As a newly-appointed moderator myself, I think "customer service representatives curating a space" is going a little too far. I see myself more as a janitor taking out the trash while doing my best to leave all the art alone, whether I like it or not.

In my personal experience, the people I see posting to [email protected] deserved the actions the mods took, and are looking to whine to someone.

No, they're usually just power tripping. When certain people get even a modicum of power, real or imagined, they become full-on dictators at superluminal velocities. There's some crossover with powerless people seeking revenge on the world at large (or any piece of it) for their misfortune or flights against them, real or imagined. I don't have any data on the ratios but my gut instinct wild-ass guess is that at least 25-33% fall into the tinpot tyrant category.

As a head CSR for my job : no mod I've ever seen is anything close to providing customer service and it's hilarious that you'd even think that in passing

You see us as customers, by your own words. So much for community. Trying to misplace and simplify the situation using this metaphor this way is basically also another way of justifying not even ostracization, but autocracies as communities.

Would you agree that banning/censoring is a form of suppression rather than oppression?

[email protected] definitely has some cases of power tripping

I agree with you.

But can we let the Karen thing go now? It's been long enough

If you trust this person to tell you, and everybody else here, how to speak, then either your speech is worthless to you or this conversation is worthless to you.

“The ultimate test of a society’s freedom is not how it treats its good, obedient, compliant citizens; it’s how it treats its dissidents.” - Glenn Greenwald

Well, this is how they should operate…

But these volunteers also require that you understand they are human beings too.* and, like all humans, they sometimes make mistakes.

Please be patient, especially during busy times of the year.

They're volunteers providing a public service for free around here, not employees.

Probably.

Communities are not owned by moderators. They are built by those that participate. The primary fallacy I see is the idea that anyone can start a different community and that size and momentum are meaningless. That is simply not the case.

An authoritarian or very active mod, in any community with public participation is actively abusing those users when they act in opposition to the interests of the community. A visible mod is a bad mod. The job of mod is as a janitor acting in the interests of the community. If you care about authority or steering, you shouldn't be a mod or admin.

Nothing about being a mod is hard. You don't need to read every post or comment. All you do is setup the basic guidelines and trust the community to vote and flag bad stuff. The community will always flag the bad stuff. The only part that really matters is that you set yourself aside and really look into any flagged issue while giving the benefit of the doubt in absolutely every possible way one can imagine while never allowing bigotry type abuse. This is how to be a good mod, to be an invisible mod. The job is only to herd bad bots and sort the flags from others.

I just try and make a percentage of my post anti corporate.

I think for the most part they're trying to protect themselves, their communities and their servers.

That said, I left world for other places and found some of the stuff that was defederated to be interesting and provide a little balance.

There's certainly nothing going on here even close to the crap that was going on at Reddit.