Personal Reflections
Over the past few weeks I’ve found myself engaged with Beehaw in a fundamentally different way. The explosive growth necessitated shifted timelines, had me prioritizing replies and moderator actions in a different way and in general greatly shifted what parts of the website I spent most of my time on.
This shift changed my perception of the website. I didn’t have as much time to spend reading the awesome interactions which resolved themselves, where people were nice to each other and to check out the cool discussions going on. I spent a lot of my time answering questions, devoting a bunch of attention to the neediest, the loudest, or simply whomever was just in my inbox. I ended up stepping into a lot of conversations to help try and defuse or deal with difficult people and directing efforts on helping (collaboratively!) to establish a strong moderation ethos. I recently found myself reflecting on this and realizing I was missing out on the very environment we came here to establish and that I need to set better boundaries for myself.
In order to prioritize my own mental health I’m going to establish the following boundaries for myself:
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I am going to spend more of my time on the site browsing and commenting and less moderating and responding to every question that comes my way. If you ping me to ask a question that other people have already asked or can be answered elsewhere I’m probably not going to answer it anymore.
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As much as I want to treat all of you with the respect and kindness you deserve when intervening as a mod or admin, it’s not sustainable at this scale because it quickly becomes all of the time I spend on this site, so I’ve put together a code of conduct below to help guide expectations of how interactions with myself and other moderators might look.
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I really don’t have the time or energy to take suggestions phrased like demands or to entertain anyone talking shit about this place. Instead of suggestions phrased like demands, I’d ask that they are phrased as requests or even better as a plan of action (how are you going to help us accomplish something better, together?). Instead of talking shit, you’re free to highlight the flaws you see (ideally in Beehaw support), so long as you’re also providing suggestions on how to fix things. Venting about this platform just to vent that it doesn’t fit your ideal situation doesn’t do the community any good on this platform. Or any platform we’re federated with, frankly. If you ever feel the need to vent about this platform then do so to your friends, in DMs, on email, by punching a pillow, or by whispering sweet nothings to the wind on top of your roof- venting here just makes the place depressing and toxic and I don’t want to participate in that environment. I want an uplifting, positive space where we enable each other and treat each other with respect.
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It’s upsetting to see how certain individuals react to moderators and admins stepping in to try and keep this place safe for minorities or to ensure that there’s peace. This is tiring to everyone involved and not sustainable. As much as I like the idea of helping each other become better, some people need a lot more help than we can offer and I think some of us don’t have strong enough boundaries on how to engage with that in a healthy manner (I know I’ve got issues with being taken advantage of because I love pleasing others). To that end, we’ve drawn up a draft code of conduct to help people understand some healthy boundaries that need to be specified.
Purpose of the Code of Conduct
The purpose of this code of conduct is not to establish new rules (our only rule is to be nice), but to frame what nice behavior looks like so that stronger boundaries can be both respectful and enforced. I’ve spent a lot of mental and emotional energy educating and diffusing situations on Beehaw in the last few weeks and this is a structure we’re providing to show you how to be respectful of the time of the moderators and admins and how to get the best results out of an interaction with us. If we tell you to disengage and you imply that I’m being a fascist for doing so, we’re no longer going to bother continuing to try to defuse the situation as some of us have been, because you simply aren’t treating us with good faith. As much as I’d like to give everyone the benefit of the doubt and to always assume good faith even when they’re angrily replying to me, none of us can do that at the scale we’ve already reached. I’ve seen a lot of people treating me and other moderators with bad faith and I don’t want any of us becoming cold and calloused to our users as a defense mechanism to deal with the abuse.
In case you didn’t notice, this post is also a link to the code of conduct.
Good. I’m sick of reading all over the place what fascists the Beehaw moderators are, and I’m sure it’s even more exhausting for you, so I’m glad you’re drawing these boundaries. I’ve mentioned it a few places, but there seems to be two camps on what the Fediverse should be. There’s the camp that thinks the Fediverse should be a fully unmoderated peer to peer free for all, and there’s the camp that thinks the Fediverse should be a distributed governance model in which users are free to choose the admins whose moderation style matches their desired moderation style.
