PhilipTheBucket

Personally, I like the idea of a $1/month fee paid to the server operators. Something Awful does something like that, and it works like gangbusters apparently. Right now, the entitlement of free access without even a laughably nominal fee creates a not-ideal set of expectations of both sides, both users and admins.

It's probably a total nonstarter of an idea, because the user culture on Lemmy right now is so entitled that it would be seen as some kind of grave insult to the users, in their position as free demanders of whatever service level they've come to expect and they will yell if they don't get it. Which is precisely the problem. Community and volunteerism are wonderful things. Even as it is, it's much better than the commercial model. But it can definitely be improved from here.

Like I said, I thought of a few different ways of trying to redress the balance, but nothing that was convincing. I think, in complete seriousness, that just starting fresh in some other corner of the fediverse might be a better way. I have a whole host of other types of thoughts about that and what this all means, from the point of view of my involvement in the whole operation, which will have to wait for me to have time for a whole separate essay for anyone who wants to hear it.

A conversation I had over there was the inspiration for me to finally polish this writing up and post it here.

The point is not that the mods are power tripping, but that the whole structure which allows toxic users to flood the zone in uncontrolled numbers, and depends on volunteer moderators to deal with them all in order to keep things vaguely on the rails, is the fundamental problem. If that deeper issue could get fixed, I think any complaints anyone might have about mod behavior would instantly evaporate.

I prefer that old way, to be honest. It seems like the moderators are trying to be "evenhanded" now, which I can understand being necessary as things grow, but what you are saying is part of what I am saying.

There's a culture on the commercial internet that you can always have a free account just because you want one, and that's led to entitlement on the part of the users and exploitation on the part of the service providers. That culture carried over into fediverse servers, where really something more like the old BBS model would be more appropriate to me. The sysop took responsibility for the system being good, and yes you can come, but a pretty small amount of douchebaggery meant you could get the hell off my hardware and no apologies.

I think it's possible you're thinking of Fidonet or something similar. I'm not trying to argue with you, I'm just saying I was around on Usenet and some of the national BBS culture at the time as well, and well into the mid-90s, they were two separate cultures.

What you're saying about BBS culture is absolutely true. Usenet was different. I think the first Usenet-to-BBS gateway that even existed was UFGATE, from 1988 or some similar time. 1986 was before even the alt. hierarchy, when the people that put together the system were uncomfortable with the idea of even unregulated newsgroups existing. I don't know how many nodes there were in the system back then, but I know in 1984, there were less than a thousand sites in the world even connected to Usenet. I don't think BBSes were in the picture back then. I can't swear it never happened, from single sites with forward-thinking sysops of some kind, but I would be surprised if you can go back in any kind of Usenet archive and find even a single message from someone pre-1990 who isn't identified by their full real name, and some tech or research institution as their place of entry. Maybe Kibo.

The influx of people from AOL or Delphi in the mid-90s, and the alarm and despair it caused as it damaged the existing Usenet culture of the time, is very well-documented. I'm not saying you're wrong. For all I know you were on Usenet and witnessed the occasional troll back then. I'm just trying to say that the type of interactions on Usenet back then were very, very different than on the modern internet, and 1994 was when the old Usenet culture died, as people got widespread access to it.

I think I made a mistake by bringing in the concept of power tripping mods. I do think that exists, although as @poVoq@slrpnk.net says, it's often an invention of someone who is being moderated for good reason.

The whole point I was trying to make was that because there is no strong social contract, anyone who is a moderator is getting put in an unreasonable position. They have to keep coming back to herd 500 feral cats in their free time for no paycheck, and that's not a fair thing to ask a whole contingent of people to do, as the backbone of a good social network. It's fine that they want to do it and have signed up to do so, so that things can work and we can have this nice thing, but it's not the way.

It is true that sometimes they become unreasonable as a result of being in that position, but that wasn't the point. It is that we need to fix the users, instead of trying to have volunteer mods always backstopping the user behavior once it passes a certain absurdly toxic threshold.

I think we're talking about different time periods. In the time I'm talking about, before AOL connected with Usenet, the number of high school kids on the actual internet could probably be measured in double digits. There were BBSes, which had their own wonderful culture, but they had trolls and villains in a way that Usenet did not.

Edit: Here's what I'm talking about: Imagine a network where there was no process for removing spam. The process was that if someone tried to post something obnoxious, which happened occasionally, everyone would yell at them, and they'd stop. Up until January-April 1994, that was sufficient. In the mid-90s, people started occasionally posting spam, since there was nothing built into the system to stop them, and a process arose that was essentially human moderators deleting the messages. There was some amount of controversy about the idea, because being able to have one person delete another person's messages was seen as censorship, and some people would have rather had the spam, which was still a very occasional problem. But for about 15 years, the network operated without a single person to my knowledge posting commercial spam.

I know, but that’s part of my point. The things that make online places feel safe, welcoming, and worthwhile are the same regardless if volunteer or commercial. I absolutely loved 2007 - 2012 early Twitter - it actually felt like the best of my old BBS/Usenet days but with much better scope.

I completely agree with this. I think most of the factors that make a network a nice place are social. Technological features can destroy or inhibit the social contract that I'm talking about, which I think happens a lot right now, but the main issues are not technological. The pre-dark-forest-internet phase of Twitter is a great example of people making a good place for themselves.

This is absolutely true. The level of entitlement and lack of appreciation that the average toxic user has for the whole effort and kindness that goes into providing a volunteer Lemmy network for them to come and be a part of, and how little regard they have for it, is breathtaking.

