Thoughts on r/antiwork drama and implications for Lemmy

Submitted ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨yogthos@lemmy.ml⁩ to ⁨asklemmy@lemmy.ml⁩

Looks like r/antiwork mods made the subreddit private in response to this post

This fiasco highlights that such forums are vulnerable to the whims of a few individuals, and if those individuals can be subverted than the entire community can be destroyed. Reddit communities are effectively dictatorships where the mods cannot be held to account, recalled, or dismissed, even when community at large disagrees with them.

This led me to think that Lemmy is currently vulnerable to the same problem. I'm wondering if it would make sense to brainstorm some ideas to address this vulnerability in the future.

One idea could be to have an option to provide members of a community with the ability to hold elections or initiate recalls. This could be implemented as a special type post that allows community to vote, and if a sufficient portion of the community participates then a mod could be elected or recalled.

This could be an opt in feature that would be toggled when the community is created, and would be outside the control of the mods from that point on.

Maybe it's a dumb idea, but I figured it might be worth having a discussion on.

@dessalines@lemmy.ml @nutomic@lemmy.ml

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dessalines@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago
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.

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- 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.
  
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  - 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.
    
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  - dessalines@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago
    
    Although, jumping communities/servers might be a bit trickier once the scale grows. And this would be an important aspect from activism perspective.
    
    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.
    
    For example, could make it so that community can’t be deleted, mods can’t take it private, etc.
    
    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.
    
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- TheAnonymouseJoker@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago
  Very true. GrapheneOS community sockpuppeting, as I proved, or the recent anti Semite /pol/ brigading observed here, are fantastic examples of how anonymity abusers can work around voting systems and comment/post/user representation numbers.
  
  I call these people "anonymity abusers" because that is what they do, and they do it to me. I experience it and I document it. I have to screenshot everything, and be swift and vigilant. It takes effort. But I do it because I do not want others to face this stuff.
  
  And that also means democracy has to unironically stem from morally correct benevolent authoritarianism, because anonymity presents us with this paradoxical situation. There just does not exist any other way for humans at the moment. Maybe someday with AI and automated systems we could do better, but those are far away in time, and requires AI to also not be morally corrupt or practically faulty.
  
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  - TheAnonymouseJoker@enterprise.lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago
    My anus hurts
    
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  - TheAnonymouseJoker ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago
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  - communismnow ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago
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- roastpotatothief@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago
  There are robust ways to do that. I've had discussions about it on Lemmy, so I could find the technical term again. The idea is to have everyone vote at the same time, and pass a turing test (for example a captcha) so it's much more difficult for a single person to vote many times.
  
  But I had thought of a different possible solution for lemmy. There could be a top-level namespace shared by all instances. So there is only one global "antiwork" community. There can in fact be many with the same name but when you search for c/antiwork you will be redirected to whichever one has the most active users / month. Other communities with the same name can still be found through their URLs. But if there is a mass exodus from the global community to a different one, the new one will automatically take its place in the global namespace.
  
  For the other problem of mods deleting things, tags will help. So you could have a setup where nothing can ever be deleted, only tagged as "deleted". Users have to turn on "deleted" in their filter and all the posts which were purged will become visible, along with all the spam etc which was rightly deleted.
  
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Tomat0@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago
IMO any such changes towards democratization would probably be best suited to a different Fediverse project entirely given how much it alters the structure of the genre of site Lemmy falls under.

I think the real lesson from the whole fiasco is that people shouldn't place more political expectations on a subreddit than its capable of handling. Reddit/Lemmy has specific uses it's good for, and things it's not good at. Upvotes, subcommunities, and central moderation all contribute to the problems with Reddit but at the same time they stay because they've proven to be the most effective at doing what Reddit is built to do.

When it comes to making a sort of rallying point for things like what /r/antiwork was going after, IMO the whole structure of the site would have to be re-thought. And while I think we should begin with experimenting with platform design more, I don't think it's a good idea to burden platforms which were designed to act as direct alternatives to mainstream platforms with unnecessary features which may or may not work out.

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- yogthos@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago
  I agree that a whole new project that's explicitly designed for organization would likely achieve the best results. I do think it makes sense to keep UX largely the same since it's been shown to scale well, but the underlying mechanics would need to be rethought.
  
  One point that's been brought up here a few times is that server admins ultimately have full control of the server, and can even just shut it down. So, a more decentralized architecture would be needed from ground up to prevent this.
  
