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[–]magnora7 4 insightful - 3 fun4 insightful - 2 fun5 insightful - 3 fun -  (4 children)

I feel like I have a lot more sympathy for mods. Do all mods experience stuff like this? Why is it like this?

Haha yeah. About half the people I moderate will work with me and are wonderful people just trying to do their best.

The other half blow up in my face at any action of moderation, have an emotional meltdown about free speech and how saidit is ruined.

Then about half of those harass me directly through PMs. About 10% create another account and break rules again straight away. About 1% post deliberate garbage to saidit (gross porn or worse) to deliberately mess up the site, so I have to ban that user too, remove all those posts, then I have to ban their IP.

Then about 1% will turn on a VPN and do it again with another username, and then I have to ban their new usernames and their VPN IP range.

And then about 0.1% will go to other websites and write a spin story to smear saidit and me over the event that just occurred (usually as an expose about how saidit hates free speech, even though they were breaking site rules by advocating violence, but they always leave that part out).

This is basically a normal day for me. People are basically either nice about it, or they go apeshit and go up this huge scale of escalation. But I have a process for it, and I just apply the process. It's routine at this point for me.

I can understand why the admin at voat just let it all go to shit, because some people use so many emotional tactics to try and get their ways, and it's kind of exhausting. But that's the point, they want you to be so exhausted by their antics that you tacitly allow it just so they stop throwing tantrums.

And then some admins and mods react way too strongly the other way to this pressure and go on drives to purge out these people (because they are tired of dealing with them) and I think that's what we are seeing on reddit right now.

It honestly takes a very careful balance to deal with the troublemakers, but not go overboard. That's why we have the pyramid of debate as a guide, and we have our rules set up the way we do.

There's just no pleasing everyone. You will always have some people on the anti-censorship side that that will cry crocodile tears that they can't shout fire in a crowded theater and yell open threats to kill people. And you will also have on the pro-censorship side the people who can't believe the "horrible" things that you allow to exist on the forum, as if it should be a carefully curated walled garden that never displeases their particular worldview, and you're responsible for that. Both are obviously untenable positions. But as an admin or mod, the challenge is to balance all this.

It's surprisingly non-trivial.

[–]SierraKiloBravo 3 insightful - 2 fun3 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 2 fun -  (3 children)

I know I've said it before, but I really appreciate the work you do here M7 (and D3rr of course!). And the fact that you are active all through the site and talk with all levels of users. I don't know how you find the time!

I've had my own experience with an unhappy poster in the last couple of days, after I deleted what I genuinely thought was a spam link. I can't even imagine the scale you are dealing with!

[–]magnora7 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

Thanks :) It is tricky to find ways to scale what I do, but getting help from vantafount has been a big part of this, vanta has been doing a great job doing content moderation for the site, mostly focusing around spam control and other things, so I can focus on the trickier stuff.

[–]SierraKiloBravo 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

Love your work mate :-)

When are we going to hear you back on The Tinfoil Hat?

[–]magnora7 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Ha who knows, maybe not ever. I heard ryan left the show, and he was the main drive for getting me on there the first time. It's probably more likely I'd be on Higherside chats again, but I don't really have a "thing" to talk about because I run this forum now instead of writing articles, which is what Carlwood picks up on to ask me for interviews. The only "thing" I have to talk about is cybersecurity and how to run forums, which might be interesting in itself, but I'd probably have to write an article about it first and hone it down to an interesting set of factoids. Maybe someday