I'm saying that the two sides of that coin, users who behave in not ideal ways and mods that behave in not ideal ways, are of a piece and feed into one another. By inviting the first and making an unspoken promise that nothing in particular is required of anybody to come in and use the network in any way that they feel like, whether it adds to the community or is destructive to it, we're welcoming a type of behavior that is not reasonable to ask a volunteer moderator to deal with indefinitely, which is part of what over time leads to the second. I think fixing the first problem is absolutely necessary in order for the network, in the long run, to be a nice community.

Completely agreed. If your whole social framework depends on finding someone you can rope into playing "daddy" over the whole operation, thus dealing with a constant stream of unregulated unpleasantness and noise day in and day out to keep things orderly, it's not going to be surprising if they are sometimes offensive in how they deal with any given user. Honestly, seen in that light, the kind of behavior that leads people to grumble about how the mods are power tripping makes perfect sense. It is the only expectable outcome.

I don't know how you could start building that social framework, separate from the code framework that defines the system, so that people didn't feel empowered to come in and be horrible and it be the mods' job to stop them. I have a couple of ideas, but nothing that is very convincing to me.

Yeah. The whole concept of the fediverse is a huge step forward. And even squatting on community names doesn't really work. If gaming@lemmy.world sucks, people can move to gaming@lemm.ee.

I do completely agree that the protocols are not really set up fully with these considerations in mind, and they should be, more so.

To start with, Usenet was often just as toxic as any current social media/forum site.

I definitely don't think this is true. That's the whole "eternal September" thing.

I do think trolls existed, definitely they did on BBSes, but the magnitude of the problem was just not even in the same ballpark.

Then we started to get the first web based news sites with a social aspect (Slashdot/Fark/Digg/etc).

I remember very distinctly being around for that first big meltdown on Slashdot, with Jon Katz being put in a special position by the site administrators in a way that the userbase didn't agree with, a little bit of that impedance mismatch developing from that in what had before then been an all "us" type of place, and then something escalated and there was a big explosion and exodus. I don't even fully remember the details, but I think I remember one of the site admins getting into a big public spat with some big part of the userbase, and going and tampering with the comments database to make his point, and that was pretty much the beginning of the end. It never recovered and what had been a pretty good thing up until that point just flamed out and became a shell.

Everyone sort of assumed it was an "us" place that the nerds were finally in charge of. That's what made it special. Then that perceived betrayal of trust when the administrators tried to assert that it was "their" place firstly, and the users existed only at their pleasure, was really shocking to a lot of people. Again, on the modern commercial internet, even on moderator-curated Reddit clones like Lemmy, that's normal, that's the whole point of what I'm saying here. But back then the template of assumptions was much more innocent.

That's the central conflict I'm talking about. How we can get back to the days where it's all an "us" place. Lemmy is a huge step forward, I think.

Like yourself, not sure how to fix it, but splitting the tech companies apart from their advertising divisions would be step one. Probably would be helpful to require social media companies to be standalone businesses. Would at least be easier to hold them accountable. And maybe require that they be operated as nonprofits? To help disincentivize the kind of behavior we’ve got now.

I'm mostly talking about the volunteer internet. I don't have any active accounts on commercial social media, even for business things. Why would I? It's horrible, and I don't see it getting any better for any reason any time soon. I think just outcompeting it from a better direction, and letting it follow along into the new protocols or not, is a better way.

I'm mostly talking here about Lemmy and its design, and to a certain extent the other platforms on the volunteer social internet. Having the government break up the Lemmy monopoly doesn't sound like a step in the right direction.

"They" meaning developers, administrators, and moderators. There's quite a lot more hierarchy in the social structure than there used to be.

One example is that some site admins want some moderation features, and they lobby the developers, but the nature of the technology is that it's difficult for them to just lay out their own features, and the developers' time is limited, so the developers say no. So people don't get their moderation features. On the long-ago internet, there were many, many different software options that supported the same protocols, and they were also a lot more configurable generally speaking, so that you weren't stuck lobbying a single group of developers to implement your thing or get stuck with things not being the way you want.

Probably a bigger example is that there are constant little impedance mismatches between how people want certain communities to be moderated, and how they are moderated. People do want for the experience to be curated. It's unwieldy, with the current volume of assholes, to say that it's each user's responsibility to encounter a handful of assholes in every comments section and block them individually, so that the overall experience splinters, consistent assholes are free to continue harassing new users until the new users learn to block them, and any given asshole is everyone's problem. That's the problem with just blocking the MBFC bot if someone doesn't like it. It's fine as an individual solution, sort of, but the fact that it's even an issue in the first place speaks to a code-enforced hierarchy of control that doesn't match the hierarchy of respect and consent. That's why people keep bringing it up instead of just blocking the bot, I think.

I think that this is one thing Bluesky does right, where you can opt for certain people to "moderate" your experience, but there's not a single grouping which has a monopoly on being able to do that. It's under your control. That would be an example of what I'm saying, where on Lemmy there is a "they" that is uniquely empowered to ban you from a community, or decide not to ban someone else that you think is objectively being a nuisance, but the "us" that is in the community can't make that decision. On Bluesky, it's all one grouping of users, and they can decide how to control that aspect of their own experience, and that's a good thing.

Hopefully that makes sense. I'm not trying to air any sour grapes, or say that the developers should immediately prioritize any wishlist thing that comes their way. I'm also not trying to say that the moderators need to obey how I want MBFC bot to be handled, or let me post if I want to change the title of an article for clarity, or anything like that. I'm saying that, in terms of system design, the very existence of a unique grouping that I need to be lobbying to do these things is a development that should be worked away from, over time.