PhilipTheBucket

Honestly, if you ask me I think the whole of moderation should be opt-in. Maybe the default set of "people who are allowed to remove content from my feed" matches exactly with how Lemmy does it currently, but then you can always override it (or add to it for that matter) according on your preference.

This whole model where "the app author" / "the server admin" can override content for "the hapless user," and the user has to have these whole stupid endeavors to come before the operators and community "owners" and beseech them to change their experience, is just a silly design.

It's not trivial to make that happen within Lemmy, of course, but it's also not some kind of crazy pipe dream rewrite. If some moderator is removing trolls and CSAM, then fine, but if they start policing people's allowed political views or making dumb decisions, then the users can as a whole just go "lol no" and disable them from controlling the communication they as individuals are allowed to decide they want to receive. That's what makes sense to me. All this stuff about how to beseech the operators to make things more amenable to us, because of their gracious acceptance praise be, is just kind of faffing about trying for a lesser evil.

For that, I am genuinely sorry. It's not your fault that I'm dealing with some shit and it's completely on me for not compartmentalizing better.

Yeah, all good man. I didn't take offense too much or anything, I have a pretty thick skin as long as somebody seems like they're coming from a good place which it absolutely seemed like you were. I was just honestly confused by it because I thought I was mostly agreeing with you. I looked back over my stuff and I feel like maybe the way I led off the very first reply ("witch hunt") sort of brought in a disagreeable or combative tone, that's all I could really arrive at, but in any case, yeah, I think what you're saying are good valid points.

Moreover, it feels kind of like you're putting that work on me. Like a lot of your comments feel like they're saying that I should have thought about that ahead of time and planned it into my post.

Naw, not at all. I think a lot of this is going to get handled (if at all) by the lemmy.world team, this is just you and me sort of pitching stuff into the suggestion box as outside observers / non dentists as you said in your later analogy. Me saying "this is how I see it" doesn't at all mean I was trying to put something on you for not seeing it the same way or putting all the stuff I had to say about it into your thoughts about it beforehand.

In the tooth analogy, what I thought I was doing was "yes that one is bad, I think it may have come about because of diet and this is what I've observed as causes, and also look at this other tooth too, that one's less visible but there might be a really significant issue with it as well." I wasn't even weighing in on what should happen, since it's not really my or your decision, just kind of giving perspective on issues that I see and how they relate to this particular issue. But yeah not saying not to deal with this particular issue at all.

So again, I am sorry for how I had responded earlier. That's on me. But that's probably the best way I can word what I'm thinking. Sorry <3

All good man, I'm completely fine about it from my end

They should be able to find people there wanting to help mod the community.

Finding someone who "wants to help" is very different from finding someone who's going to following through about putting in the consistent investment of time and energy to actually do it and do a good job at it.

it feels like you bringing unrelated issues (such as other mods, or previous moderation issues) that aren't really on topic for this post can be a bit frustrating from Stamets perspective

I mean it sounds like he thought I was saying a bunch of stuff I wasn't saying. I get how he might have gotten some of it out of what I said, but some of the stuff I very clearly never said. In any case regardless, if you're right that he felt frustrated to the point that he had to start yelling and typing all these hostile messages while I was repeatedly telling him I didn't have any kind of issue with what he was saying, I don't really feel any responsibility for that on my end, I feel like that's a him issue.

Finding someone to moderate a massive community who will do a consistent and passable job at it never mind be "good" in all their decisions, is not trivial. That's part of the underlying issue that leads to a lot of these situations developing.

That's not meant to be an argument for not removing Jordan. There are a bunch of other mods, I'm not even sure that they would need to replace him at all, it might be fine to just take him off the list and replace him with no one (I think that's the most likely outcome / plan honestly.) I'm just saying that including in the equation what happens with the community after is important to include. If the proposal includes replacing him with a good moderator then it turns into an instant win and very clearly a very good idea.

I have no idea why you are being so consistently hostile to me in this conversation.

Dude what on earth?

Because I have an enormous post above that demonstrates behavior across the board that shows he is unfit.

Yes, which I mostly agree with, as I keep saying.

You claim that he is not the source of this but I literally just gave you a mountain of evidence demonstrating that he is

Every example you gave, I agree with, as far as I looked into them which was a decent amount. I'm bringing in other issues which I also think should be solved, some of those I don't think he is the source of, but even that I could be wrong about.

Or are you saying that I'm wrong for going after Jordan here when there are other things to deal with?

Not at all. I'm pretty sure I thanked you for bringing all this up and agreed with pretty much all of it.

If we remove the people at the top who are abusive and replace them with people who are not

The addition of "and replace them with people who are not" is a huge addition here, which would basically address 100% of what I'm saying. "Remove Jordan and then move on" is the only part of what you're recommending that I am even reserving agreement on (not even disagreeing with, but just adding asterisks to my opinion about). If you add "and replace with someone better" to the plan, then it turns into 100% approval for the plan "get rid of Jordan and insert (blank) instead." Assuming that "(blank)" is someone good or even pretty-decent.

I am not continuing this conversation with you. Have a good day.

Okay, you don't have to, I just wanted to give some clarifying responses to some of what you said. Cheers. Like I said, I agree with pretty much all of your message in general on the factual basis.

Fair enough. Here's one that talks about Biden's policies and impacts a little more specifically:

https://archive.is/20240419210514/https://www.vox.com/24134257/biden-economy-inflation-wages-interest-rate

All of it? No. But a significant portion? Yes.

