Hello World,
following feedback we have received in the last few days, both from users and moderators, we are making some changes to clarify our ToS.
Before we get to the changes, we want to remind everyone that we are not a (US) free speech instance. We are not located in US, which means different laws apply. As written in our ToS, we're primarily subject to Dutch, Finnish and German laws. Additionally, it is our discretion to further limit discussion that we don't consider tolerable. There are plenty other websites out there hosted in US and promoting free speech on their platform. You should be aware that even free speech in US does not cover true threats of violence.
Having said that, we have seen a lot of comments removed referring to our ToS, which were not explicitly intended to be covered by our ToS. After discussion with some of our moderators we have determined there to be both an issue with the ambiguity of our ToS to some extent, but also lack of clarity on what we expect from our moderators.
We want to clarify that, when moderators believe certain parts of our ToS do not appropriately cover a specific situation, they are welcome to bring these issues up with our admin team for review, escalating the issue without taking action themselves when in doubt. We also allow for moderator discretion in a lot of cases, as we generally don't review each individual report or moderator action unless they're specifically brought to admin attention. This also means that content that may be permitted by ToS can at the same time be violating community rules and therefore result in moderator action. We have added a new section to our ToS to clarify what we expect from moderators.
We are generally aiming to avoid content organizing, glorifying or suggesting to harm people or animals, but we are limiting the scope of our ToS to build the minimum framework inside which we all can have discussions, leaving a broader area for moderators to decide what is and isn't allowed in the communities they oversee. We trust the moderators judgement and in cases where we see a gross disagreement between moderatos and admins' criteria we can have a conversation and reach an agreement, as in many cases the decision is case-specific and context matters.
We have previously asked moderators to remove content relating to jury nullification when this was suggested in context of murder or other violent crimes. Following a discussion in our team we want to clarify that we are no longer requesting moderators to remove content relating to jury nullification in the context of violent crimes when the crime in question already happened. We will still consider suggestions of jury nullification for crimes that have not (yet) happened as advocation for violence, which is violating our terms of service.
As always, if you stumble across content that appears to be violating our site or community rules, please use Lemmys report functionality. Especially when threads are very active, moderators will not be able to go through every single comment for review. Reporting content and providing accurate reasons for reports will help moderators deal with problematic content in a reasonable amount of time.
I think diversifying mods is a good idea.
The one who "misinterpreted" the rules is a mod of pretty much all the main subs on world.
There's a handful of accounts like that. And they hold way too much sway on the instance as a whole. It's what got reddit in trouble. Mods would add each other as mods in other subs, and it ended up with a whole bunch of super mods with way more influence then they should have had. Especially since that mainly happens when mods agree on things.
Make a limit, even 10 which feels huge would be better than nothing.
Otherwise a handful of people can chase away the entire userbase. Because when a big news story breaks, they control almost all the serious discussions. Which is what happened here. And it'll happen again if things dont change.
many communities would be happy to have more mods. many of these cases come from the lack of people volunteering to moderate a community. this is already being considered when people are promoted as moderators in communities by our admin or community team if a community doesn't have active moderators. we already try to find people that aren't already moderating as many communities in those cases.
I 100% get it.
I mod one sub because it was vacant and someone asked me, and another because I was going to post there but it was vacant so I requested it.
We 100% need more people to step up.
But even if those subs just opened the door, the same ones will still be above everyone in the chain.
Especially with communities where the top couple mods gave up on their account and it's a zombie. Someone could be 3rd or 4th and defacto head mod.
Just a suggestion though, it would have prevented the appearance in this situation from being "lemmy.world's official stance" because one person misunderstood something.
Misunderstandings are going to happen, it's unavoidable. If you want a way to mitigate the damage, it's limit how much reach each person has. Pruning is a natural part of growth, and any mod that gets their feelings hurt about it...
Well, that's the type of person we would be doing this to protect against. Someone who lets their feelings get in the way of moderation.
Yea this became a huge part of why reddit got so shitty. There needs to be a cap implemented on how many subs a mod can manage.
Then step up to volunteer your services as a mod? Reportedly the tools are terrible and the reason why there are so few mods is that so few are willing to do the job. If a limit were to be placed, without having such volunteers, then how would all those empty positions be filled?
That's because few want to. I've been asked myself whether I want to mod multiple communities because the current mod isn't active, and some of those aren't even small.
(edit: Fair enough, did not even know it's public what somebody mods - in that case however you should be inherently aware of how naturally moderating communities is something extremely few people would want to do, and how this naturally results in very few users moderating vast swathes of communities)
If you look at someone's profile, you can see what communities they mod...
Or you can just keep wildly assuming things and hoping you're right.
Or just read the existing reply chain before making your own reply?
You had lots of options bruh. But you've also made over 5% of the comments in this thread, and you didn't do that in any of them either.
Just randomly telling everyone what your uninformed opinion is about stuff...
I'm glad you haven't taken up anyone's offers to mod anything. And I truly mean that.
Great, so then every post gets 10 chances to be incorrectly identified and culled? We don't need diversity of opinion here, we need quite the opposite. We need a unification of opinion so that rules can be solidified around that.
No way, get this outta here. Last thing we need is the same mod on every community on every instance going wild with power. This line of thinking allows and empowered that sort of behavior.
No one says we wouldn't. That would still have to come from the admins...
The point is one rogue mod can't "misinterpret" something and enforce it in:
News, Politics, World News, and World News Politics.
If they limited a single mods crossover, then it would mitigate the damage done by "misinterpreting".
Like, this is basic compartmentalization, it has nothing to do specifically with the fediverse or even social media...
You just don't set up an organization where a handful of people have day to day control, especially when it's all volunteers. You got to spread it around for a multitude of reasons.