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
Yeah. I’m of two minds about it: I don’t like ceding space to the rabble. I think a lot of times, the right response to propaganda is to call it out and be vigorous about making it clear that it doesn’t belong. Anything along the lines of “just don’t engage, that just gives it fuel” winds up as a de facto surrender where every topic will be filled with… well, with comments along the lines of a lot of the ones you see in this topic. Russia tells the truth sometimes! NATO! The State Department lies! Mint Press is well-sourced, I appreciate alternative points of view even if you don’t! Iraq War! It’s just a nonstop avalanche of talking points. If you look at the voting, you can kind of see some battle lines in terms of which of them are getting traction over time and which ones are unanimously seen through, and I’m always a little gratified when someone comes in with some bullshit and it gets solidly rejected. I don’t think it’s harmful to let that happen. I do think it’s harmful to let them just run around doing this stuff unmolested. The bullshit asymmetry principle is only an issue if you let the bullshitter dictate the terms of the conversation and keep introducing new stuff – or if no one challenges the bullshit and the public discourse becomes just a factless free-for-all.
But as far as lemmy.world, it was just too much to salvage any kind of decent space. There was too much synergy between deliberate propaganda, deliberate trolling, godawful moderation, and standard internet cluelessness and gullibility. I suspect that some of the moderation was bad specifically on purpose, actually. Someone pointed out not long ago that except for MBFC, every one of the baffling moderation decisions the lemmy.world moderators undertook was in the direction of providing cover for some kind of propaganda (UM’s “advocacy” for third parties being a good example). It’s really not normal. Even in spaces that have bad moderation, it’s usually just kind of randomly applied, random people being banned and random people not. Lemmy.world’s moderation is extremely consistent in the direction of allowing propaganda - except for FlyingSquid for a while, and FlyingSquid got harassed and eventually apparently driven out. And now, Jordan made a decision that’s anti-propaganda, and look! People are harassing him and objecting to the decision and spreading bad-faith talking points that Mint Press needs to be allowed, because it’s “well-sourced.”
Yeah, we’re basically in agreement on all of it. I do wonder – what happened to FlyingSquid? All of a sudden they stopped using LW. No comments or posts at all. I hope they are ok.
Yeah, me too. The pattern of people relentlessly dogpiling on FS that he was terrible, in conjunction with the fact that he was active at removing propaganda from his communities, was very sad to me. If his inactivity is connected to the fact that people were constantly insulting and harassing him, that would make perfect sense. And now here is a post which is attacking Jordan, not for any of the various objectively terrible moderation decisions which he’s come out at various points to defend, but because he removed some propaganda.
I have seen the end-stage of a gradual community takeover multiple times on reddit, where a group of bad actors (either corporate-friendly or with a particular political goal) eventually manage to take over a subreddit and run it exactly how they want. That kind of pattern is honestly part of why I am so against Jordan’s “well the mods set the rules so fuck your opinion” attitude as pertains to moderation, even if I don’t really get the read that he is malicious in any way.
I have no idea if this particular instance of pointing some abuse at Jordan because he came out against some propaganda is a piece of a community “takeover” by mods who are quieter and more malicious (or even if the harassment of Squid had anything to do with a pattern like that.) But if it did, that would make good sense. I definitely have noticed one moderator of LW communities who consistently makes pro-propaganda decisions, and they’re super quiet about their reasoning and decisions, letting people like Jordan come more to the front to speak to the community about them.
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.