4d ago

RFC - Every community should have active moderators or get auto-locked

The recent discussion of instance admin burnout has got me thinking about how do we create a sustainable model going forward to prevent admins from being over burdened.

The biggest workload for admins is they become the defacto community moderators for every community with inactive mods, inattentive mods, etc.

I imagine this is part of the overloading stress that caused lemm.ee to throw in the towel.

Mandatory Moderation Model

1 - Every community that doesn't follow the following rules get's autolocked
2 - Every community on a instance needs a moderator
3 - Every moderator must be active
4 - The report backlog for a community must not get stale or too old (24h/48h)

Admin's would be moderator managers, and not get involved in user posts, just moderator issues

A - Moderator not following instance TOS
B - Moderator acting in bad faith
C - Unlocking communities when moderators fix the initial issue

What are your thoughts? Would this help larger instances scale better?

20 comments

I would think this all this is perhaps a personal preference on a given instance, but not practical on a global scale.
If an instance owner wants to accept the risk of a chaotic, unmoderated space on their server so be it. Other instances are quite capable of blocking a comm or defederating if it's an instance wide problem.
There's also the potential to blockade new comms on small instances when I think of it here. If I, as an admin of a single person instance, try and set up a few niche comms for personal interests and they where report-bombed by people just being trolls, there would never be a way to get them off the ground. You would spend all your time responding to reports rather than creating content in order to avoid them being locked.
- Yea, this is a very bad idea that will just create even more workload for mods, leading to yet fewer mods as they get tired of having to touch a community just to prevent it being locked.
  What will happen is people writing a script just to touch a community on the regular, like the apps that move your mouse so Corp spying apps think you're at your pc.

Problem is that not every community is the same. Nor is every mod.
You start telling to use activity as your metric, you run into trouble because there's a ton of small communities where the mod listed is an alt account to keep moderation and personal use separate to avoid the bullshit.
Back on reddit, I learned real damn fast to not moderate active subs on my main account. Lemmy isn't much different. Mods catch hell, no matter how good they are. Using dedicated moderation accounts to avoid the bullshit, while observing the community from a main account. If the community never needs action, the mod account looks inactive.
For real people, never moderate a big community from your regular account, even on lemmy.
But other than that, it's a solid idea!

Probably a petty good idea. But what constitutes inactivity. Just being idle off of the platform or not using the specific instance they purport to moderate?
- I'd start with the account must login periodically, and the report backlog must be kept under 24h.
  So if someone isn't around, for whatever reason, the community gets paused until they come back.
  
  I'd say under 24h is kinda harsh given I can see small instances get autolocked when the one mod is just on holiday or something for a report about idk, a post being offtopic (for instance)

I think this could work well!
As the other comments mentioned, determining activity might not be that easy. Do we actually need point #3? If a community is inactive and doesn't have any content (good or bad), it's not going to affect the admins much. It might end up adding more work for admins if they need to keep adding new mods to communities that don't have much going on. We might also end up with having lots of tiny communities locked, which would discourage people from posting.
I think point #4 takes care of the problem pretty well already. If the mod isn't active enough to resolve the reports within 24-48 hours, then the community could be locked.
- I see #3 as good hygiene, but perhaps not necessary - If all the listed moderators are logged out with no active sessions for some amount of time we can deduce the community is totally unmoderated, even if there are no reports. Imagine the typical 2 year old community where the moderator just disappears, no reports so it doesn't need to be actioned, but that does mean if something bad happens then the report will sit around with no attention until it escalates to the admins.
  More succinctly - If we know #3 the mods are not active, then its the same as #2 - there is no moderator, nobody is responsible for this community.
  
  I guess my worry is I don't use the account I have communities with that often since I prefer to use non mod account for shit commenting, so my mod account is usually not active unless I get an email which thankfully is really rare

Maybe when private communities become a thing, instead of getting auto-locked the community just goes private/subscribers only until the backlog is worked through.

20 comments