preface: not speaking as a mod here in an official mod context. this is in chat for a reason.
i’ve been watching a community melt down over its new community conduct policy. that policy took probably six months to draft—and the backlash to it may have honestly cost the community six months of hosting money, because for all the good the moderators who drafted it have done they made one big fuck up in drafting it. (bad enough they’ve since reversed course, but the damage is done)
i have many thoughts on this, and the general implications it has.
it goes without saying: we (as moderators) will make decisions You will not like sometimes. that’s just how it is. we cannot accommodate everyone, and it will almost certainly be necessary at times to disregard user opinion to do something for the greater good.
but: can we count on You to understand why we do that? will You give us the good faith and benefit of the doubt that even if You disagree, and stick by us so we can all build something better?
my pessimistic sense is no, absolutely not. i think that a lot of people have been conditioned—by reddit, by twitter, by other platforms—into just assuming the worst of moderation. i think most people have given up on giving any benefit of the doubt to platforms, too. it’s understandable: moderation and Existing is shit on basically all of them. there’s no face and even less accountability. rules are inscrutable and haphazard. enforcement is farcical and comical. you are much better trying to just improve things in Your vicinity than hope these sites do it for You, and to never trust a word any moderator says.
but we’re not those platforms. the community i’m watching is not a platform like that—it tries very hard to give a fuck, and to build something special. we are like them in trying to give a fuck about everything we do and build something better, and i think it shows in everything we do.
and yet it still feels obvious that when we inevitably fuck up something here, we will go through the ringer as if we’re a reddit or twitter. all the community and good faith we’ve built will immediately be discarded in one swoop, and we will not recover to that point of community trust again—because everyone has been conditioned to assume the worst. we will probably lose donations and in kind possibly financial stability. we, from that point on, may then have to scale back our involvement and start to assume worse of You just for safety reasons—we are people too, and we are being vulnerable in the level of transparency being offered here.
and i guess i just i don’t know what to do about this dilemma—or what even can be done. it’s part of why this isn’t being said in a moderation capacity, just a user one shooting off into space. what can i say, even? words hardly bind you to giving us leeway and understanding when we err.
but, to awkwardly conclude: i feel like we need that leeway and understanding for this all to work, and go differently than everything else. the implicit nature of the reaction to these fuck ups is that we have to be perfect Or Else, but we literally cannot be. that’s the nature of moderation, and of people, and i’d hope people get that when we inevitably fuck up it’s not because we’re like reddit or twitter—it’s because we care, and we care about making this place good for you too.
idk. goodnight, folks. i’ll be off for parts of tomorrow hiking.
Only sharing because this post made me think of it. Techdirt.com and Engine, a non-profit organization, released a game called Moderator Mayhem.
It’s a browser-based mobile game, and you will learn that you have to make your moderation decisions by swiping left (take down) or right (keep up), and try to align content with the policies of the company (a fictional review site called TrustHive).
Anyone interested can play the game here: Moderator Mayhem
i tried this out and my anxiety spiked - so I guess it got the point across lmao
All this is new to me, but I think you are doing it right.
Beehaw is very appealing for people who want to Be(e) Nice. People who don’t can go to another instance. Expanding Lemmy is certainly a goal, but that doesn’t have to fall on Beehaw’s shoulders. Come a mass migration/influx to Lemmy, I’d rather see Beehaw closed to applications for a while than have mods overwhelmed and standards fall.
Mistakes happen. But if you keep it simple, keep it at a manageable size, and keep it populated with easy-going people who want to be nice; those mistakes will be minor blips quickly explained and quickly let go.
(I deeply appreciate the absence of downvotes. It creates a positivity for the members that also enfolds the mods.)
One of the things I like about Beehaw is that it doesn’t try to be a new Reddit, it has a core philosophy the admin team all support, and as long as you make decisions based on that core philosophy, you can’t go far wrong.
Sure, some decisions might drive people away. But if they disagree with the core philosophy, is that a bad thing? Quality over quantity - servers can be scaled up and down as the number of people (and donations) fluctuate.
As long as Beehaw remains a place you can be proud of, I wouldn’t worry about anything else.
also on that site
people who go this hard about moderation have never had to run a community before lol. it’s not easy. i think the most annoying thing was the fact that people got mad after the changes were reversed because it was “too quick.” How do you even satisfy people when that’s what you’re going up against?
like, these admins were being ridiculously transparent and that still wasn’t enough for a lot of people. it’s kinda funny, it reminds me of my sister, although on a smaller scale. she is not very quick to forgive, and we’ve discussed the reasons why. and whilst I understand them, I feel like that mindset dampers her experiences with other people. i feel the same way about this.
I’m sorry if this digs into your wound, I want to fully sympathize. I’m sorry that communities can stomp on a person’s vulnerability at times, that
sockssockssucks.What was the mistake?
