Why I feel no one should be a F*ing mod
Posted Jul 23, 2009, 11:46 PM UTC
760
When should a person be granted decision-making power in a community?
A simplified view: You start a commune of people where most decisions are made via consensus or establishes rules. Now new people want to join your community and participate in the decision-making process. Now some decisions (like buying groceries) can be made by one person without checking back with the whole community but nonetheless can have a huge impact in the community as a whole (budget). At what point is someone granted this power? Sensibly (to me) the already existing community decides whether someone should be granted this power. Certain rules can be applied (the person has 'proven themselves', people vouch for this person, etc pp). And then they are granted decision-making power. You wouldn't grant anyone who just says I want (or even doesn't ask as it seems but somehow just becomes a mod) mod status that status. Because this is what it is: a defined status within a community.
r/Anarchism is not the first community to run into this problem and won't be the last. My kids will ask me/SO for decision-making power within our little community. Should I grant them full rights just like that? Silly, if I did!
3
this is the anarchism subreddit. the concept of somebody moderating this subreddit is still fucking retarded.
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Moderating != Ruling
11
Indeed, it does not have to equal ruling, but the Reddit system does not offer a great opportunity for what one might term "anarchist moderation".
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"anarchist moderation"
Reddit assigns the subreddit to the first claimant - for reasons that r/anarchism's moderators defend: well, what about spam? What if the Great Economics-Wing Conspiracy started reposting Hans Hoppe articles every week? What if my neighbors were nudists? Or barbequers? You could have this with discussion threads, where property is delineated by each post and not by the tag -- but to repeat myself so quickly: r/anarchism's moderators reject this. They do not want lots of little private plots with an 'anarchy of rules' with pernicious spillover like noise, smells, offensive sights, lots of traffic, suspicious people, chemical experimentation, etc. They want someone to own the neighborhood. As merely half-baked 'cultural anarchists' who carry their entire public-schooling indoctrination with them, they suppose that a majority of vocalized opinions within some time frame (and if this is suspect in the case of the US, it's indefensible - for them - in the oceanic glacier that is every subreddit's population) can own the neighborhood. By this supposition, and without any serious ideological competitor to it - can't be reading Mises.org links, after all - they cannot engage in real social suasion (oh, hm... don't read this (pdf, 31 pages)).
They can carry on with the occassional whining but general inaction by the general acceptance that they have better things to do. They can begin demodding themselves until one or a few mods remain -- who they can then satisfyingly rail against, if those mods offend. They can establish a democratic state with the apparatus of coercion (well, bannination) physically owned by someone they'll agree not to think of as skobrin's actual 'benevolent dictator'.
Or -- this is funny: the material means of production can advance to the next predestined stage and everyone will suddenly realize that all you really need is an open source 'market' for consensus filtering, subduing, highlighting: ayrnieu's posts should be light gray on white instead of black on white; dbzer0's posts should have animated flashing borders, and be boosted within reddit's hotness scheme; joeldavis can quit his alderman aspirations and instead post updates of his True Anarchist's Glasses to this subreddit.
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You could have this with discussion threads, where property is delineated by each post and not by the tag
Your whole post might actually be believable if the mods were actually moderating your posts and it wasn't the community doing so. Nobody is preventing you from posting your "little bubbles" but don't be surprised if most people reject them as the authoritarian nightmares they are.
As such, you're just an intellectually dishonest troll. In other words: business as usual.
7
Or -- this is funny: the material means of production can advance to >the next predestined stage and everyone will suddenly realize that all >you really need is an open source 'market' for consensus filtering, >subduing, highlighting: ayrnieu's posts should be light gray on white >instead of black on white; dbzer0's posts should have animated >flashing borders, and be boosted within reddit's hotness scheme; >joeldavis can quit his alderman aspirations and instead post updates >of his True Anarchist's Glasses to this subreddit.
Yes, woe is you, for getting downvoted into the ground every day for your unflagging defence of capitalism.