So what I'm talking about is things like setting it up so UniversalMonk gets to stay around for far longer than the community feels he should be, and then people are getting mod sanctions for getting in slapfights with him. That's a much bigger problem than just one mod being a dickhead in some kind of user interaction. My impression, and maybe I'm wrong, is that Jordan didn't set the policy in that case, he was just the face of putting it into practice. Honestly maybe I'm wrong in that. But I do feel like for a community of the size of lemmy.world, we should be able to find out specifically who is responsible for decisions like that, and be able to talk with them. Whether or not Jordan is around, there's still a massive problem in the moderation if decisions like that can kind of drift into codification silently, without anyone really being the one who decides to try to justify it.

You're saying that Jordan decided all on his own to step forward and justify it, which is on him, which is 100% fair also, and I agree on that score. Also, him being a dickhead in user interactions sometimes is still a problem, regardless of anything else that's going on.

(Honestly in general I just don't think that the "lords and peasants" model of moderators vs. ordinary users is a good one, I think a lot of issues like this are pretty inevitable under that model. I actually like Bluesky's user-driven and voluntary moderation model much better. But that is a separate discussion.)

Moreover, he's the face of a lot of this moderation

He brings himself into the threads and argues with everyone insisting that what he did was right. He both admits to his behavior and doubles down constantly.

Yeah. Not being able to admit error is a really bad trait in someone with a lot of responsibility. That's not his only sin but it is a big one.

All I'm saying is that I think there is moderation on lemmy.world that is openly malicious, from a clique of moderators whose names you hear much less often, and I've observed on Reddit this process of sort of knocking out moderators who are guilty of something-or-other to pave the way for the quietly malicious moderation. I've seen it happen on Lemmy to a couple of moderators who I liked a lot more than I like Jordan. I think looking at the whole picture and what the end state is going to be is valuable here, whether or not that picture includes Jordan specifically.

So we should not remove an abusive moderator because good moderators are going to not want to join because they're going to worry about being kicked out but it somehow makes it easier for more abusive mods?

No, that's not what I'm saying at all.

I don't really have an opinion on removing Jordan. I'm just offering my agreement with you that his judgement and way of interacting are often pretty bad. That's the factual basis, and then what people do after that can be up to their decision.

Mostly what I'm trying to add to that is that I think keeping in mind the end state and what we do want things to look like is a good idea. That can help with taking the factual basis into a concrete decision... it's sometimes not a good idea to jump from "this person is objectively a problem in these specific ways" to "get rid of this person and things will be better" without modeling out what the future state is going to be and specifically what a good solution would look like.

I think most of the real (inflation adjusted) wage gains for working class were due to bipartisan covid relief money

Incorrect, this was a lot more what caused it. Covid relief money stopped in September 2021, and its overall impact (in pretty much every country across the globe) was a massive spike in inflation as an after-effect. The US under Biden recovered from it better than pretty much any country in the world.

I am sort of of two minds about this. I really dislike this type of expansive witch hunt against some particular big name mod which is a frequent Lemmy occurrence (which for some reason always includes the accusation that they're a "Zionist" whether or not it is true). I've stuck up for JordanLund in the past. However, I will say that I think his judgement as a mod and style of interpersonal interaction on Lemmy is really bad. This list includes a bunch of pretty fair examples, you can actually see a brief conversation between me and him in one of them which goes about the way that a lot of conversations with him go. Thanks to Stamets for doing all the homework to dig up detailed examples and discuss them, it's clear you put a ton of sincere factual effort into putting this together.

I think a vital question is what the moderation on the big lemmy.world communities should look like. My impression is that there is some significant fuckery afoot (a distinct tendency to deliberately run cover for troll/propaganda accounts for example), and I don't really think Jordan is behind it, although there is a habit of shoving him to the front to take the blame for it when it happens. I feel like there's going to be kind of a shortage of people willing to go through the daily struggle and effort of being a mod of a super-busy community, which not only makes it hard for the mods to take time and patience to make great decisions 100% of the time, but also opens the door for people who are motivated to abuse the position and makes it harder to justify getting rid of them once they're in place.

Everyone knows if the Democrats in this committee weren't a bunch of fakers, they would have super-powered their way into reducing carbon emissions directly, even though they're not in power. It's not enough that the last time they were in power, they worked hard and managed to trim half a billion tons per year of CO₂e from US emissions. In order not to be frauds, they need to do it when they're not in power also. Glad to hear from you bringing a much needed reality check to these proceedings.

Yes, Biden and the Dems handed out enormous sums of money that, probably did or would have helped with climate change; I'll stipulate to that

Thanks for bringing up also that they took massive action on union support and strengthening domestic manufacturing which actually produced some improvement in working-class wages, which is basically un heard of in this country for a US president. I'm glad you keep bringing up factual elements which are important for people to know, so so many people just tend to fall back on lazy stereotypes and talking points in order to make sense of what's going on in Washington, I'm glad to see you not falling into that common pattern.

Oh! So you weren't talking about the whole religious Hispanic community. You were talking about the subset of it who saw through Trump's performative embrace of the gay community and attempts to campaign on the exact opposite of what you said, were deeply aware of his actual actions on LGBTQ+ issues despite the fact that they're not part of that community directly and none of their media ever talked about it, managed to ignore all the propaganda telling them that he valued family and economic issues which were much more directly important to them directly, and decided to vote for him knowing full well that he was going to go after a bunch of people they didn't really have contact with even though nothing they ever did come into contact with ever reminded them of that reality. And specifically of course excluding from that grouping anyone who voted for him for some other reason, like that their families were struggling with groceries and their media was assuring them that he would fix it.

Yeah, fuck those guys. I thought somehow that instead of singling them out very specifically for their very specific actions and motives, you were painting the whole religious Hispanic community. I apologize for not reading more deeply into what you actually meant.