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Shocked Pikachu face meme.
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this post was submitted on 19 Jan 2024
1475 points (97.3% liked)
Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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MODERATORS
Surely, attacking the mods of a community and calling them whiny babies will get you what you want, right?!
They are my mods, they should do as I command
I’m a motherfuckin user. I log onto this website sometimes. That means I dictate when you shit and for how long. Just be glad your breathing is out of my control. For now.
Aha but your breathing is now under my control now.
You are now aware of your breathing.
“You are now manually breathing” works substantially better
What does air smell like?
Doesn't that increase the degree of control I have over my lungs, if anything?
It’s all fun and games until a disgruntled banned user tries to doxx you 🫠
People have gotten fucking insane with this "Everybody should do exactly what I think they should do at all times full stop and if they don't they're literal fucking garbage, and if you disagree or care about a different thing than me you're just a whiny baby whining about baby stuff" mentality.
I'm a lefty, and it's an election year which means I get to deal with this for 10 months straight from the dems.
Title of my sextape
This man right here officer 📸🤔
And if there is a CHANCE you might do something they don’t like…they cancel their primaries
Unless you're a mod. Then it's "Everybody should do exactly what I think they should do at all times or ban."
I don't miss that part of Reddit. haha
Oh it’s here too. Take a look at some modlogs.
I forget that you can, not sure that I want to haha
I don’t miss Reddit. Full stop.
That's less entitlement and more "trying to create the community they envision", though. It's entitlement if they feel like they deserve users after fucking around. Mods, or really any online community leaders, can do whatever the fuck they want as far as I'm concerned.
God you're telling me. I'm a right winger, and I am not looking for to voting for the 77 year old orange just because the GOP can't figure out how to do a primary.
Still going to do it because of the issues at hand, but I'm not happy about it. I just hope he doesn't pull a 2nd round of bump stocks.
adjusts monocle
That’s no way to speak to us landed gentry, you filthy casual.
They are my mods. I may insult them as i please. If others do so, they die!
Landed gentry!
When I read that I never went back.
I never fully understand that, is that an insult? English ain't my first language and I was honestly not sure if I felt offended by that lol, I swear I looked for it on the web, but it wasn't clear for me either.
"Landed gentry" was a social class of people who owned estates and, well, land. They didn't have to work; they made their income by profiting off the work of the farm hands, merchants, etc, who worked on their land. The estates these landed gentry owned, along with their wealth, would be passed down to their children when they died. It meant the gentry did very little to earn their station in life, but still had a fair amount of power and wealth.
How spez thinks it applies to Reddit mods, I'm not entirely sure. But he definitely meant it as an insult. His full quote was:
So I guess he was upset that mod teams get to select who else is a good fit to join the mod team? Of course, the issue is that he is the landed gentry - users didn't vote for him, nor can they remove him; and he's profiting off the work of the people who post content and the people who spend their time moderating.
Right wing turds like Steve tend to project really hard and never have the capacity to realize it.
It's interesting that he's using an insult from England and in a context which would make him Royalty trying to control the Barons.
He has to just be riling up the "freeze peach" crowd with that line. He must know that a "users vote" way of selecting mods is always going to be a race to the bottom in terms of diversity and quality as nobody with a unique vision is going to subject themselves to the will of a bunch of reddit-brained people.
When I was part of the Vaxxhappened protest I came to the realization that pretty much all mods of big communities are not "power happy" autocrats, but on the whole surprisingly weak-willed and living in a perpetual fear of getting removed. It was sad, but I have to imagine Reddit Inc is very happy with the arrangement. These people are working 24/7 for free, on one of the many indistinguishable feeds of memes. I was very surprised the API protest happened to the degree it did at all.
It’s an insult. It’s basically saying “these people are powerful and out of touch and have no right to it”. As opposed to the reality that yeah there’s mod abuse, but also it’s a thankless job that sucks but you keep doing it because you care about the community and when you ease up you get criticism, when you crack down you get criticism, and when you try to be transparent you spend so much time writing out why you made a decision that you hesitate to actually moderate and also you wind up getting dragged into arguments over the validity of one of three fucking rules because they didn’t like that specific rule that couldn’t be clearer. And no matter what you do you’re going to get abuse in the modmail.
Yeah, the problem is that the subs used to be the only place on the internet where a given community could be mainstream, so being in a position of power means you're stuck trying to make everybody happy.
