Edit2: the ratio is amazing. I’m exhausted. This has quadrupled my hexbear time for the day and I will be limiting myself for a bit lol. I feel like we got somewhere in a couple of good threads thanks to Hellinkilla and ratboy. Good luck, comrades.
Edit: the rant wasn’t clear enough. In Previous struggles users have expressed frustrations with how mods/admin decisions are made. I would like to discuss how they are made and hear from them. Mods have also stated before that they wish we could be better, I’d like to hear how and know how they think this should be approached.
Rant/effort post coming:
What’s the follow up to the recent problems with how mods/admins have handled recent issues? Did I miss something? Can we get some explanations about how this site is structured and what roles we see for admins/mods generally?
history of struggle session, not necessary but gives context
We had a fairly large and fairly one-sided struggle session a couple weeks ago. Z_Poster was banned (and still is, as far as I know) and the emoji was added. Some users (thinking of @hellinkella, smong others) did some effort to really parse out where the pain points were and who was involved (largely Zionism inherent in some positions, Jewish exceptionalism). Only the emoji and banning occurred with no other promises/ideas from mods/admins.
There then followed a leak of mod logs where opinions were still very different than the userbase. I would encourage people not to open it or ask for it, please, and especially not to share it. But I think a significant amount of us did see messages that, regardless of context, gave an image of admins/mods that think the userbase hates them, disagreed with the userbase in significant ways, and which wants to steer us in a better direction. The mod chat was also absurdly active at the time, but there’s been little talk about what WAS discussed, only discussions about what was missed, where more context is needed, and things that were not done in a timely manner. This was not further discussed. (Personally I’m super appreciative of you all, doing work I don’t want to do on a website I enjoy thoroughly, and don’t hate any of you–including previous ones I’ve argued with, but would like to see some changes which will follow below and hopefully other comrades will add to it/change it for the better).
We had an EM/POC post which was tangential to that, but where there seemed to be large support for the userbase with regards to the ideological differences between mods/admins and the broader userbase. There was also a banning for which apologies followed quickly, but which indicates the structural failure more generally. There were of course other topics covered, which I won’t speak on here. I didn’t see any solutions proposed and accepted, from any of the topics relevant to this post. (Please correct me if I read this thread wrong, don’t want to speak for you, EM/POC comrades.)
Was there a follow up? Is that coming? Is the discussion behind the curtain of the mod chat? I understand you all have lives, so don’t spend all your time working on this, but some knowledge of how you’re working would be good. Otherwise it feels like purposeful pushing back of feedback/decisions so that we will forget the passionate feelings or give up. If that’s the goal, it’s a horrible strategy and should just be explicitly told. “3 months after a struggle session is the earliest we will make changes in processes” is better than nothing.
I would also recommend we have an open discussion about the direction of the site. It seems the mods/admins have indicated to have better ideas for what we can be (I remember this from the “dunk” discussions too), but have not made clear what their position in that is. Enforcers? A vanguard (with our input as leading determinant)? A different vanguard (against our input for but in our interests)? Theoreticians that have the ideas but want the users to take the lead? Knowing this would make clearer how to interact with you, and how to make our experiences better. Maybe we do need growth and improvement, but we haven’t been clear about how, and talking down is how most have experienced that. I already love this place, so when I’m frustrated I don’t think of leaving. But that’s not universal
I’m gonna say this. I was a lurker for a lot of struggle sessions. My lurking could go back to at least a year, but my memory is extremely fuzzy about that stuff.
I think the issue is, for lack of a better word, solved. Some more discussion could be useful, and from what I heard, the admins are planning on it, but what’s done has been done, and as far as I understand from a different perspective, the issues have been mostly rectified. Zionist mods / admins? Nakoichi got demodded and apologized. Lyudmella also apologized to my understanding. To those apologies, all I can say is that what’s done is done. The consequences linger, but the only way to fix those consequences is better action going forth.
And you know what? It seems like better actions have been done. There really is no other way to heal social wounds than to never commit them again and to let the positivity of future interactions and the march of time keep moving forward. The emoji got added, LoveYourself got unbanned, and I’m sure the mod team had a discussion about it. It makes sense that LoveYourself doesn’t want to be here anymore, as it’s a very fucked up thing that happened to LoveYourself.
And to that, all I can do is repeat myself. Discussions can be made, things can be clarified, new systems made, and old systems overhauled. But at the end of the day, there’s no other solution than to not do it again. I like to believe they saw that people didn’t really like what they did, and it’s fermenting in their brains. Hopefully they learn, they grow, and we can all forget this. I mean hopefully, though, as this can go any number of ways. While I want to put stock to the hopeful path, I have no idea what will happen. To be reductionist about it, I just hope that good things happen and bad things don’t happen.
I kind of just chalked the whole thing up to being our biannual Nakoichi gets drunk and starts banning people and triggers enormous drama moment.
Thankfully that’s no longer possible.
Why is that?
Nakoichi isn’t a mod anymore, so the specific case of Nakoichi banning someone isn’t possible.
That mods can do that generally and be protected internally, disrupting the site negatively causing people to leave in Anger or whatever, isn’t solved. Maybe it shouldn’t be because the user base and/or mode team doesn’t want that. But can we at least have a little clarity on how we should deal with it so there’s some reference/reason in the chaos next time?
Unless they make an alt, and then the admin/mod team mods the alt, as was discussed by the admin/mod team already.
Also a process problem for sure. I don’t think it happened (also saw that in the logs, Nakoichi didn’t want to), but the fact that we can’t know is something which will cause more friction and just isn’t necessary.
Can we prevent things happening in the future? Or can we plan on it? As communists we should be thinking about long term strategic planning. That’s too big of a term for what I’m asking here, but preventing future mistakes in some way seems easy, instead of only preventing repeating mistakes. It’s exactly what the goal of the EM/POC post was, but with a slightly smaller scope
I get the feeling everyone does have ideas about how this place should be run, or at least how they should be part of it, but outside of becoming a mod/admin there’s little that’s clear.
And was there anything that could have been in place to have prevented it in the first place?
Other than “people shouldn’t be dirtbags” or “this specific person should not have been a mod”. In terms of systems, processes, policies. In 20/20 hindsight, if we could fiddle with the past to avoid this outcome, what would that entail? If you don’t like the specific mod, what general guideline would have identified that person as unsuitable at the time? Or maybe there could have been a slightly different “job description” that would have led the same person to do different things?
The only real thing I can think of that would solve a lot of issues is if people were more cognizant. It feels like a lot of people (including myself sometimes) just write something and then hit post. It’s easy to do, but it also has huge consequences in some situations. That’s why I try to make it an effort to constantly think through my posts and be careful about what I say, lest I make mistakes. I’ve drafted long posts before, and never posted them because I realized just how bad it’d be.
If other people could pick up this mindset, a lot of issues I think would be solved.
I don’t disagree at all with this, but this is how we can individually solve something for only ourselves, not for a group.
Try to enforce that mindset, I guess. Maybe make a required “wait-to-post” feature where, after typing the last character, it requires you wait a duration (3-8 seconds) before you can actually hit post? That’s spitballing, and I can very easily see that being a bad idea, but it’s something.
that would be a very neat lemmy feature which one could enforce on oneself, or could be enforced on user as a condition of not being banned.
I have a thing set up in my email that delays sending for a set time period (I think I have it set to 2 minutes) after pressing “send”. During that time you can issue an “unsend” an email if you think better of it.
Open an issue or PR on the lemmy repo.
While I would, I don’t really feel comfortable making a GitHub account (even if anonymous).
well then it will only exist in the realm of your imagination