Power mods are one of the main problems with reddit. The same thing is already happening with Lemmy.
This is concerning because it allows for control of what becomes popular content.
Right now there are people who sign up with an instance like lemmy.world, who then create loads of communities, because they don’t fully understand the nature of things and can’t quite believe that the URLs for lots of different IPs are available. For Reddit, if you snagged the likes of r/starwars early on, that gave you some power. For Lemmy, it’s meaningless: if you just want to moderate 100 communities, and not spend time actually building a Community up, then you’ll just be overtaken by the Community at one of the many other instances.
Exactly this. On Reddit, you would end up with stuff like r/TrueStarWars and such as a result of bad mods moderating badly — but those communities would have a harder time taking off due to the name being less searchable, and individuals needing to be “in the know” about why one sub has “true” out the front.
With everyone being able to take the same community name, just across different instances, there’s a potential for a better, more competitive process to take place instead. It won’t be perfect — @starwars is going to be in a much more immediately advantaged position than, say, @starwars — but in theory the playing field is closer to being level.
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn’t work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !starwars@lemmy.world
A strategy would be to make an alternative an a different server with the same name and bring people over. Or to contact the server admins about them
I fully agree that if mods become a problem, there are ways to handle it.
But I strongly disagree that its reddits biggest problem. Most of the moderators there are trying their best to be fair and conductive.
You wouldn’t believe the amount of shit they have to deal with on a daily basis ans the bigotry they’re confronted with.
Anyway, I think there need to be mods here as well and they will make unpopular decisions. Try becoming one yourself and leading by example.
Fuck yes
One of the best friends I’ve ever had banned me from one of his subs because I was fucking with him as a prank of sorts
The guy poured his time and energy into making any sub he was associated with being as relaxed, friendly, and free of bullshit as possible.
And the dude got death threats.
Reddit ran off the best mods, the ones that really cared. Most of those came here.
Most mods are like him, they’re trying to help build something good, and keep it that way. Even the ones that wield the ban hammer often tend to only do so for disruptive assholes like me.
Thank you for this. It means a lot that some people understand. :)
Right, but you also have examples like r/politics where white supremacists publications are whitelisted as legit sources because at least some of the power mods were fascists and there is nothing anyone can do. No recourse whatsoever.
I like moderation and appreciate moderators, but it’s definitely a problem on Reddit.
For me personally, I never saw too many powermod-driven issues on Reddit (not that they didn’t occur, just that I didn’t experience them in the communities in which I participated).
One solution was to create a fork; lots of “r/actual___” or “r/true___” communities were born this way. To Little8Lost’s point, I think this will be even easier on Lemmy.
I’ve been permanently banned from the League of Legends subreddit for saying a team that had caught Covid wouldn’t die because they’re young and vaccinated. In a post about them having caught Covid. And in response to someone calling it a fatal disease (which it can be for some, but really isn’t if you’re 20, vaccinated, and otherwise healthy).