People have a lot of rage at Beehaw for being moderated a certain way, and the questions I always find myself asking are: “Why do you want to engage with a community you do not like?” if the person seems to hate Beehaw, or “Have you considered the possibility that you like the discussions on Beehaw specifically because it’s curated that way” when someone seems upset that they need a secondary account to access Beehaw because their main account is on lemmy.world or sh.itjust.works.
I, personally, am in the second of the two camps I described at first. Hence, this is my primary account. I really like it here. I like it a lot. For this reason, I want you to keep doing what you need to keep it being what it is, and if that means you and Alyaza taking breaks, good! I can only imagine that rage is even more exhausting for you fine beefolk since you’ve invested more of yourselves into making this instance what it is, and you have to deal with it much more constantly.
So take some time to engage as a user. Go to some dance clubs. Go tubing on a river. Love yourself, just as a general concept.
Unfortunately it comes with the territory. When you stick up for the humanity of others, people who benefit from the system fight you because they like the system as it is, they’ve been subconsciously indoctrinated, or they’re afraid of change. I know that I signed up for this and honestly it’s not affecting me all that much (I still love you all), but I’m trying to pay close attention to the environment and perceptions of the environment around here and be as transparent as I can about that journey in case it’s helpful to anyone out there
Someone on here a few days ago said rules like these are written in blood. I’ve been around to see what happens when rules like what exist here are not around, and it’s not pretty (usually lots of literal Nazis get involved). I know any kind of hostility can sting however absurd it is, but ultimately this criticism can be disregarded as it is made from at best total ignorance. Freedom should extend to the point where it doesn’t infringe on the freedom of others and I don’t think that’s too hard to understand. Some restrictions on negative freedom can enhance positive freedom, and I’ve really been enjoying freely expressing myself in good faith here without bracing myself for a stupid fight. I’ve been wanting what this is for many years.
There’s also the criticism that I’ve seen multiple times about “having to write an essay to be allowed in” when 1) I wrote maybe 3 sentences total for all of the questions, 2) it’s kind of a bare minimum vibe check to make sure you aren’t going to raise hell, and 3) even setting all that aside, anyone from an instance that is federated with Beehaw can interact with us so it’s not like they’re missing out on anything. It’s literally people being upset at nothing if they really are interested in participating in the community in any way. They just resent the smallest of obstacles (which aren’t even obstacles since, again, you can still interact as a member of another instance). It just reeks of bad faith arguments that can be discarded out of hand.
I’ve seen multiple times about “having to write an essay to be allowed in”
I am not really active on any other nodes. I am new in the concept of federated lemmy instances and completely out of touch with mastodon or any other social media based on similar principles (I only check beehaw announcements in situations like yesterday), so I have not witnessed this (or maybe most of what @[email protected] refers to in the OP). But I felt conflicted in the opposite direction when I decided to sign up after having read the documents. After a couple of weeks of lurking and watching the application of what is described in the documents I actually wanted to write an essay in the sign up form and I tried quite hard to keep it short (“It will be read by a real person”). After more than 2 decades in various online communities and platforms, there simply are way too many reasons that justify what I was feeling. Which can simply be summarized as “I am really very happy I found this community”.
I felt the same when I applied. It’s someone’s time. Be honest and direct, they will get it and that’s the reason you want to join.
I think it’s telling when they call answering a few question an “essay”, but then will happily engage in 100x longer flame wars about nothing. Sounds like being minimally thoughtful feels too tiring to some.
For some time I scrolled without account and when there is something interesting I would reply through my mastodon account. I also made posts from mastodon. Moderation is necessary for a community to build and for productive discussions
I think a mix of naïveté and bad faith is driving the “Fediverse should be wholly unmoderated” camp. Some people who haven’t yet learned the lesson of online moderation yet, and some who are hoping to rope in some people who haven’t learned it yet to their twisted world view
Eternal September, “There’s a sucker born every minute”, Barnum effect, lucky 10,000, and so on. I mean, it’s nothing new. On the plus side —I guess— it means the Fediverse is growing 🤷
There’s the camp that thinks the Fediverse should be a fully unmoderated peer to peer free for all, and there’s the camp that thinks the Fediverse should be a distributed governance model in which users are free to choose the admins whose moderation style matches their desired moderation style.