What was the mistake?
specifically the issue was is where to draw the line when it comes to fictional, non-human artistic depictions of sexual acts involving minors. this is a weird, very niche, very complicated moderation thing that probably no normal person is going to understand from the jump (generally it’s the purview of internet furries and a subset of anime and manga fans)—but it’s also one where opinion is a lot more varied and less settled than you’d probably think from how i describe it.
a lot of people straightforwardly consider art like that analogous to pedophilia—pretty easy to see why, don’t necessarily think it’s an unfair conclusion to draw as a snap judgement. but there are many people who have essentially been victims of child abuse or pedophiles, and for them that kind of content helps them navigate the trauma of their experiences without uh. being pedophilia, lol. if you ever encounter people like this it’s generally quite clear they’re not pedophiles and they abhor any idea of harming children.
but i’m sure you can see that makes it extremely hard to draw any line here, moderationally speaking (especially if you can’t just do what we do and have one rule). there’s the obvious ick factor on one hand in allowing it, but the very real consequence of the latter group not having a space despite not doing anything wrong collectively because others might. and if you’re making a conscious social space, is that fair? i’d think not.
now personally? i have no stake in the game and i don’t care where the site falls on that one. i think you can make very good justifications for both positions. but more than anything for me: the staff of that site spent six months trying to find a line to draw there—they didn’t bullshit it—and for all intents and purposes with the reaction they might as well have spent an hour on it between martinis. nobody cared that they tried to be fair to everyone, and to make as much of an accommodation as possible to the issues of the first group while not excising the second and giving them a space. a lot of people made it into all or nothing, absolutist issue: if the Wrong Side won, they’d leave and never come back and make the site’s reputation mud. when they Won, they paraded it around and still held their Win against the staff because they even considered anything but the Winning Side’s position.
and that last bit? that’s the shit i’m worried about here. the fuck up here is functionally cosmetic, in my mind, and its form doesn’t matter. ours will almost certainly not be around an issue that emotionally charged or complicated to navigate—but how it plays out will probably be the same or similar, because the rage impulses reddit primes you for are not that much different than the rage impulses of twitter.
Damn. I see how that can be a hard line to draw. I definitely am against that in my immediate reaction, but I also am very disconnected from either community. I do not know how people who have been abused in that way navigate their trauma. Hopefully we all get better at communicating over time. It’s unfortunate how black and white people see things, and how when they see something as wrong they’ll consider it beyond discussion, not worth thinking about. Good luck with moderation in the future.
yeah i’d generally say my outlook is optimistic–we haven’t run into problems here so far at all, other than a handful of comments we have to keep an eye on–but this is just the stuff you have to think about long-term when you’re trying to build a community lol
You’re correct in that not everyone will like every decision the mod team will make.
To me, so long as the reason that drives that decision is clearly stated I won’t be upset. There is a certain level I can tolerate as well, beyond which I would inevitably leave (e.g. RAID-shadolegends sponsored yeehives, or if moderation became so strict to the point I have to watch every word to avoid being exiled), but beneath which I will express disagreement but am OK with.
You have to remember what your priorities are, what makes the community what it is in order to keep it thriving, and be comfortable with them changing over time. As you wrote in another post, beehaw in it’s first iteration didn’t really take off, and since then you probably have refined or changed your thinking on it through long periods of reflection or breaks from it.
You will face tough choices too. “This decision might cause us to lose half our monthly donations, but better aligns with our founding philosphy”, or “we’re losing money so we have to aggressively fundraise or else shut down, even if those things are not what we wanted to do with the community”. Talk amongst the admins, talk with the users to try to find ways forward.
I said it in the other post and I’ll say it again: if you make a mistake, own up to it but more importantly forgive yourself for it after coming to an understanding of the situation. If people leave, they leave, but thanks to the beauty of federation they can still participate from another server.
You raise a good point moderation has been conditioned by a lot of the internet to be full of power hungry shit bags that you can do nothing about and as such its assumed that if a change is done by the moderators that is unpopular it is automatically bad even if it was decided on with good intentions.
I personally think that to solve this transparency is key before making a decision that effects the community announce it and get feedback try to understand why people dont like it and make sure your intentions are clear so that there is no miscommunication.
Make sure lines of communication between normal user and admin are open so that we can state our opinions look at the reddit black out its being done because it is the only way people can get the admins to listen and other attempts at making change happen failed, by accually taking into account the opinions of the users and having an easy way to talk to the people in charge you avoid them feeling powerless and deciding on more drastic measures
Internet moderation seems like a fun combination between anonymity, group dynamics, and a reflexive attitude to distrust authority. I had my first post deleted on Reddit in my ~12 years just recently, and my first reaction was to get hot under the collar and spout off to the moderator. I held off sending for a few minutes, softened my language, and sent a respectful message. No group and I like to think I am reasonably self-aware.
I don’t know what the answer is. The friction will always be there, and I think that 1x1, it’s reasonably easy to find a place of understanding and forgiveness with people and moderators acting in good faith. But groups seem to create a toxicity bomb and fly off the rails - one of those things you can’t really control for - you can only do your best.