2
You could have this with discussion threads, where property is delineated by each post and not by the tag -- but to repeat myself so quickly: r/anarchism's moderators reject this. They do not want lots of little private plots with an 'anarchy of rules'
You could do it lots of ways but that's not how the reddit system works. The "Moderators" (your word choice here is obviously biased) are concerned with something getting marked as spam or reported into the spam folder and having no way to retrieve it. Else there would be no moderators.
Following that, whatever hypothetical arrangements you want to come up with are irrelevant since what's at issue is something that exists on a subreddit level.
joeldavis can quit his alderman aspirations and instead post updates of his True Anarchist's Glasses to this subreddit.
Not sure what to make of "alderman aspirations" (I didn't ask to be modded in the first place, vbp just didn't think he had the time to do it) but I did find the "True Anarchist's Glasses" comment a litle amusing. Although to be completely accurately let's call it "has a dictionary Anarchist glasses"
Overall the content (from what I could make of it) has been broached and seriously considered before. All we lack is the time to develop and the certainty that any changes would be incorporated in the running version of reddit.
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OH MY BAKUNIN! EMMA GOLDMAN HAVE MERCY! PROUDHON SAVE US! WHAT WOULD ROTHBARD DO?!?! SOME WEBSITE ON THE INTERNET CREATED BY PEOPLE WHO AREN'T ANARCHISTS DOESN'T FUNCTION THE WAY YOU WANT IT TO! LETS ALL NERD RAGE AND COMPLAIN FOR AN HOUR OR TWO! I AM BEING OPPRESSED ON A VOLUNTARY SPACE OF 1'S AND 0'S! DEATH AND WOE TO TYRANTS! SIC SEMPER TYRANNIS!
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You forgot Malatesta.
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Oh come on. I had four upvotes a second ago and now only two. Come on, which one of you got pissed because I put all the anarchist gods into one comment?
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I downvoted because all you've been doing in this thread is showing your condescension. Do fuck off if you don't like discussing.
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[deleted]
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You didn't answer my question. Do you think all conspiracy theories are wrong? You can clearly see the astronauts dangling from wires like they do in movies like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. If you speed it up it just looks like some guy jumping normally on planet Earth with a wire connecting him to some kind of trellis. You have to understand that the moonwalk is the most relevant event in human history, and NASA just announced that they erased the tapes. All of them.
I think that pretty much says it all. You can drop the word "theory". It was a conspiracy, and it worked. Look at America now compared to Russia.
cometparty 1 day ago
This guy is either a moron or a troll and shouldn't be a mod, why is that an argument against having mods exactly?
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Why would that be an argument against anything?
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Because he has an opinion he is a mod or a troll? I'm not defending his viewpoint, just that he has one.
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Either everyone is or no one is.
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[deleted]
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Granted, everyone being a mod probably wouldn't be a good idea. But are there really that many capitalist trolls? I would love to think that we were of concern to them, and not to be self-deprecating, but I don't think they really give a shit about us.
EDIT: They're a bit busy pretending to be Obama-Loving 'Marxists'.
1
I can think of three or four just off the top of my head, and I'm not sure that they wouldn't take advantage of the system in place.
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[then] one of the [Great Economics-Wing Conspirators] would just remove everyone else
My response to being modded, way back in the golden era when joeldavis hadn't started practicing for his future job of alderman, was to completely ignore this. After things went batshit, and now that they've gone transparently evil, I sometimes think that I should've done then what you suggest. I could've gone on to do nothing [but remove "Anti-Capitalist"], and the initial whining posts probably would've had nothing on the present snowball of stupidity. Even the whining posts would have the entertaining themes of "anti-property person accuses me of theft", "democratic person complains about the non-democratic state of a subreddit about anarchism", etc. The subreddit would still suck, but it wouldn't be so much of a self-refuting farce for only this one fantasy-based section of the subscribers.
