this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2023
194 points (97.1% liked)

No Stupid Questions

35884 readers
1845 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

Are moderators just purely altruistic? Or do they have an ulterior motive?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Illecors@lemmy.cafe 5 points 1 year ago (3 children)

How does one monetize being a mod?

[–] kratoz29@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] lvxferre@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Pretend that you moderate a food subreddit. And people in that sub talk a lot about fries. Specially classical potato fries and the "new" yucca fries. Often with heavy debates, but often just mentions.

Then you have ACME Yucca Inc., a brand of yucca fries, contacts you. And they offer you the following deal: "promote our yucca fries in your sub and we'll give you money." You accept it, and bend the rules of your community to selectively promote yucca fries and ACME over Wonka Potato Co. and potato fries. Stuff like this:

  • Alice says "eeew, potato fries are disgusting shit, go drink some bleach!". You let Alice do it. And if someone calls you out, you say "Alice is just expressing her opinion!".
  • Bob says "eeew, yucca fries are awful, you have poor taste." You ban Bob for rudeness. "We snoos shall not stand against this sort of hateful comment!"
  • Someone posts a bag of ACME yucca fries. You do nothing.
  • Someone posts a bag of Wonka potato fries. You remove the post as spam then report the poster upstream to the admins, so the poster gets shadowbanned.
  • Some user posts a rather bad recipe for homemade yucca fries. You let him do it, but then you go on your alt account and say "why bother? Just buy some from ACME"
  • Some user posts a rather good recipe for homemade potato fries. You remove the post because the submitter missed a comma, or another shitty reason.
[–] Illecors@lemmy.cafe 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That sounds totally fucked up. Thanks for explaining!

[–] lvxferre@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It is totally fucked up. And the worst part is that it's damn hard to detect: the individual actions usually sound reasonable, you'll only notice that something is off either when it's too late (the sub circlejerks around yucca fries) or if you somehow know which mod did what, and follow his mod actions across a certain period of time.

[–] kratoz29@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Well now I want some of those fries.

[–] lvxferre@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago

On further hindsight, I should've picked another example. Because now I'm craving some yucca fries, too. With bacon, grana/parmesan, chives. And a beer. (They're a common bar snack where I live.)

[–] MedicareForSome@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

E.g. you’re the mod of the vacuum cleaner subreddit. A business approaches you offering payment to recommend their vacuum in the wiki of the sub.