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.
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.
This is the critical failing for all of these voting-based ideas. There were times when r/conservative was perpetually in the negative for all posts and comments. The voting system was useless because everything would be negative. Now, conservatives are generally shitty people, but places like 4chan also brigade and manipulate online spaces of people who don’t suck.
And even conservatives should be allowed to talk about their interests on the web. Communities should be run by people who want the community to exist, not by whoever decides to use ambient numbers or organization to suppress them.
Plus right now people can vote on mods, with their virtual feet. If a mod is bad in one community, just make or switch to another. No one gets suppressed and the bad mod’s community withers away. And you can even have cross-purpose communities where c/conservatives on one instance can be a community for conservatives and on another it can be about critiquing their arguments and impact on the world.
That’s a good example. Or another example, if the fuckcars community brigaded the cars community’s moderator voting and voted in the worst moderators lol
Corporations should absolutely be run as democracies with the employees getting votes imho
Hahahaahhahahha
This tells us all we need to know.