this post was submitted on 07 Oct 2024
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Greentext
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This is a place to share greentexts and witness the confounding life of Anon. If you're new to the Greentext community, think of it as a sort of zoo with Anon as the main attraction.
Be warned:
- Anon is often crazy.
- Anon is often depressed.
- Anon frequently shares thoughts that are immature, offensive, or incomprehensible.
If you find yourself getting angry (or god forbid, agreeing) with something Anon has said, you might be doing it wrong.
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Maybe, if you're determined to preserve a certain culture on a specific site. But as long as movement between sites is pretty easy (was quite common in the days of forums), then the community could self-regulate reasonably well. Either the weirdos would leave, or the constructive members of the community would leave and the site would get shut down. Either way, the problem solves itself without moderation becoming necessary.
IMO, the only reason we "need" moderation is because we've decided that the site itself needs to be preserved. That's the mindset that needs to change. Sites should come and go and take the trash out with it.
Well, yeah. Storing your potatoes in the dark is also not "necessary" if you're willing to just throw them away when they sprout. But wanting to preserve things we like is a given to most people.
I think that's true if you only have a handful of options, but if you have hundreds to choose from, it's easy to pick up and move elsewhere. That's the nice thing about small communities, it's easy to join multiple and then leave if a couple turn bad. But if you only have one or two, you're going to fight to fix it.
I prefer the small community form of moderation, the community ostracizes those that behave poorly, and if that doesn't work, the community moves elsewhere. That's how social relationships tend to work, and that's generally how the early internet worked. Now that everything is so centralized, things get more complicated.