The most difficult parts of moderating on Reddit aren’t the trolls or spammers or even the rule-breakers, it’s identifying the accounts who intentionally walk the line of what’s appropriate.

IMO only a human moderator can recognize when someone is being a complete asshole but “doing it politely”, or trying to push an agenda or generally behaving inauthentically, because human moderators are (in theory) members of the community themselves and have an interest in that community being enjoyable to be a part of.

Humans are messy, and finding the right balance of mess to keep things interesting without making a place overwhelming to newcomers is a fine balance to strike that I just don’t believe an AI can do on it’s own.

Exactly. Block and move on. Don’t twist yourself into knots appeasing people, focus on keeping the users you want happy.

Not trying to victim blame or anything, but I find it hard to believe that someone operating a low-moderation instance would truly expect people who don’t like moderation to stay away.

Don’t get me wrong I agree with your sentiment and dislike that behavior, but what I’m saying is that asking or expecting users not to go on witch hunts or to behave in a certain way is a fool’s errand that will always lead to burnout. A more sustainable approach for admins and mods is creating space for what they want to host and not trying to control what they don’t.

I will be dead in the cold cold ground before I ever type “/s”

I know it sounds insane but I swear to god BlueSky has astroturfing accounts on Lemmy. Every conversation (including yours here) about BlueSky is met with countless Sealions either saying it “will be federated soon” or asking “Why does federation matter?”

This is very cool! Thanks for sharing.

Everything now is rage-bait designed to get more clicks

IMO the greatest strength of the Fediverse is the increased number of mods and admins looking at everything. Don’t want rage bait? Join an instance that has rules against it.

Additional PSA to admins not running a “universal free speech” instance- if you see someone someone being obnoxious it’s probably annoying your users just as much as is is you. Don’t put the onus fully on users to curate their experience. The Fediverse needs our adults in the room!

Healthy for Lemmy, totally catastrophic for Pixelfed.

I know this comment is satire (well done… I think) but I want you to it hurt me deep in my bones.

I’m clearly not paying enough for a therapist.

Then moderators make many stupid rules to try to increase quality and overmoderation takes hold

This is so true. One of the best decisions I made during my tenure as mod of /r/StarTrek was changing the rules to be spirt-based instead of language-based. People will literally try to lawyer their way around the language of any rule, and it leads to mod burnout when they are getting drawn into rules-debates when it’s obvious the person is just trying to get around the spirit of the community’s purpose.

For example we had a rule that was literally just “be nice”. There’s no wriggling around that because it’s not some legal text. If someone is ““concerned”” about a request to “be nice” or “be honest”, they are not someone we wanted to be around anyway. These are discussion communities, not civil society, not everyone has a right to participate in every single one of them.

As you said the beauty of the fediverse is that each instance can have it’s own preferred method of discussion.

My least favorite fun fact is that Reddit forced the KiA mod to reopen after they went private calling it a “cancer”.

I was a mod at the time and Reddit always told us we had an extreme degree of editorial independence (hence the justification for allowing r/jailbait, /greatawakening, r/coontown etc) but that event made me consider for the first time that exposing normies to propaganda might not just be a side-effect, but a core function of the company.

Which ones? Searched and couldn’t find anything. This MotleyFool article is over 4 years old when COVID was still raging, hardly “recent”.

Urban dictionary says it’s a term that refers to when an undercover government agent fails to blend in with whoever they’re trying to blend in with.

Absolutely, if you’re seeing propaganda, it’s because it’s allowed on that instance. But the presence of propaganda has nothing to do if an account is an LLM or not.

Moderation on the Feviderse is different than on commercial platforms because it’s context-dependent instead of rules-dependent. That means that a user accout (bot or otherwise) that does not contribute to the spirit of a community will not be welcomed.

There is largely no incentive to run an LLM that is a constructive member of a community, bots are built to push an agenda, product, or exhibit generally disruptive behavior. Those things are unwelcome in spaces built for discussion. So mods/admins don’t need to know “how to identify a bot”, they need to know "how to identify unwanted behavior".

Good point but I will say even with immutable distros users are given a lot more control than Windows or Mac.

In Bazzite, installing software, for example, works differently than under a typical distribution.

This is true, but it’s also on the whole a lot more familiar to a non-Linux user (open app store, search, download).

Took a long time, but nice to see this topic getting mainstream attention.

This is literally the answer lmao why are you getting downvoted.