mods are volunteers. Not paid civil servants. Community mods are also not there to win a popularity contest. They are there to enforce the rules of the community. Not everyone is going to agree with any mod on every decision.
Mods are human and can make mistakes. Contacting a mod if there is an issue usually works more often than not. Attacking a mod, threatening a mod, being abusive to a mod because you see a situation differently is not the best way to go about discussing anything, and normally does not help the situation.
You are free to leave the community, start your own, and mod it the way you feel it should be done. Communities do not need to vote for qualified mods. Too many interpretations of what constitues qualified for a community run by volunteers.
And if the majority you’d need for a vote agreed the mod had to go, they would migrate to the new community anyway
Wut? Should we vote for who gets to live in your home too?
IMHO, most Lemmy mods are fine. And it doesn’t take years to advertise your community. The end.
Most Reddit mods were fine at one point as well. In your estimation, if I wanted to start a Lemmy community for something niche say bonsai tree triming, how long would it take to get enough people for real discussions?
1 week. Advertise and I’m pretty sure bonsai people will come. If they don’t exist or are not there, you will have no discussion anyway.
You are vastly underestimating how much work it takes to get a niche commumity going here.
I’d love to see it if you’re willing to demonstrate
I’m not because I don’t have time for this. Feel free to do it. Back in the late 90s we had small communities and it was fun. No one wondered how we could attract hundreds of people from other forums.
Sadly it is no longer the 90s
No need to taunt: !communitypromo@lemmy.ca
I mean your the one with all these ideas. If you think they’re great, create a community or instance and prove it.
Your first phrase, added to your other points about removing and replacing moderation, makes it sound people are going to become bad just for being in positions of power.
As someone who’s seen the final days of kbin.social, let me tell you, they were rampant with spammers and scammers, and no amount of community effort would solve it.
Authority is needed.
And on a voting system, there is one already in the fediverse, defederation. It’s usually good to shake administration into noticing there’s a problem, or at least isolating the problem if left unattended so it doesn’t spread. Sure it can be used ideologically, but it’s also in their right not to deal with those they’re not aligned with.
Therefore mods are elected by the users who generate the highest upvoted content in a community.
wow, that may be the worst idea for the direction of lemmy since the Tesseract guy. bravo
How should it be done better?
By changing the premise completely. You fall straight on the flat edge of the very fallacy that drives sites like Reddit: that popularity is an indicator of quality. (And even worse, mistaking “popularity of A” with “quality of B”). Just a hint: Donald Trump won the popular vote. So has Netanyahu.
I kind of agree with the others here. the current system is fine, but if you don’t like it, make your own instance. lemmy has some problem mods, but they are far from the biggest issue
It’s your premise people are disagreeing with, not your proposal. You have created a proposal to fix something most people don’t see as being a legitimate problem. There’s nothing to discuss or improve, the disagreement is more fundamental than that. You haven’t successfully argued that there is a real problem in the first place.
If you want to convince people your way is better, you probably have to implement it and show them it’s better.
(Spoiler alert: It probably isn’t better. It’s one of those “sounds great in theory, sucks shit in practice” ideas, I think it will be taken advantage of and turn toxic very quickly.)
kylie_kraft was being a little harsh there. Your idea isn’t really that bad, thanks for taking the time to write it up and bring it up for discussion.
mods are elected by the users who generate the highest upvoted content in a community.
I don’t think this is a good idea. I’d encourage you to look at my comment history in this community specifically. Every comment I’ve left in my official capacity is a direct result of at least one user report. I prefer a very light touch moderation style, where I address rule breaking content when reported but otherwise let the community manage itself.
Those comments I left are not terribly popular, and I think that’s the heart of the problem. Running a community effectively and maintaining some sense of order is not generally a very popular activity. Do we really want to make moderation a popularity contest? Beyond that, I don’t post much in fediverse, does that mean I’m ill suited to being a mod here? I don’t think so.
I agree in general that poor moderation can be a problem, but letting the most popular posters run the community doesn’t seem like the fix.
Yep.
If the most popular posters ran it, moderation would make a community pretty flat.
upvotes are way too easy to manipulate on fedi so if you really want democratic elections you would need a better system. but lets just keep it simple
