Context:
The article in question was well sourced, factually accurate, and written by a well-renowned author and journalist whose work appears elsewhere too, regardless of which outlet published it.
Nonetheless, Jordan Lund is once again blindly trusting a pro-zionist conservative outlet masquerading as a bias and fact checker that nothing from anywhere that criticizes the fascist apartheid regime can be reliable 🤦
This is such a weird point of view. The mods don’t “own” the space. It’s not your server. You’re the representatives of the community. It’s very weird for the community to speak with an overwhelming voice that they want someone banned because they are toxic and unhinged (and also, breaking the objectively stated rules of the community, with things like how many articles posted per day), and for the mods to say, “No, we decided they stay.” Them eventually deciding to ban, after the behavior got even more objectively unacceptable, doesn’t excuse it.
It’s like the difference between how Trump runs the government and how a normal president runs the government. Trump doesn’t “own” the country. He has a responsibility for it. The ownership, but not the responsibility, is what makes someone bad in a leadership position. It’s not to say you need to automatically accede to any loud contingent of the community that’s yelling about something. But UM was about as clear-cut a case as it is possible to get, and I cannot for the life of me understand someone who’s entrusted to keep a community of people a good place, who decides to come out and tell the members of that community “No, we’ve decided that this person needs to stay in the community, and we don’t care what you think about it.” I have no idea who these moderators are who are looking at UM’s behavior and deciding “yeah that’s not rule-breaking,” let alone a consensus of them.
I think it is, in part, a product of the weirdly off-kilter incentives that exist on the modern volunteer internet. I sort of suspect that what’s going on is that every human being kind of has an internal mental model of how much the rest of the community “owes” them, and that colors their behavior and how they adhere to the social contract. In places where someone feels like the community has “given them so much,” that kind of thing, they’ll really have respect and good dealing in almost everything. They’ll fight hard to keep the community as a good place. They won’t fall back on bullshit excuses like “well he’s not breaking any rules (today).”
I do see the other side of it. I think almost any moderator on the modern internet gets put upon by so much thankless crap on a day-to-day basis (some of which you touched on elsewhere ein these comments) that your what-I-owe-the-users meter is absolutely pegged at “0” only because it can’t go lower. I get that. I don’t think it’s really wrong for you to feel that way. I have a lot of sympathy for what mods do and it’s a pretty critical part of keeping the community okay. I’m just saying that it would be hard for be in that position and take at all seriously what any one of “the users” thinks or wants, or even a group of them. That is wrong though. That is your position, to support the will of the community to build a good place to be. Not to lecture the community on what it should be, with whether that is good or bad as irrelevant or subordinate to “the rules.”
I don’t know, man. I don’t really know what the answer is, and I don’t really like the thankless and difficult position that mods on busy communities get put into. But this mindset is wrong.
Yeah Jordan didn’t ever say “they didn’t cross the line today”, it was much worse than that. He pretended each comment and post stood on its own and that he had no way of knowing UM was a troll because he could make a pretend argument that in each case no rule was broken. It didn’t matter that UM broke the trolling rule every 10 minutes for many months because we cannot possibly just view their profile and see an OBVIOUS pattern that a large swath of the community noticed.
Yeah. And if UM was objectively breaking the rules, for example on frequency of posting, Jordan would just fall silent or make some kind of joke about it, or remove a couple of the offending posts while pretending it was some crazy one-off that something like that could have happened.
The vibe I get is that Jordan is the fall guy who has to be the public face of bad moderation decisions being made by someone else. He basically said as much, when he said the mods “talked a lot” about UM and this was the decision. So it’s not purely his fault, I think the root of the issue is elsewhere. But that’s just speculation, and he is choosing to come out and publicly defend these absurd moderation decisions, so whatever. Eventually I just decided that the solution was not to fuck with the affected subs anymore, and often when I wander back into them I feel very vindicated in that decision.
Yeah I agree with almost all of this. I think he’s the fall guy, I just had said that in a comment a couple hours ago actually. But he doesn’t seem to mind it. Because as you said, he’s still publicly defending those bad and wrong decisions.
I blocked the politics comm on LW and I’ve been less angry since. That place blows
Nothing you are saying is true. And it’s off topic. I had nothing to do with OP’s situation and I’m not the mod in question. :)
Off topic. I had nothing to do with OP’s situation and I’m not the mod in question. :)
The mods set and enforce the rules of the community, if someone isn’t breaking the rules, they can be as obnoxious and hated as they can stand.
We looked at them, repeatedly, and were actively waiting for them to cross that line, when they did, we took action.
This happens on the back end a lot, there are a couple of other accounts (which shall remain nameless) under discussion now.
In those two cases, they aren’t in my communities so I approach it as “not my circus, not my clowns”, but provided an opinion. I think they’re ban worthy, but it’s ultimately up to the mods of those communities and admins to make that call.