On federated networks you can have multiple communities with the same local name coexisting, so if you don't like one set of mods you can go elsewhere. I'm not saying that solves all the problems, but it takes off the pressure of being the piracy sub mod.
Yeah but breakaway communities existed then. Underscore, rename, different order… all this shit was there. You can have the same name now which is cool, but you always could have something close. It’s the community and users people care about and starting a new one is a pain in the ass
There's a big advantage to having the sub with the most obvious name. If you want to talk about Canada you're going to go to /r/canada first, not /r/onguardforthee.
To give you some background on the term, it refers to rich land owners in England who had a lot of inherited wealth through the estates they owned (landed, meaning they own land). These "gentry" generally led lives of leisure and wealth, but they didn't actually do anything, they just inherited it all through their family wealth and land ownership.
I'm sure I have details of that a little off, but that's my best explanation of it.
My old modmail sure seems to indicate people thought that way
I used to be a mod at /r/soccer, and it was a great way for you to lose faith in humanity.
We saw it all, racism, death threats, insults, even an instance where one user found a mod's place of work and stalked them. We also had one guy that was obsessed with a footballer spam the sub with bots for several days, because he wasn't allowed to post whatever he liked. It took the admin's three days to fix...
More often than not, it was people that didn't read the rules, and got upset that all subs didn't run on the idea that "if people upvote it, it's allowed".
Yeah that sounds about right. I used to moderate trans and lesbian subreddits. It was …not good for my mental health. Leniency in rules allowed for people to post bigoted shit that sat right on the border or sounded like it might. Strict wording in rules meant that people would toe the line. Us having to explain why we removed things (it was an experiment one sub I moderated tried for like a year) resulted in an absolute shit show because there are more people who want to be assholes than mods and the more stressful moderating is the higher the turnover. I distinctly remember one night being out at a bar with my now ex and her friends and trying to write up my reasonings for someone who was obviously breaking a rule because she disagreed with the rule but she was challenging every decision and we had to give so many chances and allow appeals and she was ruining my night, and I was acutely aware that she could just hop to a new account when she was done. Also we had mod drama.
The "legal eagles" are best ignored. Just ignore them. Most of the time they'll just stop if you ignore them, because they want you to argue with them.
Absolutely but my attitude eventually shifted to “this is a small Internet forum, you want to be a jackass do so elsewhere.” I always tried to find a form of balance because I did care about the users. But the balance did rely on gut feelings, perception, and how willing to put up with your shit I was. I spent most of my 20s doing this shit and yeah it feels wrong to say “if you’re a rude asshole in response to a mod decision you don’t like you’re less likely to get a favorable response” but also yeah the time it took to read an essay berating me was time I could spend on literally anything other than helping the person who wrote it and I did the thing of giving even those people the benefit of the doubt every time and turns out it was a waste of time because further investigation tended to reveal that the person was either a troll, an asshole who had a net negative impact on the community and a tenuous grasp on the rules, or someone unstable enough that they didn’t need a forum, they needed a support group with professional oversight.
But yeah when someone messaged me that one of the mods had been saying things that were inappropriate for a moderator of that community to say I spent months helping oust them and she and I are now actual friends.
I’ll also add that good moderation was a challenge because in my experience there’s four kinds of people who moderate: people who recognize it as a volunteer hobby and maintain an external life, people on a crusade, people who do their best but aren’t doing good mentally and probably need to be making major life changes, and bright eyed idealists. The first are what you want and the rarest, the second are a problem that you have to weed out because they become petty tyrants, the third can be ok or can be petty tyrants, and the fourth are the most common and they burn out in a month to three or rarely become one of the others. It’s hard to tell who will be which.
I've moderated many online forums going waaaay back (farther than I'd like to admit actually). I agree with you, and I want to explain decisions to the users too, so I'll generally try to talk them as well. And sometimes we get a connection, and sometimes I realize I made a mistake. But in my experience, when they start playing lawyer, you're not going to please them.
I never thought about the four categories of mods before, but what you wrote feels pretty accurate. I think I'm in that first group, and I try to avoid issues by moderating as lightly as possible.
When I'm in other groups or communities, sometimes I think, "If someone did that in my group, they'd get one warning, then I'd just ban them the second time it happened. Boom. End of discussion." But I know that's likely not how it would go in reality. LOL
I would have suggested just ignoring it for 12-36 hours. She could have waited, or another mod could have handled it.
RIP Inbox :P
"...until morale improves"