I’m kinda regretting not naming it oneninesix, but here we are. I guess I love letters.
To anyone wondering what’s up, I did this on my phone while out in the “big city”, so I’m still waiting to get home to do anything serious. I have a few suckers really nice people who volunteered for modding along with me. Anyone else who is interested, drop me a line. I’ll be picking mods when I get home in a few hours. Sorry for the wait and I’ll do my best to put out any fires in the meantime. I didn’t think this would take off!
For those wondering, here’s my take on moderating the place.
-
Moderation is to facilitate an experience for its users in line with the goals of the community and the instance. It’s not to push a personal agenda, give you a bigger hammer in debates, set up a digital fiefdom, etc. You certainly can and should include your mod experience on your dating profile, though. Unilateral decisions are not cool except in a few situations, like if 100% of your userbase is usurped by literal Nazis.
-
196 exists to be a place where you post something (often but not always something goofy) when you visit. I know not everyone does and that’s fine - I still love you. These things can’t be offensive or hurtful, though, especially not intentionally so. Unintentional vs intentional I believe is a HUGE distinction and needs to be considered when moderating.
-
LBJLBZ exists as an inclusive, (relatively) judgment-free zone for gender-diverse folks. I intend for us to uphold that here. I say relatively judgment free because there will be people looking to start shit and mods and admins are going to have to judge their actions, but only their actions.
If you wanna be my modder, you gotta get with my bullet points…or argue persuasively why I should amend them (but that part doesn’t fit the tune).The three big things I’m looking for otherwise are diverse viewpoints, if you can remain reasonably impartial, and if you can say you’re sorry. The last is huge for me. As a mod, you’re going to mess up. I used to mod on Reddit and I certainly did! I find it’s important for maintaining the community’s respect to be able to admit when you made a bad call and what you’ll do to avoid it in the future.
@ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone, pointers would be welcome as I think you do a great job.
Community feedback is encouraged and welcome, just be aware I’ll be a little slow to respond for a bit.
PS: wow, I really DO love letters!
Edit: Corrected point three, damn autocorrect! Believe it or not, we’re not an inclusive community in LBJ’s corpse.
you can read my reply to a comment and the comment itself, everything you need to know (also i own !uselessserver093@lemmy.blahaj.zone
The only experience I have is small leadership roles in some discord (🤮) communities, but I’d be willing to try my hand at moderating here. I’m trans, I like to think of myself as a good listener, and while my neurodivergence sometimes makes me “not get the joke” I generally think it forces me take a step back from my emotional response to things and look toward community reaction for guidance on various posts and issues. First and foremost I’m glad this community was made to help us stay on LBZ, and I’d love to help contribute to it even though I’m not a frequent poster.
same but for guilded instead
I’m a bit late on the wagon, but if you’re still in need of mods, I would gladly help curate this community and do my best to maintain onehundredninetysix as we know it ^^
I vow to make this comm 1000% more trans and leftist if appointed mod 🤓
I am in cahoots with the international trans mafia. I will not show anyone any quarter. (I already mod shit on here)
The three big things I’m looking for otherwise are diverse viewpoints, if you can remain reasonably impartial
Lemmy UI shows this as 196@lbz in the feed which is amazing UX xd
Ah yes, one nine six at lesbianz. Truly an inclusive experience. 🏳️🌈🤗
It shows as this in Eternity as well. No idea why.
trans lover of memes and progressive politics here!
I would love to help out
Hello! It’s me, Roflmasterbigpimp! The lovable rascal from communities like !bubatzgartenclub@lemmy.world and, since yesterday, !196@lemmy.world.
And to some degree even !196@lemmy.blahaj.zone for a whopping two days, until feddit.de (and therefore my account) died.
Even though I have barely done any moderation at all over at !196@lemmy.blahaj.zone, I still want to help out and perhaps sort things out further. I tried to do my best on the .world 196. I encourage you to check my comment history about this topic and form your own opinion about me.
I can 100% understand if you decline my offer, but I really like this community and want to make this work.
Furthermore, I would advise adding a rule along the lines of “All decisions affecting the community and its members as a whole must be backed by a public vote.” This is something that could have prevented this whole disaster in the first place.
“All decisions affecting the community and its members as a whole must be backed by a public vote.”
Is there a way on Lemmy to distinguish who is or isn’t a community member? Is there a way to prevent me from rigging votes with a bot army or a group of bad actors?