  The main problem that I think needs to be solved is how to prevent bad actors from ruining a community. This includes external problems like brigading, as well as internal ones such as rogue mods or admins. It has to be assumed that good actors can flip, and there needs to be some process for removing them from power at that point.
  
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abbenm@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago

This led me to think that Lemmy is currently vulnerable to the same problem. I’m wondering if it would make sense to brainstorm some ideas to address this vulnerability in the future.

I think yes and no to this. Yes because Lemmy as it currently exists kind of has the same thing going on. People who create the communities are the creators and that's that.

But no, because federating is supposed to be a mitigation here. I know that mastodon.social and pixelfed have sometimes shut down signups to purposely spread the userbase across other servers, and perhaps some rebalancing across credible servers can help here.

That would be my first idea.

I think I would veer away from elections because that could have unintended cultural effects. They could be gamed, create inward looking drama that makes no sense to people on the outside, etc.

I like the brainstorming here though, and I agree that your suggestion would help avoid that problem, but its at the cost I think of bringing on some unintended consequences. If we can lean into existing features that would be my option A.

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- yogthos@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago
  That's been my thinking as well, there isn't a clear and simple solution to the problem. So, it's interesting to do some brainstorming to see what can be done to address these kinds of things.
  
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AgreeableLandscape@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago
Thought experiment: if a US news outlet offered to interview Lemmy's devs or instance admins, how would/should we respond?

Personally, I would never go on a televised interview just for privacy reasons and because I get crippling stage freight. At most I'd write in with my responses to their questions if they asked me to, though I feel that even that should only be done collectively by the entire dev or admin team.

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- yogthos@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago
  These kinds of interviews can be done well, but people doing the interviews need to have some media training and to have good answers at hand for the sorts of questions that would be asked. This is a good example of a Fox interview done right. So, I'd say the main takeaway here is that these things shouldn't be done on a whim, and require lots of practice and preparation to do well. And it definitely has to be done by someone who's comfortable on camera. A written interview is much easier to do, so that should always be the preferred option.
  
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Amicchan@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago
I do hope that there's a nonautocratic moderation system before Lemmy gets popular or someone becomes rouge.

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gary_host_laptop@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago
Aether works like that in theory, but I think that the feature was never created.

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k_o_t@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago
does anyone know what kind of moderation 4chan has? tbh, if it didn't attract all racists, nazis in the world, i think that kind of forum would be onto something interesting 🤔

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T34@lemmygrad.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago
I see what happened as a flaw in anarchism itself that reminded me of the essay Tyranny of Structurelessness by Jo Freeman:

This means that to strive for a structureless group is as useful, and as deceptive, as to aim at an "objective" news story, "value-free" social science, or a "free" economy. A "laissez faire" group is about as realistic as a "laissez faire" society; the idea becomes a smokescreen for the strong or the lucky to establish unquestioned hegemony over others. This hegemony can be so easily established because the idea of "structurelessness" does not prevent the formation of informal structures, only formal ones. Similarly "laissez faire" philosophy did not prevent the economically powerful from establishing control over wages, prices, and distribution of goods; it only prevented the government from doing so. Thus structurelessness becomes a way of masking power, and within the women's movement is usually most strongly advocated by those who are the most powerful (whether they are conscious of their power or not). As long as the structure of the group is informal, the rules of how decisions are made are known only to a few and awareness of power is limited to those who know the rules. Those who do not know the rules and are not chosen for initiation must remain in confusion, or suffer from paranoid delusions that something is happening of which they are not quite aware.

r/antiwork users saw it as not just a place to chat but a movement, though a structureless one. It turns out that there was structure all along, dictated not by the users but the corporation, enabling whoever created the subreddit to ban users, censor speech, and act as spokesperson.

The solution is to have an actual IRL party with a formal structure and democratic centralism. If the party wants a web site with user comments, it can make one and appoint moderators who can be recalled by party members. The key is that a real movement must be led by a party, not a structureless crowd on a web site.

One idea could be to have an option to provide members of a community with the ability to hold elections or initiate recalls.

The problem is there's no IRL party. The "community" is whoever posts here. If lemmy ever takes off, what's to keep cops, marketers, right-wing trolls, etc. from voting in the election?

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Jesse ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago
[deleted]
- a_Ha@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago
  obvious spoon of the real "Jesse" :
  https://lemmy.ml/u/masu
  
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TheAnonymouseJoker@enterprise.lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago
I'm SO ANGRY! WHY CANT I FIND SOMEONE TO SLEEP WITH ME!

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