I'm splitting this into two parts. First identifying the issue. And second my personal idea for a solution. I'm hoping for a lot of discussion so please be clear which part you are responding to.
Part 1: The problem
Reddit as a platform has many flaws. Obviously being a corporation means they're terrible no matter what. But their platform is also flawed. Even if Reddit was 100% community owned the platform would still be flawed. The number one thing that is ruining Reddit are the tyrannical mods.
Each community on Reddit is a dictatorship. Whoever is arbitrarily in charge of a community has full unrestricted power to do whatever they want. The people who are actually creating the content and sharing it are totally at their whim. I understand that modding is a difficult and thankless job, but toxic mods ruined Reddit and Lemmy will do the same if it's not addressed.
Lemmy's answer is to allow people to create their own instances. Don't like the mods at World? Go make your own Lemmy, with blackjack and hookers. But that's not sufficient. It takes years to build up a community to have enough people for meaningful discussion to happen, and nearly all communities or instances fail. We absolutely need a way for mods to answer to the users.
Part 2: My solution
My solution is simple. Lemmy is built on the community. Everyone helps run it. Therefore mods are elected by the users who generate the highest upvoted content in a community.
Elections should happen on a schedule and, if a community is particularly upset with a mod, a vote of no confidence can be taken.
I understand that this will be a huge undertaking. But I truly believe that we need to fix this issue for Lemmy to thrive long term. Or else we'll just end up with another Reddit.
I don't even like leaning to heavily on moderation. I want emphasis to be on users ability to curate their feed.
That won't work because casual users don't want to do anything. The 90/9/1 rule says that 90% of users don't want to do anything, every extra click required scares them away.
yeah the 90 aint here yet. I kinda view it as an additional feature. anyone who can't handle it im pretty fine not being on it. trust cafe has a pretty good example where you can give everything a rating and your personal ratings will determine your feed.
Just like here, if you sort posts by Hot or Top.
no here its based on public votes. trustcafe you rate everything 0-100 and everything starts at 50. users, posts, replies, urls, whatever. everything can be rated. I want the sorting to just use the users preferences and not other peoples although I don't mind a degrees of freedom setting. like taking into account the rankings other people you highly rank give things.
And I want emphasis on websites-as-community-hubs. Which means we have some significantly opposing desires.
Now what?
I don't see how our desires are opposing. I just want control of which things I see based on my preferences. im not saying communities can't exist. I like the forum format.