Watching this man’s trainwreck is so mind boggling. I mean just a decade ago he had every single one of us believing he was real life Tony Stark. I mean even pop culture sci fi like Star Trek mentioned him along Sagen and Einstein… He really pulled the wool over our eyes.

Hey, not every one of us. I disliked Elon Musk before it was cool. I thought he was always obviously just another obscenely wealthy self-centered guy with good PR.

I actually do not understand the widespread hostility that people have toward this kind of thing. I watch a lot of content on YouTube, and I don't want to see ads, so I pay for premium. I watch a lot of content on Twitch, and I don't want to see ads, so I pay for turbo. Hosting a major video streaming website isn't cheap. It's not like these things are unreasonably priced. If you hate the ads so much, then why not pay for the service that the platform is offering you, and for the content that creators are providing on it? And if you don't watch often enough for ad-free viewing to be worth a few bucks a month to you, then why get so worked up about having to sit through an ad every now and then?

From my perspective as a user that has been on reddit for a while, its been on a downhill slide for a long time now. The moderation mechanisms there are really becoming the downfall. Its like police or politicians, the position attracts the very qualities that would make you unsuitable for such authority.

This really is a bigger and more complicated problem than I think most people realize. I helped moderate some larger subreddits for a while, but I burned out hard and will definitely never be doing it again.

You've got the people who really did care, at some point, but all of their empathy for the people they're supposed to be serving got ground down by the insults and derision that moderators always have to put up with, until issuing bans and removing posts and comments becomes rote and they don't see the humanity or the nuance anymore.

You've got people who seemed reasonable when they applied to become a moderator, but as more trust and autonomy is afforded to them they change and become outright abusive. Presumably because it's the only thing in their life that makes them feel powerful. And if they've been around for long enough and moderated actively enough, then removing them can be a whole stressful ordeal that blows a big hole in a team's ability to keep up with the mod queue.

And you've got people who do care, and who are able to take abuse from the community without it affecting their approach to moderation. But for these people, all the drama that arises in trying to work on a team with the former two kinds of moderators becomes increasingly demotivating, until they burn out and step away.

And god forbid you try to help moderate a subreddit that actually matters. On top of everything else, you will have bad actors actively trying to infiltrate the moderation team, to bring in new moderators with a certain agenda and to push out old ones. Or you'll have those who are determined to find a way to personally profit from having a position of power in a large online community, even at the cost of the community itself. I still don't know how one keeps these people out, once they've taken an interest.

I think there are some things that can help. I've seen that, on reddit, having a top moderator who is disengaged from normal moderation but who will keep tabs and step in like a benevolent dictator to arbitrate internal disputes and ensure that there are decisive resolutions can keep larger moderation teams more stable for longer. This way the top moderator isn't so involved and won't burn out, and everyone below them on the moderator list knows that there is someone they are accountable to. (Of course, this all hinges on the top moderator being suited to this kind of role.)

But even so, once a community grows past a certain point, I think it's just not viable to run it off the backs of volunteers anymore.

Simple question: Will you go back to Reddit and other centralized social media platforms, if Reddit step back from the API changes? The benefits of Reddit are obvisiouly, it has million of users and even small communitys have thousands of users.

Most likely yes, I'll be sticking around. Something I very much appreciate about lemmy as an advantage over the big social media sites is that lemmy is set up such that you can be reasonably sure that there are many more human users than bots. On reddit you can mostly avoid the bots by sticking to the smaller subs, but I think lemmy may be able to grow larger than that and still avoid being overrun by propaganda and marketing bots due to the prevalence of manual approval for newly registered users.

I'm definitely hoping to see even more features that emphasize this advantage of lemmy. I'd like to try contributing some code for this myself, at a time when things feel more stable (i.e. no huge sweeping changes in the pipeline, like the HTTP client is now) and I can find some time for it.

For example...

One obvious improvement would be to add an invite system, where new user registration occurs via reputable users sending invite links to people they know.

