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Is everyone satisfied with the moderation here? For me, it’s getting to unacceptably high levels. For some reason, they recently felt the need to almost double the mods to take care of the shrinking userbase.
Our old charitable custom was to treat strangers as if they were worthy of good faith. Increasingly the mods treat those whose good faith has already been established (such as the recently modded Kulak, Hlynka, Burdensomecount) as if they were strangers.
Like reddit, you can start off as a bastion of free speech, but inevitably mods identify with their function and see mod action as an end in itself, until they become more prison guards than janitors.
So are there good alternatives to the motte out there?
Your opinions on moderation, are, of course, entirely your own prerogative. The Motte seems to form a very small, in absolute proportion, but enormous, relative, in the overlapping circles of the Venn diagram representing "freedom to express controversial opinions" and "relatively high quality discourse", throw in "politely", if you care to be stricter.
You want to get away with saying just about anything? Well, there's 4chan. Maybe Twitter. You want articulate and earnest users making long-form content? Plenty of options, none with a particularly wide Overton Window.
Before I became a mod, or even had any reason to assume they were going to add new ones, I certainly felt the poor bastards were overworked and underpaid (well, they're still the latter). I have access to site usage metrics, and they're largely flat since we left Reddit, which is surprising enough. Is the user base shrinking? Not that I can see by eyeballing a graph over months or years, though I am as concerned as anyone by the loss of the old pipeline from Scott endorsing us or simply through the contagion of being an active subreddit. But I foresaw apocalypse before the migration, and that very much hasn't happened.
At any rate, it would be a bit awkward if adding more mods didn't result in more moderation decisions, or minor changes in how it's done. What would the point be then, at least for the former.
Oh boy, or maybe "if only you knew how bad things really are"(if we didn't take action)
I assure you that much of the suspicion of new users is because of the tendency of certain undesirables to play whack-a-mole, and that, if someone posts something only mildly objectionable, we usually let them right through.
I find Kulak and BC entertaining, they even have a point at times, I am studiously mute on certain others, but Kulak didn't get banned (last time I checked), merely warned not to be unnecessarily combative, and BC is an out-and-proud fan of drama who got away with a lot before a time out.
What you can get away is with is pretty proportional to your standing in the community, believe me I'm sure I've gotten away with things I feel compelled to mildly mod these days, if only because I hold myself to higher standards.
Not that I'm aware of. The SSC subreddit is neutered. The Schism, an offshoot of us more tuned for progressives (and I believe) more restrictions on speech is barely in action, the Culture War Roundup subreddit, well it was dying a while back, and I half suspect is gone. /r/Drama? For very loose definitions of "good alternative", I suppose, though I'm glad it exists. It's slim pickings out there.
The CWR subreddit is barely active anymore- I think most of the non-shared regulars got permabanned from Reddit and the shared regulars don’t feel the need to post their as often.
Maybe datasecretslox?
Ah, I forget DSL exists, and I'm not even sure what it's like over there. All I can really say, after a quick look, is that the design of the site on mobile leaves much to be desired.
Though I think they have harsher moderation standards, but that's from vague memory.
DSL's pretty okay.
Getting modded does seem to always result in a ban, but there's still a long ladder of them, and what actually gets modded seems a bit less strict.
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