I’m splitting this into two parts. First identifying the issue. And second my personal idea for a solution. I’m hoping for a lot of discussion so please be clear which part you are responding to.
Part 1: The problem
Reddit as a platform has many flaws. Obviously being a corporation means they’re terrible no matter what. But their platform is also flawed. Even if Reddit was 100% community owned the platform would still be flawed. The number one thing that is ruining Reddit are the tyrannical mods.
Each community on Reddit is a dictatorship. Whoever is arbitrarily in charge of a community has full unrestricted power to do whatever they want. The people who are actually creating the content and sharing it are totally at their whim. I understand that modding is a difficult and thankless job, but toxic mods ruined Reddit and Lemmy will do the same if it’s not addressed.
Lemmy’s answer is to allow people to create their own instances. Don’t like the mods at World? Go make your own Lemmy, with blackjack and hookers. But that’s not sufficient. It takes years to build up a community to have enough people for meaningful discussion to happen, and nearly all communities or instances fail. We absolutely need a way for mods to answer to the users.
Part 2: My solution
My solution is simple. Lemmy is built on the community. Everyone helps run it. Therefore mods are elected by the users who generate the highest upvoted content in a community.
Elections should happen on a schedule and, if a community is particularly upset with a mod, a vote of no confidence can be taken.
I understand that this will be a huge undertaking. But I truly believe that we need to fix this issue for Lemmy to thrive long term. Or else we’ll just end up with another Reddit.
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I’m sympathetic to this post and surprised by the massive downvotes… But it sounds like a great deal of work for a questionably better result.
Thank god you’re not the one running it because holy shit, these are some awful takes.
“Whoever is arbitrarily in charge of a community has full unrestricted power to do whatever they want”
So you want to kick out whoever build the community and be in charge with others likeminded people?
All popular community’s would be taken over by groups, bots, data centers, big tech … And used will be brainwashed. Your vote wouldn’t matter at all.
You vote with leaving a community and / or the platform.
Literally nothing is stopping you from creating communities or even an entire instance that follows that principle…
If you want to do it, then do it.
And if people want it, they’ll participate.
But even if they do, I don’t think you’ll get the result you expect and want
I think this is the single best answer here. Probably requires a dedicated instance so there’s an admin who keeps an eye on things and has the power to enforce decisions. But that should be possible to achieve.
OP would just have to be “top mod” and show restraint and only use it to switch over elected mod.
Stupid easy, I just don’t think OP would be able to do that. They’d go hands on and it’d be a shit show no one would want to partake in.
So your probelm with the platforms is not the platforms themselves, but people? Because the mods running communities here aren’t too different from the refit communities.
As for your second point, you want karma farmers to run the communities?
As I said, Reddit is a corporation so it will never be good even if their platform had no flaws.
I’m open to feedback on my solution, please provide your opinion on how it can be improved to address the weaknesses you’re seeing.
feedback on my solution
He gave you a good one but I’ll explain: there is no karma here. But spammers have a lot of accounts, which would mean one spammer would be able to elect himself which is not what we want.
Yeah that’s true. I guess I’m assuming people aren’t upvoting spam. What could be a better way to qualify who is allowed to vote for a community’s mods?
What could be a better way to qualify who is allowed to vote for a community’s mods?
Mods are volunteers. Not paid civil servants. Community mods are also not there to win a popularity contest. They are there to enforce the rules of the community. Not everyone is going to agree with any mod on every decision.
Mods are human and can make mistakes. Contacting a mod if there is an issue usually works more often than not. Attacking a mod, threatening a mod, being abusive to a mod because you see a situation differently is not the best way to go about discussing anything, and normally does not help the situation.
You are free to leave the community, start your own, and mod it the way you feel it should be done. Communities do not need to vote for qualified mods. Too many interpretations of what constitues qualified for a community run by volunteers.
And if the majority you’d need for a vote agreed the mod had to go, they would migrate to the new community anyway
Wut? Should we vote for who gets to live in your home too?
IMHO, most Lemmy mods are fine. And it doesn’t take years to advertise your community. The end.
Most Reddit mods were fine at one point as well. In your estimation, if I wanted to start a Lemmy community for something niche say bonsai tree triming, how long would it take to get enough people for real discussions?
1 week. Advertise and I’m pretty sure bonsai people will come. If they don’t exist or are not there, you will have no discussion anyway.
You are vastly underestimating how much work it takes to get a niche commumity going here.
I’d love to see it if you’re willing to demonstrate
I’m not because I don’t have time for this. Feel free to do it. Back in the late 90s we had small communities and it was fun. No one wondered how we could attract hundreds of people from other forums.
Sadly it is no longer the 90s
No need to taunt: !communitypromo@lemmy.ca
I mean your the one with all these ideas. If you think they’re great, create a community or instance and prove it.
Your first phrase, added to your other points about removing and replacing moderation, makes it sound people are going to become bad just for being in positions of power.
As someone who’s seen the final days of kbin.social, let me tell you, they were rampant with spammers and scammers, and no amount of community effort would solve it.
Authority is needed.
And on a voting system, there is one already in the fediverse, defederation. It’s usually good to shake administration into noticing there’s a problem, or at least isolating the problem if left unattended so it doesn’t spread. Sure it can be used ideologically, but it’s also in their right not to deal with those they’re not aligned with.
