For example, do you need a degree in philosophy to be a moderator of the philosophy community?
If so, how do we test for that?
If not, why do we treat them as authority?
Does your username refer to the extra step your mom has to take when doing your laundry?
Guy, they banned you because you’re an insufferable twat. Your entire post history is either pointless ramblings or arguing with people over stupid shit and making an ass of yourself. Touch grass some time.
It would seem I can only pin my own comments. I was trying to do a stackexchange and choose yours as an officially approved canonical answer.
At least you tried, thanks 😂
You actually need an engineering degree to moderate philosophy. Don’t ask me why, I don’t make the rules.
No. But some users seem to have limited understanding and self awareness in regards to how their posts often fail to contribute anything worthwhile.
If you don’t like the mods of this community, go make your own (blackjack and hookers optional), instead of posting whiny questions because a mod (me) removed your post once upon a time.
Your attitude is actually rather common, unfortunately. Might makes right etc. It’s probably built into our monkey brains.
If you’re finding attitude common, you may want to check your own shoes.
You know what you want? You want Usenet. It’s still around and still chock full of unmoderated communities. Go there and post your bullshit to your hearts content. Please. Go. Like, immediately.
I am actually rather curious: what communities are out there using Usenet boards?
Bullshit? My stuff is pure pearls.
Also, address the topic. No vague ideological handwaving.
I will address the subtext of your post, which is this: You are choosing to be defensive and blame a third party for the poor quality of your discourse, when you could choose to put that energy into improving your content. You’re the guy at the party who shits in the punch bowl and blames the host for putting it there. You’re that Life In Hell comic where the kids are standing over their spilled drinks saying “Society did it.”
I say this with a loving, brotherly hand on your shoulder: You might have a personality disorder
Jesus, do you touch yourself with that finger?
You’re damn right I do. Now go make yourself a nice meal and reevaluate your choices.
Just because you swallowed some sand the other day doesn’t mean whatever came out the other end today is a pearl.
Time to self reflect, realize that your posts are largely percieved as whiny, and move on.
No more than someone who starts a local philosophy club at the library.
Moderators do an important unpaid task as a service to the community. They don’t need a philosophy degree to do stuff like removing spam, doxxing or rude comments.
Sometimes there will be moderators who do end up going on a powertrip and ban everyone they don’t like. In those cases it’s probably best to just move on to different communities. If you feel a bit petty and want to complain, you can post it to /c/[email protected]
Most of the great philosophers in history didn’t have a degree in philosophy.
Moreover, having a degree in philosophy doesn’t make you a philosophy expert any more than having a driver’s license makes you a driving expert.
Don’t treat anyone as an authority, just be respectful of everyone regardless of whether you perceive them as being in a position of power or not.
By the way, you have all of the agency in the world to make a different community, or even an entirely different server, if you feel that you don’t like how things are being run.
A degree might not make the philosopher but it does set a bar. Which is probably better than no bar. These are our precious conversations after all. Our voice in the community. We don’t want to hand dictatorial power over to just any rando. Right?
It’s certainly not required since everybody can just create a community and be a moderator if they want to.
But I think at least with some smaller niche communities, people that have a special interest in them will tend to run them.
At least in my case I think I do have a special understanding of the topic I’m moderating, though I certainly don’t have a degree. Feel free to test me on it, though!
Now I’m curious which communities you moderate, and whether it’s a topic on which I can test you.
I moderate [email protected]. I quite enjoy doing identifications, though those are hard to verify if you, well … don’t know any better :D
edit: also, If anyone does know better, I’ll happily invite them as a mod. Having second opinions is a good thing for these kind of communities!
Cool, but I have no way of testing your knowledge on the matter beyond obvious stuff sych as “how many legs does a spider have”, lol
True. But to proof I’m not a total hack, I do have at least 3 books! And they were actually nearby because I regularly use them.
I do not doubt your expertise, especially since you have an infinite multiple of books on the subject in question compared to what I have.
