Technology

There is one complaint that I have about the mods across Lemmy, they seem to be hesitant to crack down on trolling. This has, in turn, made trolling easy thanks to the audience Lemmy attracted. Love the mods here, but when someone calls out a troll, maybe don’t remove the comment calling out the troll and leave the troll alone to continue trolling. Your contribution is actively negative if you do this.

<3

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The CEO of the company I used to work, used to say every time they talked about the inclusivity initiatives that they were not doing them because it was the moral thing to do, but because it was the thing that brings more returns to the company. Always found rare that he was so honest with that.

Partially agree

It really is about the will to take a hard stance. Just look at twitch. You have hundred-ish concurrent channels with two or three volunteer mods who can't handle "the memes". And then you have stuff like (in their prime) Geek and Sundry where you had very attractive hosts outright making sex and bondage jokes and chat was pleasant. Because the automod settings would nuke any comment that included key words and mods would add the cheeky mispellings as they show up.

It really does boil down to wanting the audience. Numbers mean money. Money is good. If you get rid of the chuds, your numbers go down. So you try to "manage" them and only remove the "problematic" users. Until the overton window shifts and you try to ignore all the dog whistles.

Where I disagree is that the fediverse is any better. Lemmy.world is already an example of one instance getting big enough that it has a LOT of influence. And they (as well as other instances) have already had their bursts of mods (and admins...) going batshit insane like it is a vbulletin board in the 00s.

But also? We are seeing the same bullshit we see everywhere. A "good" example is Naomi Wu. She has been in the news cycles periodically because of all the "best" reasons (she is clearly being silenced by the CCP, a lot of "maker youtube" is shouting her out as an OG a result, she had the audacity to speak out about a prominent youtuber who recently imploded making her uncomfortable for the exact reasons said youtuber imploded, she has boobs and doesn't wear a burkha, etc). And I can attest to three of the prominent boards having moderators who think they are doing a good job by removing any mention of that because it "makes people angry" or "doesn't lead to good discussion". Can't acknowledge someone who actually influenced a lot of the design philosophies in the 3d printers we all use on a 3d printing board because the chuds will get mad. And so forth

And THAT is the problem. Mods and Admins will decide they want to be influential and want those giant audiences.

Most advertisers don't really want their ads to be shown alongside Nazi content. One thing users can do is to send the advertisers' PR contacts a screenshot of their ad beside someone calling for racial holy war. "Hey, I'm not buying your beans any more because you advertise on Nazi shit" is a pretty clear message.

Any civility rule that is enforced with greater priority than (or in the absence of) a “no bigotry” rule serves only to protect bigots from decent people.

There's a saying I think about a lot that goes "The problem with rules is that good people don't need 'em, and bad people will find a way around 'em".

The best thing about human volunteer mods vs automated tools or paid "trust and safety" teams, IMO, is that volunteer humans can better identify when someone is participating in the spirit of a community, because the mods themselves are usually members of the community too.

The key word here is "large". From the article:

"[Fediverse] instances don’t generally have any unwanted guests because there’s zero incentive to grow beyond an ability to self-moderate. If an instance were to become known for hosting Nazis —either via malice or an incompetent owner— other more responsible instances would simply de-federate (cut themselves off) from the Nazi instance until they got their shit together. Problem solved, no 'trust and safety' required"

we have more mods per capita that the corpo hellsites and we don't even have venture capital money funding us

Which is another way the fediverse is better: The success metric is a vibrant, happy community, not MAUs or engagement numbers, so they make decisions accordingly.

Not to mention that because the fediverse doesn't require the collection of analytics it is less expensive to run. Most of the servers at Facebook are used to gather, sift, and deliver usage metrics. Actually serving content is a cheap and largely solved problem.

Isn't that kind of the point?

Exactly. It was easy to partition them off.

If a Fediverse instance grew so big that it couldn't moderate itself and had a lot of spam/Nazis, presumably other instances would just defederate, yeah? Unless an instance is ad-supported, what's the incentive to grow beyond one's ability to stay under control?