I’ve been thinking recently about chain of trust algorithms and decentralized moderation and am considering making a bot that functions a bit like fediseer but designed more for individual users where people can be vouched for by other users. Ideally you end up with a network where trust is generated pseudo automatically based on interactions between users and could have reports be used to gauge whether a post should be removed based on the trust level of the people making the reports vs the person getting reported. It wouldn’t necessarily be a perfect system but I feel like there would be a lot of upsides to it, and could hopefully lead to mods/admins only needing to remove the most egregious stuff but anything more borderline could be handled via community consensus. (The main issue is lurkers would get ignored with this, but idk if there’s a great way to avoid something like that happening tbh)
My main issue atm is how to do vouching without it being too annoying for people to keep up with. Not every instance enables downvotes, plus upvote/downvote totals in general aren’t necessarily reflective of someone’s trustworthiness. I’m thinking maybe it can be based on interactions, where replies to posts/comments can be ranked by a sentiment analysis model and then that positive/negative number can be used? I still don’t think that’s a perfect solution or anything but it would probably be a decent starting point.
If trust decays over time as well then it rewards more active members somewhat, and means that it’s a lot harder to build up a bot swarm. If you wanted any significant number of accounts you’d have to have them all posting at around the same time which would be a lot more obvious an activity spike.
Idk, this was a wall of text lol, but it’s something I’ve been considering for a while and whenever this sort of drama pops up it makes me want to work on implementing something.
I’m always wary of how such systems can be gamed and how they’ll influence user behavior, but the only downside to trying is your own efforts. Even if you fail miserably, I imagine the exercise itself would improve our understanding of what works, what doesn’t, and how to form better approaches in the future. To succeed in making a system which improves user interactions would be a truly wonderful thing, and may even translate to IRL applications. I would urge you to follow through with this for as long as you feel it’s something you’d like to do.
Yeah those are basically my thoughts too lol. Even if it ends up not working out the process of trying it will still be good since it’ll give me more experience. Those aspects you’re wary of are also definitely my 2 biggest concerns too. I think (or at least hope) that with the rules I’m thinking of for how trust is generated it would mostly positively effect behaviour? I’m imagining by “rewarding” trust to recieving positive replies, combined with a small reward for making positive replies in the first place, it would mostly just lead to more positive interactions overall. And I don’t think I’d ever want a system like this to punish making a negative reply, only maybe when getting negative replies in response, since hopefully that prevents people wanting to avoid confrontation of harmful content in order to avoid being punished. Honestly it might even be better to only ever reward trust and never retract it except via decay over time, but that’s something worth testing I imagine.
And in terms of gaming the system I do think that’s kinda my bigger concern tbh. I feel like the most likely negative outcome is something like bots/bad actors finding a way to scam it, or the community turning into an echo chamber where ideas (that aren’t harmful) get pushed out, or ends up drifting towards the center and becoming less safe for marginalized people. I do feel like thats part of the reason 196 would be a pretty good community to use a system like this though, since there’s already a very strong foundation of super cool people that could be made the initial trusted group, and then it would hopefully lead to a better result.
There are examples of similar sorts of systems that exist, but it’s mostly various cryptocurrencies or other P2P systems that use the trust for just verifying that the peers aren’t malicious and it’s never really been tested for moderation afaik (I could have missed an example of it online, but I’m fairly confident in saying this). I think stuff like the Fediverse and other decentralized or even straight up P2P networks are a good place for this sort of thing to work though, as a lot of the culture is already conducive to decentralization of previously centralized systems, and the communities tend to be smaller which helps it feel more personal and prevents as many bad actors/botting attempts since there aren’t a ton of incentives and they become easier to recognize.
Hey wow thats an awesome Idea! I’m currently in training to become a Software developer myself and this sound really impressive!
Did you already started?
I’ve been looking at the Lemmy api and stuff, and into some existing libraries/implementations of trust networks but that’s about it so far tbh. I think I’m gonna start working on some implementation later today maybe, this whole mod drama and the discussion it led to make me really want to start lol.
Nice! If you post progress or so to any programming community @ me :D
As far as I know, yes. There is some sort of trace from where the Upvotes came. But I’m not deep into Lemmy-Tech so I don’t know much.
But it would still be possible for me and a number of trolls/bots to make accounts here and participate in voting, right?
