p.s the difference between this post and this post is that I want to ask questions and get people's opinions and answers in this one more.

Here's a few examples, last one being an argument between a few people where most people, including Deimos agreed with this idea.

Personally, I find this idea almost terrifying because it implies social media in it's current form cannot be fixed by changing or expanding human or automoderation, nor fact checking, because moderation can't reasonably occur at scale at all.

However, I have 2 questions:

1: If large social media platforms can't really be moderated what should we do to them? The implied solution is balkanizing social media until the 'platforms' are extended social circles which can be moderated and have good discussion (or more practically, integrate them to a federated service like mastodon which is made to be split like this or something like discord.) An alternative I've heard is to redo the early 2000s and have fanforums for everything to avoid context collapse and have something gluing the site's users together (something I am far more supportive of) or a reason for invite systems and stricter control of who enters your site but doesn't explain the idea that once your site hits a certain usercount, it will inevitably worsen and that is something that stems from human nature (Dunbar's number aka the max amount of friends you could theoretically have) and so is inevitable, almost natural.

2: Why is moderation impossible to do well at large scales? While I think moderation, which I think is analogous to law enforcement or legal systems (though the many reddit mods here can definitely give their opinions on that) definitely likely isn't the kind of thing that can be done at a profit, I'm not entirely sure why would it be wholly impossible. A reason I've heard is that moderators need to understand the communities they're moderating, but I'm not sure why wouldn't that be a requirement, or why would adding more mods make that worse (mods disagreeing with eachother while moderating seems quite likely but unrelated to this.)

Do we have any statistics on how many users have been banned and why they’ve been banned? What information should be or remain public? Some forum sites let you see the banned users post and comment history from prior to their ban; is there any value in that?

Unrelated; how many Tildes-ers are we up to now?

What I mean by this is:

Sometimes @Deimos posts something related to his mod/admin work, like saying he will be locking a thread or adding something new, but that's not all he does, he makes regular topics and comments about regular things, he doesn't have need to use an alt-account for that. I feel that when he's talking or posting about his mod/admin work and talking about anything else that interests him should be able to be viewed separately.

Thoughts?

First post on Tildes (though I've commented some before). I'm a mod on one of the "beta" sites, and have been for almost four years now.

I don't follow any of the other sites really, and certainly not Meta, so the whole Monica scandal kinda happened without me noticing. After the fallout (or amidst, I guess), Shog9 and several other community managers that I liked were fired, with seemingly no notice or cause.

Then after that, there seemed to be a push to create a "mod council" to create standards for behavior and for removal and reinstatement of moderators.

But the whole thing has seemed so needless, everything could have been cleared up with a few heartfelt announcements (and/or apologies), and the executive team at SE has just been so damn opaque about everything.

Then, to top things off for me personally, the community leaders were explicit in stating that the votes for members of the mod council would not be treated as binding, so what's the point? They can just be a rubber stamp at that point if they're not freely elected. The new moderator rules are "abide by the council-approved rules and whatever the community managers say." The new moderator rules also say "moderators will be removed and reinstated per the council-approved procedure for doing so, except when SE doesn't want to use that policy."

The mod council vote was non-binding, and then SE is making it a point to clearly state that the rules approved by the council don't matter.

It's this last bit that is coming as too much of an insult for me. I've told my fellow moderators that I'm not planning on signing the agreement. I don't understand why there has to be such an adversarial relationship here when I'm volunteering my time.

I don't want to leave, but everything is just rubbing me the wrong way. Please someone help me understand how I'm wrong. I just can't understand the way things have been publicly announced.

One of the unique feature of Tildes when it comes to content moderation is the usage of "labels". While there are guidelines, there are no hard and fast rules as to when to use one label or the other (nor should there be!). I am curious what criteria you all use when deciding whether or not to apply a label to a comment, and also how frequently you find yourself labeling things. For reference, the current labels are:

• Exemplary
• Offtopic
• Joke
• Noise
• Malice

Are there labels you find yourself using more than others? Are there some you think are unclear? I feel like this is an often overlooked and underused feature, but that may just be because I personally do not use them that frequently. For example, I have only given a few Exemplary tags, a few noise, and I don't think any of the others.

Prologue: Feeling cranky, trying to be civil.

I posted a link to an article, in the ~news, about two of the top US dairy producers declaring bankruptcy ... and Someone moved it to ~food.

Harumpf.

~food is "check out this new latte recipe" or "how to survive the vegetarian keto diet" (yes, that's a thing; I'm on it. May be why I'm cranky).

My post was ~news, about the US economy, shifting societal norms, potentially about climate change.

But forget about this specific categorization issue. This is the first time I've bumped into Tildes' moderation methodology.

I don't subscribe to ~food, so for me, my post just vanished, w/o notification or explanation. Took me a few minutes to find it. I don't see any way to ID who moved it (may well have been @Deimos, for all I know), nor any way to challenge the move.

Have I overlooked some 'moderation dispute' button, or some such? Or is moderation here beyond dispute?

ETA: For anyone visiting this post down the line, here's the official/original statement on this ...

https://tildes.net/~tildes.official/53r/users_can_now_be_manually_granted_permissions_to_re_tag_topics_move_them_between_groups_and_edit