And I envision a feature where one instance may mark some of the instances it federates with as low trust. Users on the instance would have the option not to see content posted by the low-trust instance's users, or the option to have their content explicitly marked in the UI. This could be used, for one thing, to still federate with larger instances that are less stringent about disallowing bot accounts, but provide a means to view only content where there is a higher degree of confidence that it was posted by a human, or to at least clearly mark low-confidence content.

The #1 thing missing is user notes. In my experience, being able to attach notes to users that are shared among moderators is essential, even for smaller teams or smaller communities.

As the number of things that need to be moderated grows larger, being able to maintain a list of pre-written removal messages will also help a lot.

And as lemmy continues to grow, it will be very important to have something that works like automod that can be configured on either a per-instance or a per-community level. Especially something that can do filtering and auto-reporting. There are a lot of cases where you don't want to outright forbid a certain kind of content, but you do always want to bring human attention to it.

Op is obviously trying to create drama which is being shared on Reddit to discourage people from joining Lemmy ( not lemmy.ml the instance). Any new user who would spend a bit of time would figure out that there are many instances to all tastes, if not they could create their own instance.

Honestly, it was my hope to avoid greater drama in the future. I am concerned that there will be a much larger problem down the line if people join lemmy.ml in large numbers due to events on reddit, and only come to understand afterwards what rules they have agreed to by registering their account there. If the rules are not communicated clearly ahead of time, then I think this is likely to make a lot of people very upset, and this could seriously damage the reputation and adoption of lemmy as a whole.

This is why I have attempted to clarify by commenting where others shared a link to my post in /r/lemmy, that this is only about lemmy.ml specifically as opposed to the entire network and, at least where I stand, only about a need to communicate its rules more clearly.

Locking this thread as the discussion isnt going anywhere productive. If you dont like the moderation in !worldnews@lemmy.ml, you can subscribe to a different one or create your own.

I have not complained about the moderation in !worldnews@lemmy.ml. I am not asking that there be any change in moderation. I feel that I was very careful in making this clear, in the post.

What I have asked is that the moderation policy be stated more clearly and openly. I believe that it is in everyone's interest that people coming to lemmy.ml understand the rules that they are expected to follow.

Rule 1 says no racism or xenophobia. May the new Reddit users learn to recognize their own chauvinist positions are both and bannable, whereas on Reddit they are structurally promoted at the highest levels.

Okay. My position is that they should be informed of this up-front, and that it should not come as a surprise after they have already unwittingly broken the instance's rules.

I see no issues in banning liberal trolls, just because they want to parrot nonsense takes on the internet, and are now seeking to find a new Reddit to vomit onto. Lemmy is not going to be your Reddit 2.0, if you desire to replicate this behaviour. Learn some manners and stop the western vitrolic reactionary groupthink behaviour.

If you read the post carefully, you may notice how I tried to make it clear that I am not arguing against the policy. I am arguing that the policy should be clearly and openly stated, so that it does not come as a surprise to anyone.

There’s no point in acting surprised about it. All the planning charts and demolition orders have been on display at your local planning department in Alpha Centauri for 50 of your Earth years, so you’ve had plenty of time to lodge any formal complaint and it’s far too late to start making a fuss about it now. … What do you mean you’ve never been to Alpha Centauri? Oh, for heaven’s sake, mankind, it’s only four light years away, you know. I’m sorry, but if you can’t be bothered to take an interest in local affairs, that’s your own lookout. Energize the demolition beams.

What about “Remarks that moderators find inappropriate” is not clear? :p

Do you honestly have to ask? Most people will not interpret this as including orientalism.

What is the purpose of having rules if you do not communicate to people the rules that they are expected to follow?

If you try to clearly state all rules, you will just end up with a huge wall of text that no-one reads other than some trolls that try to intentionally walk up right to the border of that is “legal” and test your patience as a moderator.

There was a clearly stated reason for these removals, but it is a reason that does not appear either in lemmy.ml's rules list nor on the page that you listed.

There were additional moderator actions citing the same "orientalism" reason that occurred while I was writing the post:

Screenshot of lemmy.ml modlog

It is my opinion that this is a significant rule to leave unstated.