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.
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.
Voting manipulation and manipulation of perception of majority (close but different things) are already problems everywhere. In an open network where anyone can join in, that’s an invitation for problems.
depending on the threshold, your post would already qualify for removal
Online community development and maintenance is actually a studied thing. The research shows that clear rules and a moderation team dedicated to community management and enforcing the rules is the best way forward.
One of the problems with Reddit – and now Lemmy – is the belief that the masses are the ones who should have the power to censure and censor, thanks to those little up and down arrows sprinkled all over the place. If we want to build better communities, we should be leaning away from that, not into it.
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?