Asking specifically because of the situation over at !worldnews. I see that recently, there has been an open call for moderators - https://lemmy.ml/post/5277453 - with the following requirements:
“You have to be on the lemmy.ml instance” and “Should have a history of activity here”
Are these the only requirements really? Because I think that moderators have quite some extraordinary power within a community, to the point that they can just censor whatever is unpleasant to their personal opinion, as if it were violating the community’s rules when in fact it’s not.
(For instance, see the modlog over at !worldnews https://lemmy.ml/modlog/14788 - where everyone expressing doubts about the justification to call “genocide” the Israeli reaction to the Hamas terror attacks is banned. I just think that moderators should show some sense of the actual power they possess and be careful to exhibit it. As in the case above, despite the atrocities of war, there’s good reason not to speak of genocide - and even if that’s not the moderators’ opinion, expressing doubt about the justification to call it so does not violate the community’s rules.)
Those seem like fine requirements. Asking for much more is impractical or impossible. I can’t imagine trying to screen mod candidates with personality tests, or judging their political opinions, etc. Since mods are people they will all have their biases and flaws. Fortunately, Lemmy offers total freedom of choice: you can choose to avoid communities with mods you dislike, and find (or create) communities you do like.
As an aside, Lemmy needs more mods in general. There are plenty of communities with absentee mods, or a single mod who can’t realistically monitor their community all the time. I worry that under-moderated communities are ripe for abuse.
To some extent sure, mods you don’t like are unavoidable. Guess I just want to stress the importance of some awareness that active moderation comes with responsibility, and that includes at least trying to be aware of your own biases, and questioning to what extent the community’s rules legitimize your actions.
When I find a community I might be interested in, I check their rules and if I’m ok with them - go for it. Just damn frustrating to run into mods themselves violating the community’s rules.
Can you link to some lemmy activity to consider abuse? Where do you see things going wrong without moderation?
My concern is hypothetical so far. Imagine a malicious troll starts posting garbage (CSAM, calls for violence, whatever) in a community with an absentee mod. The posts show up on everyone’s All feed. You can report the posts, but without an active community moderator the posts will stay up until the instance admin notices and takes action. Having more mods, and mods who are active users, increases the chance that garbage gets taken down in a timely manner.
Okay imagining is fun but unless you actually see the problem happening, what is it that you expect to change in the future to cause it to start happening where it’s not?
I remembered two current examples since my last post: !fediverse@kbin.social and !internet@kbin.social.
In both cases the lone mod is also the instance admin, who happens to be overworked and distracted at the moment. Both communities regularly get hit with spam pitching Amazon gift cards, prescription drugs, and political clickbait, which appears in my All feed. The posts stay up for days. If those communities had additional mods they could respond promptly and clean things up.
I notice in the case of kbin, all the spam has a negative score. Perhaps what lemmy needs is the ability to hide or de-emphasize content with a negative score.
The whole reddit standard is designed to suppress unwanted content simply through voting. That doesn’t seem to be happening here.