/m/politics is basically unmoderated, and the trolls and other ne’er-do-wells are starting to find it. I’m not even particularly interested in following it, but that’s one topic that you don’t want to leave unmoderated. It’s a troll magnet for obvious reasons, and that starts to affect the rest of the instance (and the fediverse) if there isn’t anyone enforcing some sort of decorum.
@ernest I know you’re ridiculously busy right now, but could you find a moment to appoint someone to recruit a mod team for /m/politics? I’d be willing to do the recruiting if you don’t have any better candidates, but I wouldn’t want to remain on as a moderator after that’s done.
Alternatively does anyone here actively want the job?
I wish I was moderator material. I’d like to help if I believed I could do it while keeping my sanity intact.
I’ll probably immediately throw a fit and fuck things up if I’m ever in that position though. I have absolutely no notion of patience.
Hmm… I used to be supermoderator on a fairly large forum (originally gaming focused, but had since expanded) back in the day, as well as moderator on an imageboard. That said, the reason I don’t moderate things now is because it’s incredibly stressful. But I was relatively active in r/politics until this whole debacle, so I guess this could be considered wanting to give back to the community. Definitely don’t want to do it long term, though. That said, m/politics seems to be chugging along just fine without mods for now.
There’s a part of me that wishes I could help. I like the idea of helping the sub and site succeed. But I know all to well what kinda bullshit the mods deal with.
They’ll spend lots of time having to read troll posts, death threats, porn, CSAM, and just general assholes arguing back and forth. When they ban someone righteously, there’s a good chance they’ll argue back. They’ll have to carefully read some comments to try and get a feel of if they’re written by an AI. They’ll have to look through profiles and other comments to figure out if something is a bot copying comments.
People will constantly be complaining about mods not doing enough. Or maybe doing too much. Some users will get upset if they get acted on for something that wasn’t technically against the rules (or unclear if it was), while others will be upset if mods don’t respond to obviously awful stuff just because it wasn’t technically against the rules.
And they have to do it with barely any tools. Reddit mods complained tons about their lack of tooling, but the very young Lemmy and kbin have even less tooling.
You have to be a very caring and patient person to be a mod, and it’ll still probably drive you crazy. Or alternatively you can just be someone who likes a position of power and enjoys the feel of lording over others enough to deal with the downsides (or maybe even enjoy the feeling of people hating you). But that’s not in the best interest of the community.
And not to forgot, all that you wrote, is worse for a “hot” community like m/politics. I’ve done modding work before and I’m not touching that one with a 20 foot pole.