I completely agree with the sentiment of involving the community, I just remember having problems with direct democracy on Reddit and question what the best implementation is.
People on other instances can be community members as well, which is an extra complication on top of Reddit’s problems in the “Who’s allowed to vote?” question.
But it would still be possible for me and a number of trolls/bots to make accounts here and participate in voting, right?
We had a vote on sh.itjust.works on whether or not to federate with threads and it seemed to go just fine. They had a bot that checked validity.
I guess so. 🤔
But it would at least open the discussion Instead what ever just happend.
The thing is I’m quite sure moss and the other Mods plan was not
-
Move Community
-
get backlash
-
Change Plan
4.???
5.Profit
Thats why some rule like you just can’t do that should be in place so People can discuss this. Because if accidentally or not it caused massive drama and rift and could have been avoided so easily.
No, I agree that there must be a rule(s) to prevent just this sort of thing. I’m only objecting in an attempt to help moderation craft the best version of the rule for the desired effect. And even with that said, an imperfect solution is better than no solution, so my objection should be disregarded if there’s no way around it.
Possibly there should be new systems in place, such as registering membership with communities beyond simply subscribing, and then it would be very clear who should vote on community issues.
-
This is part of the deal you make when joining a community with active mods, admins, and rules. Not everything is up for debate. I know firsthand that this can be quite frustrating sometimes, but we can’t act like everything else has always been subject to election up to this point. It simply was not.
https://lemmy.world/comment/14556651
Not sure that really shows you under the best light
Furthermore, I would advise adding a rule along the lines of “All decisions affecting the community and its members as a whole must be backed by a public vote.” This is something that could have prevented this whole disaster in the first place.
Which is why encourage the Team to make especially this Change. Like I said in the other Comment.
So while I say the admin of “the page” can do with their page as they like (assuming there are no other rules in place forbidding them from doing so, either at the community or instance level), I believe that it’s everyone’s own choice to come, go, leave, or stay.
Because by setting rules not only for user but for admins/mods as well we could have easily prevented this.
If you leave people without rules and just hope they act as you and others would like them to, you can be harshly disappointed. Rules are not only there to enforce behavior but also to provide guidelines.
When you create a community, you are the mod of the community you created, and you can choose to move or stay.
https://lemmy.world/comment/14556677
So you’re still supporting mods locking down communities without asking members approval?
Start a community and run it the way you like! Expand the Fediverse! Make a place truly your own!
Perfect, and then the mods will lock it down and move to an instance I dislike.
You mean the answer to your comment where you said you gonna do the same with a Community you made or just not understood how moderation works?
When you create a community, you are the mod of the community you created, and you can choose to move or stay. So I don’t know which mods you are talking about.
I think it was their right to do so. They had no guideline or anything else which prevented them from doing so. And if you look a bit down below you see again:
You can also set your community rules to something like “Big decisions affecting the whole community must be backed by a public vote.” This is what I mean by making the place entirely your own.
I think it was their right to do so.
Then let’s agree to disagree!
One rule I think might be a good idea is that mods aren’t allowed to moderate their own posts/comment chains. Not that it’s really been an issue on 196 in the past afaik, but there are some communities where the mods will get into an argument with another user and then remove comments for incivility or a similar rule which obviously has massive potential for abuse. Assuming there are enough mods where it’s not an issue to do so (which seems very likely based on the number of people interested in moderating) preventing situations like that entirely seems beneficial.
I cannot agree more. Good call, I appreciate the input.
Glad to be here :3
Congratz on mod!
Congrats!
I think we should use the same picture we used in R*ddit as community icon.
The canonical name being written out in words makes sense if you or Ada didn’t want to take over the existing community (which IMO would have been preferable). But I would strongly prefer that the display names of both communities make it clear which it is. So !196 would become “196 (archive)” and !onehundredandninetysix should just display “one hundred and ninety six”, or at least “196 (new)”. This is just so it’s very clear at a glance, regardless of where in the UI you’re seeing it, which community you’re looking at, and helps differentiate it visually from the LW one.
Do you not see the instance name after it? For me, it shows up as “196@lemmy.blahaj.zone”, which makes it distinct from “196@lemmy.world”. It doesn’t need to be distinct from the old one, because they locked that one to new posts.
I agree that it would have been much better if we could have just taken over the old 196@lbz but here we are.
