I think it’s important to discuss the state of the community every now and then - feedback for mod behaviour, what’s going wrong, what’s going right, what news is interesting, what news is boring, what should there be more of, what should there be less of.
Mods feel free to remove this post if it violates rules, but I think it’s an important discussion to have.
A lot of people here are USA propaganda zombies. We should use sarcasm to drive them away
There’s too many boring US/China news stories. Just because an article talks about the US or China (superpowers) does not make it interesting on its own.
This community’s mods are rather nice imo
They don’t argue in the comments and ban people for disagreeing - they serve much more as a moderator than as a user with moderator powers, if that makes sense. Better than some other communities (lemmy.world) for that reason alone.
Don’t need to agree with their moderation stance to appreciate them respecting the ideals of separation of concerns. Moderators should not be able to argue so strongly in comments and ban other users because the mod got pissy and lost an argument.
The mods there argue with you and when they cant go on with arguments the ban hammer speaks
That’s what happens on lemmy.world lmao
I can’t remember the last time a mod got into an argument on this community - must have been months ago. I remember there being a few teething pains, but those have clearly been resolved.
Edit: I’m not saying I agree with their liberal use of the banhammer (I think it prevents people from seeing the errors in their opinions because being banned creates an antagonistic environment and likely solidifies their positions), but just look at the comment history of mods on this community: they’re remarkably quiet.
Seems pretty civil and highbrow to me, other than the occasional incursion from certain large instances.
Keep it up
It is somewhat opaque how sometimes the rules apply and sometimes they don’t, like news sources on rule 1, and iirc rule 3 in general. Deleting content should have the mod informing the user and the rest community what happened and have a way for the users to manage mistakes, be it either accidental rule breaks by the user or wrongful modding.
This is a good point and we’ll take it under consideration. Unfortunately, sometimes we do have to make a judgement call, but if there are any particular cases you’d like to discuss please mention them here.
Sometimes those judgement calls have allowed moderation that is at the very least poorly defined in the rules. I posted one comment complaining about a local protest about the current Palestine-Israel conflict that trashed my university’s library and shuttered it for the next few months. I got a delete-ban over that for a “CHUD Opinion”, which is very much not in the rules. And that is far from the first time that I’ve run into unwritten rules that feel like they’re putting a thumb on the scales.
Sources like The Guardian, Reuters, Telegraph, CNN, BBC are sometimes allowed and sometimes removed on rule 1.
The latter case is usually evident while lurking and finding a deep long comment thread. Sometimes one user there has deleted messages and there’s another’s rule 3 content comments left. Apparently these cases seem to usually be mutual rule 3 but it looks like they’re treated differently.
I do think we don’t have a clear policy on opinion pieces and that’s absolutely something we should work towards. Right now it’s more of a case-by-case basis.
If you could point to some specific examples that would be great!
