I’m kinda regretting not naming it oneninesix, but here we are. I guess I love letters.

To anyone wondering what’s up, I did this on my phone while out in the “big city”, so I’m still waiting to get home to do anything serious. I have a few suckers really nice people who volunteered for modding along with me. Anyone else who is interested, drop me a line. I’ll be picking mods when I get home in a few hours. Sorry for the wait and I’ll do my best to put out any fires in the meantime. I didn’t think this would take off!

For those wondering, here’s my take on moderating the place.

  1. Moderation is to facilitate an experience for its users in line with the goals of the community and the instance. It’s not to push a personal agenda, give you a bigger hammer in debates, set up a digital fiefdom, etc. You certainly can and should include your mod experience on your dating profile, though. Unilateral decisions are not cool except in a few situations, like if 100% of your userbase is usurped by literal Nazis.

  2. 196 exists to be a place where you post something (often but not always something goofy) when you visit. I know not everyone does and that’s fine - I still love you. These things can’t be offensive or hurtful, though, especially not intentionally so. Unintentional vs intentional I believe is a HUGE distinction and needs to be considered when moderating.

  3. LBJ LBZ exists as an inclusive, (relatively) judgment-free zone for gender-diverse folks. I intend for us to uphold that here. I say relatively judgment free because there will be people looking to start shit and mods and admins are going to have to judge their actions, but only their actions.

If you wanna be my modder, you gotta get with my bullet points…or argue persuasively why I should amend them (but that part doesn’t fit the tune).The three big things I’m looking for otherwise are diverse viewpoints, if you can remain reasonably impartial, and if you can say you’re sorry. The last is huge for me. As a mod, you’re going to mess up. I used to mod on Reddit and I certainly did! I find it’s important for maintaining the community’s respect to be able to admit when you made a bad call and what you’ll do to avoid it in the future.

@[email protected], pointers would be welcome as I think you do a great job.

Community feedback is encouraged and welcome, just be aware I’ll be a little slow to respond for a bit.

PS: wow, I really DO love letters!

Edit: Corrected point three, damn autocorrect! Believe it or not, we’re not an inclusive community in LBJ’s corpse.

  • Roflmasterbigpimp@lemmy.world
    62·
    8 hours ago

    Hello! It’s me, Roflmasterbigpimp! The lovable rascal from communities like [email protected] and, since yesterday, [email protected].

    And to some degree even [email protected] for a whopping two days, until feddit.de (and therefore my account) died.

    Even though I have barely done any moderation at all over at [email protected], I still want to help out and perhaps sort things out further. I tried to do my best on the .world 196. I encourage you to check my comment history about this topic and form your own opinion about me.

    I can 100% understand if you decline my offer, but I really like this community and want to make this work.

    Furthermore, I would advise adding a rule along the lines of “All decisions affecting the community and its members as a whole must be backed by a public vote.” This is something that could have prevented this whole disaster in the first place.

    • stray@pawb.socialEnglish
      2·
      1 hour ago

      “All decisions affecting the community and its members as a whole must be backed by a public vote.”

      Is there a way on Lemmy to distinguish who is or isn’t a community member? Is there a way to prevent me from rigging votes with a bot army or a group of bad actors?

      • WrittenInRed [any]@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        2·
        23 minutes ago

        I’ve been thinking recently about chain of trust algorithms and decentralized moderation and am considering making a bot that functions a bit like fediseer but designed more for individual users where people can be vouched for by other users. Ideally you end up with a network where trust is generated pseudo automatically based on interactions between users and could have reports be used to gauge whether a post should be removed based on the trust level of the people making the reports vs the person getting reported. It wouldn’t necessarily be a perfect system but I feel like there would be a lot of upsides to it, and could hopefully lead to mods/admins only needing to remove the most egregious stuff but anything more borderline could be handled via community consensus. (The main issue is lurkers would get ignored with this, but idk if there’s a great way to avoid something like that happening tbh)

        My main issue atm is how to do vouching without it being too annoying for people to keep up with. Not every instance enables downvotes, plus upvote/downvote totals in general aren’t necessarily reflective of someone’s trustworthiness. I’m thinking maybe it can be based on interactions, where replies to posts/comments can be ranked by a sentiment analysis model and then that positive/negative number can be used? I still don’t think that’s a perfect solution or anything but it would probably be a decent starting point.

        If trust decays over time as well then it rewards more active members somewhat, and means that it’s a lot harder to build up a bot swarm. If you wanted any significant number of accounts you’d have to have them all posting at around the same time which would be a lot more obvious an activity spike.

        Idk, this was a wall of text lol, but it’s something I’ve been considering for a while and whenever this sort of drama pops up it makes me want to work on implementing something.

        • Roflmasterbigpimp@lemmy.world
          1·
          2 minutes ago

          Hey wow thats an awesome Idea! I’m currently in training to become a Software developer myself and this sound really impressive!

          Did you already started?

      • Roflmasterbigpimp@lemmy.world
        1·
        10 minutes ago

        As far as I know, yes. There is some sort of trace from where the Upvotes came. But I’m not deep into Lemmy-Tech so I don’t know much.

    • Blaze (he/him)@feddit.orgEnglish
      52·
      7 hours ago

      This is part of the deal you make when joining a community with active mods, admins, and rules. Not everything is up for debate. I know firsthand that this can be quite frustrating sometimes, but we can’t act like everything else has always been subject to election up to this point. It simply was not.

      https://lemmy.world/comment/14556651

      Not sure that really shows you under the best light

      • Roflmasterbigpimp@lemmy.world
        22·
        6 hours ago

        Furthermore, I would advise adding a rule along the lines of “All decisions affecting the community and its members as a whole must be backed by a public vote.” This is something that could have prevented this whole disaster in the first place.

        Which is why encourage the Team to make especially this Change. Like I said in the other Comment.

        So while I say the admin of “the page” can do with their page as they like (assuming there are no other rules in place forbidding them from doing so, either at the community or instance level), I believe that it’s everyone’s own choice to come, go, leave, or stay.

        Because by setting rules not only for user but for admins/mods as well we could have easily prevented this.

        If you leave people without rules and just hope they act as you and others would like them to, you can be harshly disappointed. Rules are not only there to enforce behavior but also to provide guidelines.

          • Roflmasterbigpimp@lemmy.world
            22·
            6 hours ago

            Start a community and run it the way you like! Expand the Fediverse! Make a place truly your own!

            Perfect, and then the mods will lock it down and move to an instance I dislike.

            You mean the answer to your comment where you said you gonna do the same with a Community you made or just not understood how moderation works?

            When you create a community, you are the mod of the community you created, and you can choose to move or stay. So I don’t know which mods you are talking about.

            I think it was their right to do so. They had no guideline or anything else which prevented them from doing so. And if you look a bit down below you see again:

            You can also set your community rules to something like “Big decisions affecting the whole community must be backed by a public vote.” This is what I mean by making the place entirely your own.