I really want to make a philosophy post on the effects of individualism on moderation…
I’m really curious, and ready to read that post
Please do. Don’t fell pressure to write elaborate essays if the thought is incomplete. Opening discussions attract others in the same boat.
How many social media services need to circle the drain that is the alt-right hate speech/extremism pipeline before we all admit that, maybe, there are a lot of toxic people out there who WANT that to happen, and we might be happier if we just told them up front that they are not welcome?
Honestly, I have no problem whatsoever. If Beehaw is not for me, I’ll find someplace new. And the alt-right folks can go set up their own Fediverse node if they want. Good luck to 'em.
While true, some communities are too quick to ban, and offer too few (like zero) opportunities for explaining oneself or any attempt at redemption. I hope this won’t become one of those.
Removed by mod
the alt-right folks can go set up their own Fediverse node
They have, several. A relatively famous one imploded when its admin finally realized that some of the “free speech” people posing as Nazis… were not just posing, but actual believers. There is a hilarious/cringe last post on archive.org.
Ah shit. I need to see this. Happen to have it handy?
trigger warning, click at your own risk
The current attempt seems to be exploding-heads (not linking to that).
When I hear people calling the admins/mods here fascists, having read their ideas and literally read some of their modlogs, it usually tells me all I need to know about the person calling them a fascist haha
Some people will scream fascism at absolutely everything except actual fascism. That they consider freedom, and think you’re a fascist for trying to stop it.
Insane world out there. At least there’s Beehaw 💖
I’m just stunned that anybody is making an effort, honestly. As an older tech nerd with kids and adulting and all this crap, I can’t imagine the kind of impact it must have on people’s time and attention to run a site like this.
Of all the recent spin-ups of reddit alternatives, I’m honestly more excited for beehaw than anything else. Having a consistent vision and concept of operations seems to be the only way to prevent media from sliding with the rightward-shifting Overton window. Every other social media site taught us that if you do nothing, your site will turn into an alt-right hellhole.
If people don’t like Beehaw, they are free to go elsewhere.
They seem to forget they request to be here and have read the rules. Don’t like them? Goodbye then.
I’ve noticed some ‘I’m right and everyone else is wrong’ types turning up on Lemmy world/ml.
I’ll probably drop those accounts. This place is like a breath of fresh air.
Long may it stay!
Due to federation, not everyone participating here “requested” to be here. They can still be banned though, but I think the approach of “inform, remove, ban”, leaving them an opportunity to correct course, is the right one.
As mere users, I think we may also help mod efforts by respectfully educating infringers of what they are doing; worst case scenario, it will lower the workload for mods.
It’s always a bit sad when something you love starts feeling more like “just” work.
Sounds like a good plan to chill a bit and rub shoulders with the mortals.
You guys are probably going to have to recruit more mods in the near future to avoid burnout if we keep growing like this.
Hang in there!
I think Lemmy needs instance moderators, or super moderators, basically. People who enforce instance wide rules, but don’t worry about the rules of local communities. Further, these users would not have access to some of the gnarly system administration stuff that an admin would have. I totally understand right now the low number of admins on large instances like this purely as a technical requirement. The more admins you have, the more security holes your instance has, purely from a social engineering perspective. But moderation and system administration are very different tasks, and the fewer admins you have right now, the fewer top-level moderators you have.
I know “power mod” is a loaded term for redditfugees, but I think the problem was less “this moderator does moderator action across too many communities” and more “none of these communities are well moderated because no one here locally in the communities leads the moderation.” I’d be curious what other people think
Yeah, I think Lemmy needs a lot more granularity over roles. Currently there’s two rules outside one of a user : Admin (You can literally do anything that is possible) and Community mod (Remove comments/posts, ban community-wide).
We need people who can remove comments/posts site-wide, ban site-wide, do application approvals. None of this can currently be delegated without giving full powers.