Now? Way more whining, unreflecting appeals to the local sovereign that might go bad for me, and I'd destroy your practical lesson in democracy and 'collective property'.
IIRC, I suggested to cometparty months ago to demod himself: he "didn't care" then, he "doesn't care" now. The rest of you should as well.
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You might not be a mod Arny, but take heart, you still have the power to ban yourself form this forum at any time. I don't like banning people myself, but given your constant trolling, you might want to consider this severe measure.
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This is exactly why I don't think that we should mod ayrnieu.
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It seems that you so live in a world of quips that non-quip messages don't quite make their way to you. If you > [quip that skobrin sees], we can at least make some sense of you.
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You're all being children.
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Good gawd! The childishness of people discussing their problems in order to find solutions. How immature...
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It is shameful.
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People are complaining about being moderators on a tiny section of the internet. This is why there is no anarchy.
0
There's no Anarchy because anarchists in a tiny section of the internet discuss and try to find solutions on working with a natively archist platform. Makes perfect sense.
Oh I know. What we really need, like the children we are, is a teacher. An Authority figure which will take the decisions for us and show us how true Anarchy is supposed to be.
Oh wait...
3
It would be much more effective to work on creating a forum system that doesn't rely on moderators. I'd like to extend that all the way to system administration, but it's a hard problem.
This archist system is a tool, you can either overlook that it's archist and just use it as effectively as you can, or you can create a new tool. trying to make the tool anarchist in place is just pointless.
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[deleted]
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Being a child is a good thing innocence is a precious commodity.
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[deleted]
0
Why don't we just create an inactive account and allow this to be sole moderator? Of course this would mean that one person would have the account password, but I'm sure we can find someone trustworthy.
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The spam filter bans posts occasionally.
1
If we're going to do that, we might as well make this one person the sole moderator.
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Would this be a bad thing? I know this has been discussed earlier, (the reason there are so many mods atm) but we can see the results now, down the track.
1
Well, what we could do is create such an account and encrypt the password with a key that is then split amoungst "moderators". At that point, moderators have to achieve consensus/plurality/majority/whatever before taking any action, which I think is far preferable to what we have now. The encryption key could be re-generated periodically to account for people entering and leaving the community.
1
I don't know how its progressing, but this sounds like a good idea.
Since we can't figure out how to organise ourselves, you want to put a server in charge? We couldn't view traffic or control potential spam (I don't think voting down is sufficient).
It's not that we cannot figure how to organize ourselves. It's that we need to figure how to organize ourselves on a software-platform which enforces archy on us.
Exactly, it is a huge design limitation, not just a matter of personal politics.
Sergi's sounds like an okay idea. I don't see anyone bitching about the mod problem coming up with an idea like that, honestly.
Edit: I'm not as enthusiastic for the idea based on ayrnieu's recent insightful comments, but it's a solution, and there hasn't been another one. I just hope that if this works, it doesn't make things worse (i.e. democratic state).
I say we just set it to unban everything that the spam filter picks up and hope for the best. Hell, we could even have it periodically post traffic reports.
I don't think voluntarily giving up control of this place is the best option. We should just have more moderators. Not 4800, but more, with some system to determine who makes the cut.
But any one moderator could shut down the entire subreddit.
I agree. Why the hell can't we just unban everything (inclding spam), & then use Greasemonkey (in our own browsers) to filter out shit on a person per person basis?
Sergi is also a good idea, but this would be more decentralized & require less of an undertaking, albiet, a bit sloppy, if this is possible.
We could also get a chat room or another forum or somewhere else, if needed, and people could post the relevant links & comments there via voluntary data mining.
Hell, we could probably make some sort of script to automate that process for each of us.
I don't know, may not be good ideas but they are more creative than the emerging egodrama behind all of this.
The paranoia about capitalist pigs & communist monsters taking over as a mod & destroying everything is making this entire sub-reddit more than a little unpleasant to use, honestly.
Also we don't do that kind of thing here. ;)