Ack I read this earlier and had a lot of thoughts that I thought were good and constructive but now that I’m in front of my laptop my mind went blank. Still, I’ll try to make some coherent points lol. I spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to be thoughtful while typing this out so I’m sure people have already covered a lot of what I’m gonna say but I’ll send it anyway.

Direct Responses to your comment:

This is now the forth post discussing this, after the initial post, a post made by hellinkilla, the post for the EMPOC community, and now this one.

So besides the EMPOC improvement post, I don’t remember any of the other posts that you are talking about. Which one was the inital post? The one that got removed with the modchat screenshots? The first site improvement post? I went through hellinkillas post history and didn’t see anything resembling a post that has to do with what’s going on here. I don’t want you to go through the trouble of finding them for me, but I think this is kind of the problem. People bring up their concerns about mod cliques, favoritism, accountability, hostility towards the userbase, uneven comment/post removal and banning, etc. but those things are brought up in the shadow of other posts that are meant for other discussion (ie. the ND and EMPOC improvement threads), or through user posts that you brought up. But there has not been a big Community discussion explicitly about these grievances that is stickied and facilitated by the mod/admin team, and that is really what people want and why it keeps coming up over and over. I think that it is kinda different to have posts that say “how can we improve the experience for x or y users” and “we need to address the concerns you have about admin/mod behavior”. The first type of post, imo, only serves to get feedback on how to moderate behavior of average users, as opposed to the latter, which serves to discuss how to moderate admin/mod behavior.

The problem is there are many comments expressing their emotion but there is not many ideas for concrete change.

So I think this problem stems from the feedback I gave above. When these grievances are aired in threads that aren’t explicit about accountability, I feel like a lot of that content can be glossed over and forgotten about, because that’s not what is being asked of in the post. This can make it difficult to have a structured, productive conversation when you feel ignored, and that compounds the problem of distrust. I think that giving a structured, focused forum for people to bring up these concerns may yield more concrete ideas.

I believe that the changes that you all have made have been great, but they do nothing to address mod cliques, favoritism, accountability, hostility towards the userbase, uneven comment/post removal and banning, etc. A lot of people have expressed that when they do air grievances, it’s nothing but radio silence OR, when it is not ignored, replies to these grievances only address the very specific example that a user might make. For example, someone expresses frustration about an unwarranted post removal, and a response might be “we restored that post”. Another example is someone asking why “User X” was banned but NOT “User Y”. The response might be “we ended up banning user y”. But really, it’s not only about frustration around the specific instance, but frustrations at the patterns of behavior by the mod/admin team and that is never directly addressed by the replying mod/admin.

I will remove inactive mods, we have a very diverse admin team with multiple admins directly nominated by the EMPOC community over a year ago. We have committed to having more meta posts to engage the community in changes…

Again, I think that changes y’all have made are excellent, and I think that even the strongest critics of mod cliques, favoritism, accountability, hostility towards the userbase, uneven comment/post removal and banning, etc. agree with that. I can sense exasperation here and that totally makes sense. I think you all are doing a lot to try to get community input and improve things! But since this specific topic doesn’t seem to have been addressed directly, you’re just going to continually hear these complaints in every community improvement thread, and that is gonna make it feel like no one appreciates the effort that you all put into this. And that fucking sucks and I can understand if it might make you or other people on the team feel frustrated, bitter, whatever it might be. And that might make people go to the mod chat to blow off steam. That’s a reasonable reaction to being continually criticized. But having those shit-talking sessions does nothing to try to fix this problem. It seems like no matter what it’s just a matter of time before chat logs get leaked and that just pisses people off MORE because instead of their very valid complaints being taken into consideration, they are being shown that they are just being mocked behind closed doors, and that reinforces the whole cycle.

I also want to bring up the banning of LY here as another example. So LY, an EMPOC, was commenting in the EMPOC improvement post with a criticism that they put a TON of effort into crafting which explained how EMPOC voices were being silenced and not taken into consideration. What happens? They get banned, with no explanation, in a post that is meant to address racism on the site. That ban was a perfectly ironic example of just exactly the problem of racism on the site. Nobody cares that you unbanned them, they decided to leave anyway because it upset them so much. It never should have happened in the first place. Unbanning someone does not mean that people within the admin/mod team has reckoned with mod cliques, favoritism, accountability, hostility towards the userbase, uneven comment/post removal and banning, etc.. The unbanning happened as a reaction to MASSIVE backlash amongst the users. Having EMPOC admins/mods is very important and it is great that they were elected by users. That does not fix this problem, though, as CommunistCuddlefish pointed out.

FInal Thoughts: People do not like that they do not seem to get engagement directly with mods/admins beyond a “we fixed that problem” comment. People do not feel that vague apology posts after the fact are adequate. People want DIALOGUE. People seem to prefer that problems that many have agreed are systemic get dealt with, instead of the admin/mod team having to play defense and clean up every time something shitty happens. I think that Maoists got it right with criticisms and self-crit. I totally get not wanting to take seriously comments that are unnecessarily hostile, but I think many people do not feel like their criticisms are taken seriously, and do not feel that the admins/mods have actually tried to engage in self-crit because they do not see these problems as systemic and are issues in the imagination of many users. I think that part of demonstrating that you have engaged in self-crit is not just relying on users to give you “concrete examples” of how to fix things, but to really investigate these problems amongst yourselves and suggest ways to improve trust and transparency specific to mod cliques, favoritism, accountability, hostility towards the userbase, uneven comment/post removal and banning, etc.. Some people have actually given concrete suggestions, and I have seen those shut down, so not sure how much users can really give that will be agreeable to you all.

Concrete suggestions:

• Create a Mod Accountability Post and link to this discussion. Request that users give constructive feedback and ideas as to how their grievances could be solved. Do not shut down ideas with “we can’t or won’t do that”. See if ideas can be generated to find a middle ground first. Perhaps whoever posts this should act as a facilitator. If someone comes in venting their emotions, perhaps try to guide the user towards working towards a solution. Be curious, ask questions. Be more involved in discussion instead of just reading comments and only discussing them in the mod chat. Don’t play goalie when people bring up specific examples, try to get to the root issue or if you don’t know what it is, ask.
• Refer to @hellinkilla@hexbear.net 's Community post format. It is near perfect and an easy template to refer to for whoever creates those posts, could make the job a lot easier for y’all.
• For Community Improvement threads specific to marginalized groups, make it explicit that the post is ONLY for input from that community. Or, only allow users who don’t identify with the community to “bump” comments/suggestions that they think should be amplified.
• No removing comments/banning users for input on community posts unless a number of other users request this. If that’s not feasible, then I think that only the Admins should have those privileges, or only the Admin who created the post.
• One idea from another comrade: A lot of people want mods/admins to be identified so that we can see who is banning and removing things. Instead of connecting mod usernames to these actions, perhaps assign mods ID numbers so that people can see if there are patterns with certain mods that appear problematic. I think this would honestly be a relief for the mod/admin team as well, because many frustrations are lobbed at the team as a whole when it may just be one or two actors that are making controversial decisions.
• Idea from another comrade: Occasionally make sticky posts advertising that there is a need for mods. List the communities in need of mods. Copy/Paste a blurb as to what is expected of a mod.
• I really dislike when users devolve to name calling and outright hostility. Maybe once things turn that way people should be given a 1-2 hour cool off period ban with a note explaining that they can come back to the conversation only in good faith.