I think that “power mods” are more of a perception than a reality even on Reddit. There are a handful of examples that people tend to bring up, but I’d wager that the vast majority of reddit users never had any issues with power mods (or if they did there’s a decent chance that there’s more than one side to the story), and I know that in a few of the examples people like to repeat there’s more to the story.
I agree that Lemmy really needs a site mod role. Right now, only the Admins can issue sitewide bans or purge users posts or post contents. That means that admins have to step in any time a user is a problem in more than one community (and if they’re a problem in one place they are more than likely going to be a problem in more than one) or if illegal content is posted (I haven’t really encountered this, I know it has happened).
(I’ve long thought the same, about power mods, and mostly think the Redditor mentality of “power tripping mods” comes from users who consistently get moderator action taken against them for being shit. The only moderation team I ever had any trouble with was AmITheAsshole where I got banned for saying the other person in the story, the non-OP person was the asshole)
I used to think like you. In my 12 years on Reddit and like a dozen thousand comments, I had zero problems for the first 10 years.
Then, over just the last 2 years, I got:
- Banned from r/askscience for finishing a comment with a joke (“offensive language”, no warning)
- Suspended from r/netsec for explaining why someone’s approach was wrong (“don’t create unnecessary conflict”)
- Suspended from r/3Dprinting (no reason given)
- Warned of “violent content” violation (no reference)
- Blanked previous couple months of comments
- Suspended site-wide for “violent content” (still no reference to what was the supposed content)
- Blanked ALL comment history
- Banned from r/atheism (no reason given)
- Banned from r/functionalprint (no reason given)
- Suspended from r/eli5 for adding an example GPT output (strict “no GPT” rule)
- Suspended from r/worldnews for proving someone was lying (“no personal attacks”)
- Suspended from r/linux for explaining why RMS had been cancelled (“sexualization of minors”)
- Banned from r/tech for pointing out someone was being insulting (“violating community rules”)
- Banned site-wide for explaining why Justin Roiland has been cancelled (“sexualization of minors”)
- When appealing the ban, got ALL my accounts (both of them) banned site-wide (“repeated violations”)
So either I’ve turned “shitty” in the last couple years, or something else has changed.
if they’re a problem in one place they are more than likely going to be a problem in more than one
I’d be really wary of that approach. People deserve an explanation and a chance to correct their mistakes, not getting marked once and presumed guilty in all their future interactions. If you asked me how many mistakes someone should be allowed to make site-wide, I’d say as many as they are willing to correct.
A site-wide mod role might be beneficial to reduce the workload for Admins, that shouldn’t change the approach to modding, though.
I’m certainly not advocating jumping straight to sitewide bans for ordinary users who have a bad interaction, I don’t think we ought to change our moderation approach or anything.
However, a lot of the bans I’ve seen so far have been for things like spam, trolling, or being outright hateful. Those are cases where the user is probably being a problem instance-wide, not just in a particular community. Now, if we continue to grow and we add more specific communities we will probably have more examples of users who are problematic in certain communities and not others, but for now that hasn’t often been the case from what I’ve observed.
Because of that, it seems like it would be helpful for there to be a set of mods that don’t have full admin access but have the ability to do things like hand out sitewide bans. That would keep the admins from being pulled in every time a spammer or troll needs to be yeeted.
To me “power mod” means someone that uses their moderator/admin powers to bully users. I’ve been banned from FB groups for citing city ordinances and for pointing out that a post was made by a scammer.
The legal advice mod gave me a vulgar and derogatory flare because I argued that the smell of marijuana coming from your neighbors house is a nuisance.
If a moderator has the ability to shape the narrative on a platform and uses their powers to harass people, they are a “power mod”
I’ve never heard the term but I would have thought of it more like a “power-user” if you said it to me in passing. Rather than somebody who is power-tripping.
Don’t mean to derail but I thought that distinction was interesting.
I have found the “official” definition.
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Power Mod
But actually it’s whatever you want it to be(e)
I’ve known this to mean a power-hungry power-tripping asshole of Reddit that doesn’t care about other people. They just want fake Internet points (i.e. karma, upvotes, awards, etc). A typical sociopath exploiting other human beings for their sick fucking amusement.
