Here's a github issue for it, with some other threads linked. @nutomic@lemmy.ml and I are both very sympathetic to the idea, because there's been so many of these cases where a top mod will wreck or subvert an entire subreddit.
Hierarchical moderation is definitely a weak-point that I replicated here for only one reason: I've never seen a system of democratic moderation work in practice. You could hold "elections", but then who approves the voters, and makes sure they're legitimate, and not double or triple voting? Now you have to institute a reputation system for the voters. How often do you hold these elections, and what initiates them? Who decides when elections are to be held? How do you circumvent people from "faking" reputation scores, or double voting ( creating many accounts, faking content and upvoting themselves, etc ). How do you prevent someone putting forward 3 of their alt accounts for modship, and voting themselves in?
And then doing all of that is somewhat overkill, and only seen as necessary because of reddit's obsession with subscriber count, even if 99% of those subscribers are inactive. It takes two seconds for people to subscribe to an alternate, and these alternates sometimes explode in activity within a few weeks. I've changed the sorting and emphasis for communities away from subscriber count, and towards users / month, to mitigate that inertia here a bit.
Also a lot of reddit's issues wouldn't be replicated on a server like this where the admins actually participate for the health of their server. If a mod goes rogue, and the community dislikes that, we can just boot them and appoint a different one. If a server creator / admin like myself goes rogue, people can just start their own server.
Again I'm not completely against it, I just have yet to see any system of democratic moderation work on forums or online communities anywhere, and that's likely an unavoidable consequence of internet anonymity.
yogthos@lemmy.ml 2 years ago
Glad to see you've already be thinking about it, and those are all excellent points. It is hard to make a system like that in a way that precludes it from being gamed, and voting would require tracking user reputation in some way as well. I imagine it's something that would need to be tried and refined over time if you do decide to give it a shot. No matter how good the system is, people will continue to look for different ways to game it. So, it's always going to be an arms race between loopholes being discovered and addressed.
I also very much agree with the emphasis on active users over subscriber counts. Ultimately, it's the people who actually participate that make the community what it is. Although, jumping communities/servers might be a bit trickier once the scale grows. And this would be an important aspect from activism perspective. If there were a million active users in a community, and it was being used for real world agitation and organizing, then a rogue mod could potentially do a lot of damage.
Thinking a bit more about it, I wonder if a simpler solution than voting could be to allow making communities with restricted mod powers instead. For example, could make it so that community can't be deleted, mods can't take it private, etc. And as you note, if the admins are actively participating then they can be used as arbiters for issues like rogue mods. You're right that this is a big difference from Reddit, and if server admins go rogue then there's really nothing you can do about that with software anyways. So some trust is ultimately necessary.
I just wanted to float the idea, and I'm also not sure how workable it would be in practice. It's obviously a bunch of effort to implement and test a feature like this, so it's worth thinking about the merits before investing the time into implementing it.
tmpod@lemmy.pt 2 years ago
I think your suggestion provides some good balance, you're right in that, even in a decentralized platform, there has to be some local trust/centralization. I find trusting the server admins easier than the community mods, so shifting some of their powers could be good. Additionally, if migration tools are to be developed, a community could fairly easily move itself to another instance, in case the trust on the admins cracks.
dessalines@lemmy.ml 2 years ago
100% agree. Especially since communities really do "live" on a server. Another server can have a backup of that community's history (IE federated content they see on their own server), but if the original server dies, then so does the that community... and it would have to be re-created.
Fortunately besides deleting all your own content, even mods cannot edit or actually database delete anything but their own content. Even a community delete is just a boolean flag, and communities can be undeleted with no harm done.
But yes there's so much with democratic moderation that has never been tested or implemented, that its completely unpredictable. I'm not sure I would want lemmy to be a test-case for that potential instability, I'd rather have other projects figure out something that works first.
yogthos@lemmy.ml 2 years ago
Completely agree with all that. I don't think this is an urgent concern and, as you note, there aren't really good examples of the idea having been implemented. It's something to keep an eye on, but likely not worth trying to pioneer.