Ask Lemmy
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Centralization of anything. Powermods shouldn't be a thing, and major central instances are a bit sketchy too. No offense to ruud et al.
The problem with power mods is that it's a thankless job that people do for free. You're not exactly getting a line of people out the door willing to take up the mantle, so a small group of power users end up taking on more and more.
You're giving them too much credit. Although some are altruistic, many are greedy power hungry scabs who's entire life revolves around holding whatever merger power they can over others.
I stepped up once and made a sub for a small niche game I liked when none existed. The devs noticed, reached out me with free copies of the game to give away on the sub and everything. Then some power mods got wind of it, made their own subreddit for the game and completely overwhelmed my little sub though cross promotion via their other subs and with their army of alt accounts too.
Most of them don't want help, their cries are just to elicit sympathy and get free stuff out of it. Power mods are the scourge of Reddit.
I'd wager it's the other way around. Most of us are decent people, it's just a few bad apples that make the rest of us look bad.
And yes, I've been a mod for a couple decades on various platforms. On reddit I ran about a dozen smaller subs for years. Almost all the mods on my teams were decent people, only a single person was the exception.
And the problems with reddit are more systemic than "hurry durr power mods r bad." It's like having a cough, then blaming your mouth for it. Don't just look at the guy doing work for free, look at the people getting paid off the backs of free labor.
Reddit is a fairly unique exception to the usual moderator experience. I too used to be an admin on a couple of large forums and IRC servers and I'd say most of those people were decent. Reddit however is plaged with a large number of power mods in many of the medium to larger subs who's sole purpose in life is to be an online lord of opinion and toxicity over others.
That's not to say there's not decent people too but I imagine your experience is squewed a bit if you ran smaller ones.
Well right. The answer is just to have GPT moderate everything in exchange for Bitcoin. /s
You're definitely right, though. It's thankless but important and idk what the solution really is, but I think distribution is definitely better than centralization. More mods the merrier even if they're just there as checks and balances. But that's definitely getting into politics as well, which I'm not great at.
Something that Lemmy should do is create a better way to handle mod permissions. Reddit's system of the ranking structure doesn't really work well. Even something as basic as guilds in most MMO's would be far better than what we have right now.
That’s already kind of happening. the main two communities are lemmy.world and lemmy.lm. And since different instances can defederate from each other that can cause the same echo chambers we saw on reddit. Here’s a list of everything you can’t see if you’re on lemmy.world: https://fba.ryona.agency/?reverse=lemmy.world
Thankfully you can go out and make an account on an instance like lemmy.sdf.org that doesn’t block anything but I don’t think it’s a perfect solution.
Shameless plug for lemm.ee, which no one has defederated from, also the admin has been actively contributing to the codebase and really seems to know his stuff.
Am I misunderstanding what I'm looking at? Because to me it looks like they do, infact, block stuff:
https://fba.ryona.agency/?reverse=lemm.ee
They've blocked a few instances that were very spammy. It became necessary, and there was a post notifying about it. However, no one blocks lemm.ee.
Edit: lol, this has changed since yesterday, one instance has blocked us. https://fba.ryona.agency/?domain=lemm.ee
I suspect powermods are more of a myth than reality, but I agree we should be concerned with any instance becoming the defacto site for Lemmy.
I think the best way to avoid this is already in motion (though slowly), which is to have smaller topic instances which house the topic in its entirety and don't have as many users (for example there is one for Star Trek and one for Android already). This way, regardless of your instance you still have access to the topic.
That's just my 2 cents, anyways.
Powermods exist, but they are important to how Reddit functions.
They effectively act as a knowledge base on how to moderate large subs. They know how to use a lot of specialty software to moderate large subs and will typically act as a lightning rod for other mods on unpopular decisions.
They also get drunk on power, but Reddit never provided for a better way to control their communities. Of course, technically neither has Lemmy, yet.
That's quite interesting.
To be honest, I was never active enough to encounter a power mod; but I suppose anyone could go overboard trying to protect their community (even if they wind up doing more harm than good). Without having encountered any power mods, it's hard for me to say what percentage fell into that category.
In your experience, did the level of power of the mod seem directly proportional to their level of overboardness/corruption?
I apologize if the answer seems obvious. I keep hearing about the power mods, but since I've never seen one in action, I would certainly like to learn more.
No, but they did have their bad days and being a mod of large groups can be very damaging to a person's sanity. For those who were kicked off, I saw it less as getting what they deserved and more as them getting the break that they really needed.