I don’t know if those crappy moderators are ever going to walk again after you butt slammed them from the top rope like that
If they want to swim around the bottom of the barrel of human refuse, then let them.
Be(e) nice to the admins and mods who have made what we have possible. Kudos to all y’all. Beehaw rules.
Self love is the best kind of love. I hope you find the reason you work so hard for this community again. Thank you, and to all the mods and admins I really appreciate you all. Always fun to read discussions here
love the clarity, love the honesty, love you. big W
Thank you for putting your own mental health first. The loud minority of assholes can be emotionally exhausting. I like Beehaw the way it is, and that takes effort. I am VERY grateful!
Thanks for all the work you do for this space to thrive! Is there anything community members can do to assist other than not being jerks?
You can help remind other people to be nice if you ever see them not being nice!
Will do 😄
The new direction is more than fair honestly. I both really appreciate and sympathize with the need to point out that these hostile bad faith responses are upsetting. For a long time, commentary on attack dogging a forum has had to sidestep the issue that having to deal with this shit is emotionally draining. It’s reasonable that there is a place for eveyrone at the table but the chairs have an emergency eject for diners who start throwing food. It’s bad enough that everyone still eating has to finish their meal with a mess everywhere.
everyone still eating has to finish their meal with a mess everywhere
Content removal, addressed in a previous post, should work for that. I still wonder if an AI could somehow help in the process.
You all are definitely doing good in my view but I don’t think it fair that we’d expect you to spend all of your time moderating literally every aspect of this community.
May I suggest that it just be a community rule that if somebody has a request we just say they should put it in Beehaw Support and let the community engage on the topic to discuss the merits.
If we are all fairly like minded on respecting others and the defederating or bans that have occurred it would seem we could self regulate those discussions and catch people up as a community rather than expecting the moderators to handle every engagement.
You’ve been transparent on actions that have been taken and why, I think we can handle propagation of that info ourselves at least.
I had a similar thought that I’m trying to develop. We, as members, should take care of our community too. If you see moderators and admins as individuals with specific responsibilities instead of power, you might realize you can contribute in a different way. Exactly how is what I’m working on right now, but there’s the danger that we’ll start policing each other in the worst way possible if we start focusing in rules and not in how we behave.
if we start focusing in rules
I think a big point of all these philosophy posts, is to avoid that. Having principles instead of rules, should hopefully prevent community members from throwing rules at each other.
Thank you for this post. I really appreciate all that you and the other admins have been doing to keep Beehaw going. I hope you’re able to disengage when you need to and manage the burnout. Take care of yourself.
I always really appreciate the effort y’all put into clarifying how you want this community to be run or actions y’all are taking. I wanna say that I really enjoy the feeling I get here: that people typically are good faith and see the human on the other side. Being a mod or admin and trying to exemplify the community you hope to foster has to be incredibly exhausting. That being said, the effort is noticeable, and I’m really thankful for y’all’s passion for this project of beeing nice :)
Lots of voices saying the same thing I’m about to say, but I really want to pile on so you know many of us mean it…Please take care of yourselves mod team! You have created the best place on the internet, and deserve lots of time to rest and revel in your hard work.
I hope we as a community can do enough to make those bad actors feel like it is a waste of time to engage with us.
I want to praise you for redacting a “Code of Conduct” with only one “BAD” example, while making it clear and concise. Kudos.
Also please don’t become calloused, take care of yourself and enjoy the community you’re building.
Suggestion: What would you think of having some sort of “community ambassadors”; not in a role of mods, but just people who’d be willing both to orient newcomers, and politely engage those who might be trying to cause trouble, to either diffuse the situation, or lead them to show their true colors for easier modding?
I’ve been in some communities with such a non-mod ambassador role, and I think they were a positive influence.
We had one early on who quit within 2 days because they didn’t understand our ethos or principles before signing up. It was a bit of a mess, and I hope they found whatever they were looking for.
I’m completely open to the idea even if it crashes and burns again. I’m an anarchist, so I’m very much in favor of anyone willing to chip in with whatever they can and that matches their skill set.