Therefore mods are elected by the users who generate the highest upvoted content in a community.
wow, that may be the worst idea for the direction of lemmy since the Tesseract guy. bravo
How should it be done better?
By changing the premise completely. You fall straight on the flat edge of the very fallacy that drives sites like Reddit: that popularity is an indicator of quality. (And even worse, mistaking “popularity of A” with “quality of B”). Just a hint: Donald Trump won the popular vote. So has Netanyahu.
I kind of agree with the others here. the current system is fine, but if you don’t like it, make your own instance. lemmy has some problem mods, but they are far from the biggest issue
It’s your premise people are disagreeing with, not your proposal. You have created a proposal to fix something most people don’t see as being a legitimate problem. There’s nothing to discuss or improve, the disagreement is more fundamental than that. You haven’t successfully argued that there is a real problem in the first place.
If you want to convince people your way is better, you probably have to implement it and show them it’s better.
(Spoiler alert: It probably isn’t better. It’s one of those “sounds great in theory, sucks shit in practice” ideas, I think it will be taken advantage of and turn toxic very quickly.)
kylie_kraft was being a little harsh there. Your idea isn’t really that bad, thanks for taking the time to write it up and bring it up for discussion.
mods are elected by the users who generate the highest upvoted content in a community.
I don’t think this is a good idea. I’d encourage you to look at my comment history in this community specifically. Every comment I’ve left in my official capacity is a direct result of at least one user report. I prefer a very light touch moderation style, where I address rule breaking content when reported but otherwise let the community manage itself.
Those comments I left are not terribly popular, and I think that’s the heart of the problem. Running a community effectively and maintaining some sense of order is not generally a very popular activity. Do we really want to make moderation a popularity contest? Beyond that, I don’t post much in fediverse, does that mean I’m ill suited to being a mod here? I don’t think so.
I agree in general that poor moderation can be a problem, but letting the most popular posters run the community doesn’t seem like the fix.
Yep.
If the most popular posters ran it, moderation would make a community pretty flat.
upvotes are way too easy to manipulate on fedi so if you really want democratic elections you would need a better system. but lets just keep it simple
upvotes are not representative of quality, or ethics.
You clearly don’t understand what a thankless job being a mod is. You’re subjected to relentless harassment from anyone you try to moderate. Its not really a job that anyone wants. Mods are volunteers who just want to improve their communities. You may disagree with their policies and enforcement, and you have the right to move to or create a new community. Having elections would just ensure that there’s no one at all to moderate them.
mods are elected by the users who generate the highest upvoted content in a community.
So, your solution is… cronyism? Because this just sounds like creating a special class of power-player users and a smoke screen for them.
Its not that big of a deal. Mods do have power to influence and control a community but I don’t think average users care enough to engage in this discussion required to do community governance.
Its hard enough trying to get people to give a fuck about voting for the leader of their country theres no chance they will care about electing a mod for a Lemmy community.
You’ve got instance Admins who can remove mods if there is to much of an issue. You can easily start a community with the same name. We have reasons why this won’t be as much of a problem as on reddit.
Don’t like the mods at World?
That’s admins not moderators. Admins are for instances, moderators are for communities.
Go make your own Lemmy, with blackjack and hookers. But that’s not sufficient. It takes years to build up a community to have enough people for meaningful discussion to happen, and nearly all communities or instances fail.
Define “fail”? Niche communities will have a limited audience of course, but if the moderators of a big community suck then people will move. It doesn’t take years to saturate the Threadiverse audience, the people are either here or they aren’t, but the people that are here and interested will join your community pretty quickly.
Elections should happen on a schedule and, if a community is particularly upset with a mod, a vote of no confidence can be taken.
Voting is really not much different from moving to a different community. Vote with your feet.
nearly all communities or instances fail.
Define “fail”?
Yeah. It’s not like there’s a quarterly review for coolness or the sub goes away.
The thing that kills a sub is impatience by the founder.
But that’s not sufficient. It takes years to build up a community to have enough people for meaningful discussion to happen
It literally takes as few as 2 people to have a meaningful discussion, so the idea it needs to be some kind of massively large site is already a false premise.
Yeah, agreed. In terms of niche communities I know…
- There are like 5-6 of us posting weekly on !gothindustrial@lemmy.world with occasionals popping in. We get a regular number of upvotes (329 Monthly Active Users) tho not a lot of discussion/comments
- on !sumo@lemmy.world there’s only like 3-4 daily regulars during tourneys and we have more comments than upvotes sometimes, but it’s a fun community
- on the other hand, !juggalos@lemmy.world is pretty dead because there were only 2 of us (there was a third person but they disappeared) and I think we got bored posting to each other
So in terms of a rock bottom number of “engaged community members” to keep a community alive, I’d say it’s closer to 6 than 2. But yeah, it doesn’t have to be a massively large number.
You mean “as few as 3”. With only two people, that conversation could have been an email.
But if you post it to a public forum, it’s like hitting “reply all.”
Maybe the 2 users in Sergio’s Juggalo community already say enough that spectators agree with one or the other and don’t feel the need to add anything more. 🤷♂️
But with it being on a publicly accessible forum, there’s the implicit invitation to join the discussion.
