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Notes -
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?
[cw: newfriend opinion nobody asked for]
I'm not seeing anything too wrong here, and in fact have been consistently impressed by the quality of moderation here, which almost uniquely among rat-adjacents tries not to embody the quokka meme like SSC/ACX comments (marxbro my beloved) and many other rat-adjacent communities where even obvious, to my shitposting eye, trolls feed like kings for months until they finally slip up in their gluttony and get b&. Even subtle trolls get their due here impressively quickly from what I've lurked.
Also I've now spent almost a year in a "community" of /g/entlemen and let me tell you, life without jannies is absolutely miserable. Running on the endless attention supply and cheered on by bait posters, two or three ban-evading [slur]s (the established term is "spitefags", etymology hopefully obvious) are enough to derail entire threads, actively screw with people's resources by reporting or DDoSing them, cause endless drama and schisms, etc. etc. for months on end. Moreover, with no moderation the audience eventually gets Stockholm'd into being impressed with the autism on display and starts actually seeing their scourge as "based", which further exacerbates the issue.
Even considering where I'm "from" I found Hlynka's and BC's comments to be in particularly bad taste, it's too similar to 4chan kids that weave insults into their replies because they can and because it's cool (and sometimes because what they say is true, but the former two almost always take precedence), down to the casual drive-by nature of it as they weren't in the chain beforehand. Really only the all-lowercase text is missing from the edge bingo. It's pure brinkmanship, and usually rightly results in mutual shitflinging. Kulak at least took offense and got heated during an actual discussion, which is imo more understandable, I wouldn't have even modded him but who am I to say.
Since Bad Words are unnecessary and carry no actual substance, mods technically can choose to just ignore them, but they're the definition of arbitrary, unnecessary heat, and as I understand this place is focused on preventing that. It's not even just the scary words themselves offending the uh, target audience, it's just when people shoot the shit like this it inevitably spreads and slowly becomes the norm (ask me how I know, cf. "based" example above), people look at it and wonder "hey, you can do that? fuck it, watch me", and the casual tone doesn't help. I'm looking forward to the inevitable day when I'll carelessly drop a stray slur somewhere out of habit and get rightly modded for it, looking back I already have one comment I'm surprised I didn't get warned for in hindsight. Skirted the edge successfully, I suppose.
TL;DR: from a relative outsider perspective, you don't know how good you lot have it. Mods = gods
I think it's been better in recent months than in the past but even in recent months (iirc, not privy to details) people who are very obviously ban evading and trolling still take weeks to get banned.
Different issue, that's not a problem of number of moderators. They knew about that, but extended charity to obvious ban-evading bad faith trolls. I referred to that discrepancy in my OP.
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