!onehundredninetysix@lemmy.blahaj.zone and !196@lemmy.blahaj.zone show up as similar in a few menus as they rely on display names and not ID
That’s the main problem, definitely. A secondary problem is that in some places it might show the instance name, but it’s not quite as prominent as the community name. So it takes a second longer to figure out which one you want. If that second can be entirely removed by one easy change, even if it is only one second, that’s a good thing to me.
@ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone could you maybe do something here?
Nah I think this is a mod thing, not an admin thing. That’s why I was suggesting the display name be “196 (new)” or “one hundred and ninety six”. I’d now add “one nine six” to the list, that could be good. Though the one with 196 would be the most searchable, since then you can search either by text or by number.
I was thinking about editing the old one as “196 locked”
Oh right. Yeah admin help on that one would be good.
That depends HIGHLY on which app/client you are using and in what context you are viewing it.
Sometimes display name is all that shows.
Fair enough; I only use Lemmy on a computer, so I’m not familiar with the idiosyncrasies of the various apps.
Literally didn’t know there was a blahaj 196, and now you guys are my entire feed lol. Love this fediverse lore
Also if you read this I wish you a wonderfully fulfilling day
!196@lemmy.blahaj.zone used to be the only (or at the very least largest) community of the type. Recently, its mods unilaterally decided to move the community to !196@lemmy.world and lock 196@LBZ (essentially squatting on the name). !onehundredninetysix@lemmy.blahaj.zone is a replacement under new management.
It was the main one.
Feels like it should have been 197 😅
nah that one’s the kid friendly. 196 is for antagonizing children and authoritarians
Yay thank you so much for taking this on!
You could always just copy the old 196 rules. They work pretty well.
I wrote these rules for a venting room on the blåhaj matrix, perhaps they could be of some inspiration here. A venting room on a different medium will have very different needs of course from a community like this.
Rules
User rules
- Assume others have good intentions. Strive to keep this a safe space to vent.
- Tangents are allowed, but the primary purpose of the room is venting.
- Don’t respond to vents if the venter does not wish to be interacted with. You can mark a vent with /dni to signify this.
- Keep mature vents in 18+ rooms if possible. Use https://trggr.link/ if such rooms are unavailable.
- Censor/spoiler sensitive issues and provide content warnings as appropriate. https://trggr.link/ is an excellent way to censor something. Some clients support surrounding text in || on either side of it to censor it like this: ||spoilered text||. Some clients may have a spoiler command: /spoiler spoilered text.
Issues you probably should spoiler: Slurs, racism, ableism, bigotry, suicide, self harm, abuse, drug/alcohol abuse, blood and gore.
Moderator rules
- Use a gentle hand, don’t reprimand!
- Assume good intentions.
- When moderating, use DMs or moderator rooms for anything beyond single-comment moderation and for anything serious.
- Don’t leave moderated users in the dark regarding issues they are directly involved in.
- Warn, then kick, then temp-ban, then perma-ban (avoid), in that order, when dealing with non-compliant users and serious infractions. Skip steps if necessary for larger infractions.
- Users may appeal your decisions and some arguing should be tolerated. Attempt to deescalate when this happens. Harassing you however is never okay.
- If you feel yourself become angry at or get a bad relationship with a user you are moderating then pass on the issue to another mod if they are available.
- Take care of yourself. You are moderating voluntarily after all.
Proper guidelines for moderators is probably key, and then for users a quick summary of the purpose of the community is important, followed by any additions to the instance rules.
Ahem. Can I propose a dumb rule in the spirit of the community’s name?
- All numbers shall be written out in full here.
One hundred and ninety six.
Two thousand twenty five.
The Kessel Run can be run in less than twelve parsecs.
The universe was made thirteen point six billion years ago and was widely considered a bad move.
Assume others have good intentions.
Solid approach! Not naming names, but let’s just say some people and groups assume everyone is out to get them and moderate accordingly.
That one is especially important in a venting room, perhaps not as necessary in lemmy communities.
It’s true that mods should be careful and assume good intent when reasonable, however care should also be taken to not allow concern trolling and sealioning. I think a good approach there is a warning (preferably in the form of a gentle reminder that their comment can be misinterpreted) for suspected cases of concern trolling and sealioning and removing the offending comment if necessary, followed by a temp ban if the user continues.
Rarely, people sealion or parrot bigoted points without knowing better. Giving room for people to learn is important, but so is not getting run over by actual trolls
