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Are we going to be able to make our own groups?
This was one of the biggest appeals of reddit. There was a subreddit for everything and you could use your subs for way more than just a group of like-minded individuals.
But yeah. We should be able to make our own groups.
There needs to be a system for maintaining active moderation in the best interests of a group though.
One of Reddit's major flaws is so few users having so much power over subreddits, especially with the seniority system.
That is one major thing this site can do better.
Give this page a read for info about the way I'm hoping this will be able to work: https://docs.tildes.net/mechanics-future
It won't be simple to get it to work well, but I think it could improve things a lot if we can figure it out.
This does sound better than Reddit's moderation system, thought you're saying there would still be moderators in the Reddit sense. They would be moderating other users' ability to govern the community in addition to moderating discussion.
A moderator would be the one making the distinction between correct and incorrect reports, unless you specifically would govern all the posts to establish trustworthy users, which doesn't scale well as the site grows. Someone needs to make that distinction.
This lands us in the same trap of having a few users with control over the discussion, and additionally in control of determining the most trustworthy users. It's a good solution to relieve moderators from the amount of work done at scale, but does not solve the issue of a few users with final say over the discussion of a community.
The hope is that having so many more moderators will prevent one small group from becoming tyrants over the content. It's easy for a group of five or ten people to go off half-cocked about the rules. It's a hell of a lot harder for 1500 or 5000 of them to become corrupted - especially if those are all of the top submitters, commenters, readers, and lurkers. That basically is the community, doing its own moderation driven by the core members. Rep will decay over time too, so those who are inactive would lose access.
Yes, but who determines those trusted users? Who decides if they are making correct reports?
We want it to go both ways - mods feedbacking on users through reports, and users feedbacking on the mod's actions in a public log. The exact mechanisms for feedback there are sketchy, but the idea is they keep each other in check, and it's all in the open. We had a thread about that somewhere, the /r/redditalternatives thread I think.
I'd imagine that the best way to handle the "few users with final say" issue is to make it into a voting system with the trusted users. I don't think that setting it so that it would be safe to trust a users reports without a preemptive review is good in any case - we are all human and have feelings and emotions, sometimes letting those things cloud our better judgement.
I was a mod on a very large forum (over 5k active users) and as much as I'd hate to admit it, stuff like that happened to both me and the other mods. A better solution would be to make it a voting system, allowing a group of trusted users to review the content. If there are x amount of report validations, make it so.
I think you might be misunderstanding the scale, the idea would be to have hundreds or thousands of "trusted users" for a larger group. It's still not going to be a perfect system and will have its own issues, but "all users are equal, let the votes decide" doesn't work at all.
But how do you decide which users are to be trusted? Who is the one that determines which users are making correct reports?
The person determining that has a lot of power, and must also be able to remove posts and approve posts after reading those reports.
This was already discussed here. In short, yes, but it's complicated.