A comment I left for the LW Admin team

LW is where so many ex-Redditors start off so there's bound to be users among them who were/wanted to be mods and just aren't good at it.

I blocked one of that communitys mods off my feed because they made it obvious that they think being a mod makes them special.

In my opinion it was a mistake for Lemmy to copy the same failed moderation model as Reddit.

In offline politics, we’ve learned from history that non-democratic governance always leads to the abuse of power. But somehow we imagined that in the online world this same dynamic would not play out. However, I don’t have a fully formed alternative in mind right now. It’s a thorny issue.

And I’m not trying to shit on LW admins here. I generally think they’re doing their best. But they’re only human, and it’s hard not to respond to people being shitty to you without being shitty to them. If you have an issue with what they’re doing, I would highly recommend you approach it in a polite way. Not just because it’s likely to have a better outcome. It’s also just the right thing to do.

From the outside looking in… Stop posting on Lemmy.World communities then. I'm not sure why that's such a difficult concept for some people.

It means nothing, because these folks have complete control, but it fundamentally shouldn't be a ban for arguing with a mod or general shit talking. They've used the civility rules to essentially put moving target on what "disagreement" and "ban" looks like.

Telling a mod to fuck off should, at most, result in a deletion.

Lemmy mods jump to scorched earth

Edit tldr many more deletes, far less bans

Edit edit I'm not saying it's cool to just like, be a complete asshole, blow up a community, chase a mod around yelling garbage.

But it seems like mods here are far more trigger happy and "you don't see the world like I do, so banned" than any chat forum I've seen in the past.

Small clarification, @MindTraveller participated in that thread, but was banned while a comment of theirs was removed in a separate post. That's why they're not included in the list.

That's why I'm a proponent of a a truly federated system where for any community you would be able to choose which are the people in charge of moderating/curating your feed.

You need to be able to criticize moderators, and moderators need to be able to accept criticism, both good and bad. Some of those bans really speak towards really insecure moderation. I'm also not a fan of them being able to get complete anonymity while doing so. What usually happens is the problems is a bad apple within the mod team but the rest will still get defensive regardless when the only one you can blame is the entire group, it's group psychology 101.

Even "ACAB" cops all have an ID number that can identify them, and on lemmy it's even easier to create an alt. Heck, if you go over to their Matrix chat and talk to lemmy heads, they don't consider unfair abusive lemmy bans a big deal because "its ok if people are forced to create a new alt, if they aren't culpable they won't get banned again". Literally fucking shit logic, specially considering if a ban was actually justified you would not want to lose track of who that person is masquerading as.

The same reddit double standard is here, and I see that the modlog doesn't even seem to be displaying who the particular admin or mod who performed the action was anymore while still providing only the most minimal explanation with no chance for individual users to contest it. Seriously, all it took was for mods to create a mod alias, but even that was too much?

People left Reddit because of the API problem, but the problem was there long before. Subreddits like modsbeingdicks and others got banned even though their moderation did a top notch job at making sure personally identifiable information was removed from posts and comments in comparison to other subreddits that still remain. The future of Lemmy may very well be limited to becoming a poor man's Reddit. The Stanford prison experiment, read up on it, and if you find it too uncomfortable, jump on the bandwagon of trying to find something to nitpick about the study as it has become customary to do so, doesn't change how relatable it is.

It does seem heavy handed, but given how incredibly insufferable and annoying vegans on Lemmy have been recently, I can't say I blame the admins for deciding they've had enough.

Lemmy.world admins made it very clear they considered the statements being made as animal abuse, and that it wasn't welcome on their platform, and the community mods actually banned an admin in response, and reinstated a bunch of deleted comments.

I think the vegans will probably move communities, and it's probably the best option at this point.