I know quite a few proper arachnologists from other communities, but none of them uses lemmy. Reddit’s r/spider community is really one of the only things I miss about that platform. It was a great community. We were like 10 people that did identifications and regularly pm’d and tagged each other in posts, because we even knew each others specific areas of expertise …
It’s no fun being the only “authority” on a subject, because I do get shit wrong sometimes and there is no one to challenge it, really.
They don’t need anything to do anything. It’s better here than reddit in my experience but I’ve still had comments removed because the mod disagreed with them even though they broke no rules. People gonna do people shit always.
I got comments about Israeli removed for anti semitism.
My comments were links to wikipedia about population statistics. Apparently pointing out the Jewish population of NYC is anti-semetic.
I’ve only gotten reasons for removal once and it was for disinformation when I said female genital mutilation was worse than circumcision. I havent gotten a reason for the time I was arguing against the use of the phrase “death to America” doubling down to include death to all Americans. I had some comments removed in that thread and decided to delete the rest.
I mean, I would remove that comment too. Mostly because I hate gender war bullshit about ‘who has it worse’. It’s never productive in any meaningful way.
It was a post about the horrors of female genital mutilation and people were commenting about how we should really be talking about circumcision…
I’d ban and remove you all.
Lot of speech policing huh? You’d make a great mod
Yep.
No we don’t.
Maybe there’s some meritocratic action in there.
modding an online community has nothing to do with merit.
at best it’s a popularity contest, most of the time it’s just a matter of dibs. you got there first.
Hmm, a rather shabby system.
Yes. But it’s the best we have that also makes sense. Internet has worked this way since the beginning of time, and it wasn’t a problem before the amount of entitled numpties reached critical mass.
Best? Really? What do you suppose we’re optimizing for here?
Ya, it was better when it wasn’t so popular.
Admins don’t need any qualifications, and neither do the mods they choose.
If you like a community but not its mods, you may be able to find a similar community on another instance, alternatively you may try starting a “competing” community yourself.
But when you create your new community, the population doesn’t follow you.
And, I’m getting that most of us don’t care about a better community. We don’t make waves anyway.
No.
They have authority and if you don’t like it you can create your own community or even instance and moderate that yourself.
They have authority
No. Only power.
That depends on the definition of authority you want to use. The first one duckduckgo shows me is
The power to enforce laws, exact obedience, command, determine, or judge.
Which I’d say is true for mods as related to the community.
But in any case it adds nothing to the discussion.
To simply define authority as identical to power is quite useless.
If they boot dissenters it becomes the other kind of authority too.
No. No and No.
It’s not trust, it’s power. They have power. You don’t.
I’d argue that they don’t actually have much more power than any other user, since anyone can make a community or even an entirely new server if they want. The FOSS nature of the fediverse puts a lot of agency in the hands of the user if they choose to use it.
But when you leave a community to make your own the population doesn’t follow you. So not really.
Who should have authority is a really subjective topic. You cannot find a matric, that will fit the definitions of the complete fediverse. So the current solution basically is ditching the vetting process (as it is subjective) and give everyone the possibility to build their community (or instance) with their own rules, admins and moderators. Then the users can choose where to go.
Is that perfect? No. It just solves the problem of moderation (which is necessary to avoid the worst behavior of human kind) differently than mainstream social media, by creating niches for everyone, which can be isolated by blocking and defederating.
Of course you can build your own instance and set the rule, than anyone, who wants to moderate, has to provide proof of corresponding education for the community. Maybe that works, though I doubt it.
People typically aren’t going to want ot be a part of a ‘fair’ community.
They are going to be a part of one that protects and promotes their beliefs and biases and keeps out the riff raff who don’t agree with them.
Like you’re not going to run a feminist community and allow men’s rights articles to be posted. Because your community is about promoting women’s issues.
A community about ‘everyone’s rights’ is just going to be a pissing contest because people are going to dogpile about their ‘side’.
Or even better, abandon communities and make the post (with its thread) the moderated unit.
