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.
You must log in or register to comment.
So your probelm with the platforms is not the platforms themselves, but people? Because the mods running communities here aren’t too different from the refit communities.
As for your second point, you want karma farmers to run the communities?
As I said, Reddit is a corporation so it will never be good even if their platform had no flaws.
I’m open to feedback on my solution, please provide your opinion on how it can be improved to address the weaknesses you’re seeing.
feedback on my solution
He gave you a good one but I’ll explain: there is no karma here. But spammers have a lot of accounts, which would mean one spammer would be able to elect himself which is not what we want.
Yeah that’s true. I guess I’m assuming people aren’t upvoting spam. What could be a better way to qualify who is allowed to vote for a community’s mods?
IMHO, most Lemmy mods are fine. And it doesn’t take years to advertise your community. The end.
Most Reddit mods were fine at one point as well. In your estimation, if I wanted to start a Lemmy community for something niche say bonsai tree triming, how long would it take to get enough people for real discussions?
1 week. Advertise and I’m pretty sure bonsai people will come. If they don’t exist or are not there, you will have no discussion anyway.
I’d love to see it if you’re willing to demonstrate
I’m not because I don’t have time for this. Feel free to do it. Back in the late 90s we had small communities and it was fun. No one wondered how we could attract hundreds of people from other forums.
Sadly it is no longer the 90s
Obviously being a corporation means they’re terrible no matter what. […] Even if Reddit was 100% community owned
It would still be a corporation. Do you realise unions, non-profit NGOs, churches, and every legal entity that isn’t a literal human, is a corporation?
toxic mods ruined Reddit
No they didn’t. At most they ruined their community. But anyone can make another community on Reddit. Doubly so here on Lemmy.
Wow you got me I used the popular definition of corporation and not the technically correct one good job /s
If you feel like mods haven’t ruined Reddit you must have not attempted to post on a popular community for at least several years. Go try it.
Literally nothing is stopping you from creating communities or even an entire instance that follows that principle…
If you want to do it, then do it.
And if people want it, they’ll participate.
But even if they do, I don’t think you’ll get the result you expect and want
That will just make sure that it will be impossible to create niche communities about unpopular ideas, if (the same) majorities can decide mods everywhere. To take an analogy from the offline world: democracy is a very good and necessary thing for running a government because there can be only one government in a specific territory. But corporations are not (normally) run democratically, instead we allow different ones to compete and people to be customers or employees at whichever of them does things best. Lemmy communities are like corporations, not like governments: there can be more than one of them and we can individually choose which ones to be parts of.
The status quo is roughly fine in this regard. We’ve had the concept of moderators being appointed from above since I started to be on the Internet at all (more than 20 years ago), back then it was on a lot of independent forums.
My second solution, which may be too radical, is simply do away with mods. Each community gets a threshold of upvotes to downvotes and anything that’s outside of that range is removed.
There are some obvious downsides with this idea. Sometimes content needs to be rapidly removed. It also opens ideological communities to attacks where good content is removed because people who disagree with it downvote it
Lemmy is open source. You could start an instance and run it this way, as a trial.
I’m not sure it would work. It’s very hard to effectively replace volunteer effort with an algorithm.
Yeah trialing it on specific instances first is definitely a good idea.
Sounds like the easiest idea to put in place.
Easy yes, but the flaws will need to be addressed. Maybe mods have limited removal powers?
