this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2023
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I wanted to express that I'm extremely concerned about the banning of @paddedperson and the deletion of their thread saying that they were migrating away from lemmynsfw.
As far as I can tell, @paddedperson was banned for leaking preliminary information about upcoming content policy changes from the admin discussion group. In my view, they were legitimate concerns, and retaliatory action taken against him are very concerning with respect to treatment of whistleblowers.
Can admins comment on this incident?
Truly transparent non-profit organizations (e.g. Wikipedia) typically release meeting minutes (a summary or transcript), or allow the public to attend voting meetings as part of the audience. Can the admins provide a summary or transcript of the votes taken on various decisions?
So I'm not really an "admin" - I'm a sysadmin/developer who was given the role of admin so I can make sure all systems (including modlog, reportings, and other tools) work as we adjust them for this instance's very specific needs.
Padded got banned because he was trying to sabotage the efforts of an entirely volunteer group including revealing our hosting provider. We are not a "non profit organization" - lemmynsfw is a volunteer instance being run on donations. People need to understand that this is no one's "job" and yet it's literally taking a ton of our time. I've spent so many hours pouring over lemmy code, system configurations, working with the mod tool group, brainstorming, writing code, and trying to help the real admins where I can...
And seriously, no one is being paid for this, donations barely cover server costs, and any excess donations are being saved because it's anticipated that server costs will continue to rise while donations don't. Besides, I don't think any of us WANT to be paid for fear of reprisal from our respective governments for "making money" off serving pornography.
When the creator put out his call for help, a bunch of us stepped up to try to keep the server alive, but this is not an easy instance to run. Please understand that.
To be clear, the volunteers/admins at Wikipedia are not paid either. From my personal experience in Wikimedia communities, my sincere advice is to consider and take transparency seriously.
The most important resource in volunteer spaces like this is 'trust'.
I hope you and the admin team recognize that in order to run a website like this, you also require the trust and buy-in from moderators (who are also unpaid) to invest the many hours into their communities just as you have done for the server. Hiding things from moderators, sending mixed messages, and making secret deliberations (with rumors that some admins are eager to remove large quantities of content) is really damaging for that relationship of trust.
The recent content policy changes (even before padded's leak) have been dictatorial top-down decrees. However, these unilateral rule changes are impractical/meaningless when moderators have not agreed to enforce those rules -- and I've personally experienced this (at best, only 30% of the content that I've reported for content policy violations have been addressed by moderators). Realistically, no moderator wants to enforce rules they don't believe in, and if they leave, the departure of skilled talent cripples this website and leaves communities effectively unmoderated in practice.
Please consider improving the transparency of these content policy deliberations, and at the very minimum, incorporate community moderators into the discussion and ascertain that they are in agreement with the rules before rolling out changes on the drop of a dime.
It's impossible to please everyone, tend to our jobs, and tend to our families and lives. Concessions will always be made. I don't know how wikipedia handles all that, but I don't see how we can do that.
There is a matrix channel for public lemmynsfw discourse, https://matrix.to/#/#lemmynsfw:matrix.org - there's not a lot of activity there but if you have questions or want a more direct line with us, that's where we are. We can make a mod specific room and invite folks to have a mod-centric discussion if you think that's helpful.
But please, please, PLEASE remember that everyone is volunteering their time, and respect for one another is the most important part of this entire process.
I'm very understanding and sympathetic to the fact that running large communities is difficult.
My impression of the current situation is that trust is especially low between community mods/contributors and the admin team. The only way to repair that trust is through transparency, and I would suggest that your team implement as many measures as possible.
For example, mastodon.world discloses all of their finances.
Content banning and user banning processes need publicly posted procedures. How many warnings does each user get? What is the appeal process like? Banning of communities or users should never occur unless it is in violation of an existing policy. It is not okay to change the rules and ban simultaneously (e.g. as was done with c/scat or c/rapehentai). Instead, provide some advance notice. Ideally, suspend before banning. Provide the banned community or user with information about why they were banned.
In a situation like this, where there is so much wild speculation about the content policy, my honest opinion would just be to make the entire process transparent. For example, I used to write minutes for the mediawiki community I was in and sometimes I would publish saved IRC logs. Example minutes:
Although I suppose it was more important for our community to track all the minutes because we were a volunteer community with elected admins. However, for the situation that you are in, I really think it would be beneficial to pursue transparency to that degree.