Well hello again everybody! This has been a wonderful past couple of days. I want to give a huge thank you to everybody who participated in my Under New Management post from Thursday. There was a lot of great feedback, and it will go a long way to helping me better understand all of your wants and needs for this community. Yay!
Yes, this will be wordy. Read it anyway. I will try to be concise.
I spent the entirety of Thursday afternoon and evening working through the over 600 reports that existed for the community. There are still a little less than 200 more left to work through. To be fully transparent, I was given the option of simply mass clearing all of the reports so that I could start with a clean slate. Halfway through, it was very tempting to take the powers-that-be (PtB) up on their generous offer. π But, I wanted to see the reports and see what was being reported (and also by whom). Again, this is my way of learning about this community and its members.
The first thing I want to say is this: for the time being, I have decided that @beep@piefed.world is allowed to stay β with conditions. I have reached out privately to them about their past behavior, and they conveyed that they will respect the rules going forward. I have conveyed back to them that their continued use of the community is contingent on their ability to not break the rules going forward (especially with the alteration of comics). With this said, I fully expect this to ruffle quite a few of those proverbial feathers. But, for better or for worse, the decision is made. Please do not report their posts/comments merely because of who they are. If you do report them for anything, do it because it actually breaks the rules (be sure to be specific about what rules).
With this out of the way, I also want to take a moment to welcome the following people to our moderation team:
- @TheTechnician27@lemmy.world
- @Harvey656@lemmy.world
- @slazer2au@lemmy.world
- @Otter@lemmy.ca
- @cannedtuna@lemmy.world
- @18107@aussie.zone
They have each reached out in some capacity to ask for this job, and I see no reason to not bring them aboard to help out. I expect that they will do their very best to ensure that this community, and its visitors, are treated fairly and with the upmost respect they deserve. Let's be sure that they get the same in return. Everyone made it a strong point that we are all adults here, so let's be sure to act like it.
The only rule Beep was breaking at the time was the per-day post limit. While cleaning that up would be tedious, it'd still be doable; the main reason we haven't (that I know of) is that those posts are long-since submitted and have hundreds of existing discussions which other users contributed to. The per-day post limit is mainly relevant for new posts, so enforcing that rule as it should've been when they were posted wouldn't really accomplish anything except make a lot of user comments inaccessible. It'd be functionally random, too β starting at the first posts, leaving post n and post n + 1, then removing everything until the next 24 hours after post n, loop until we get to the last post they made before it was upped to 5 and Beep was forced to stop breaking it. (That wasn't your question; just addressing it since it has the more complicated answer.)
As for the altered comics, there was no rule in place at the time that comics need to be unaltered and have attribution. We (at least I) don't do ex post facto rule enforcement. Of the existing reports for posts/comments made before dohpaz42's rule changes, none (that I saw) were for violations of the rules that existed at the time, so the only reports I ended up acting on were the ones that violated Lemmy.World's terms of service.
That makes sense for allowing beep to stay. I still don't think it's the right move given the extreme level of bad faith in which he operated, but ok, you guys are making a point about objectivity. Rules shouldn't apply ex post facto to members of the community.
However. Rules should and typically do apply ex post facto to content. If I dig up an old comic with the word "fuck" in it that was never removed, would you remove it now that curse words are allowed? Or would you say there's no current rule against it, so it stays?
I'm sure it would stay. Common sense wins out in that case, just as it should in the other case.
The point of having rules around content isn't to punish users who break the rules. It's to shape this place into the community we want it to be. If we want it to be a community that respects artists, then we need to remove the content that's so blatantly and aggressively disrespectful to artists.
Posts that broke the per-day rule or the old NSFW rule aren't harming anyone. But these posts that are an intentional perversion of a creator's art, removing their name and in some cases surreptitiously modifying the content of the picture, are passively harming those artists every day that they exist in this community. You're leaving them out there to be found and disseminated, to supercede the artist's original work.
I seriously doubt the community values artist integrity less than "hundreds of existing discussions" about what an asshole the poster is, so I think this should be a pretty easy stance to take.