comfy

I like high quality communities, which cannot maintain quality without staff, and which would probably struggle to maintain any funding.

One example of a community I became a moderator for often had trolls occasionally show up and post obviously malicious content, and commercial ad spam. Due to timezone differences, these often took hours to be deleted by existing staff.

So it wasn’t about morality, righteousness, money or power. It was about me wanting to develop a community I cared about.

Edit: in a comment chain, you mentioned people who clearly moderate for other motives. They exist, I’ve seen them and helped get some removed in one particular community. Like you said, there are other motivators. Sometimes a community is so desperate for volunteers that they keep junk ones on-board, sometimes the admin personally likes them and enables their abuse, or sometimes the admin is too absent and no-one can kick the abusive staff out. And worse, if a staff team is toxic, it’s harder to bring good volunteers in.

It depends on the community. Larger general purpose communities tend towards that, the people who acknowledge you are typically people disputing a ban or who took it personally. On the other hand, for a Lemmy example, look at the admin Ada (and similar examples) who have reasons to regularly communicate their decisions and achievements and are clearly in line with their general community’s values – their community won’t have as many people crying about censorship because the community doesn’t pretend that they will tolerate bigotry.

Mods who just delete garbage posts (sometimes called “janitors” on other platforms) are typically faceless thankless volunteers, or abusive personalities powertripping. It’s a tough job, and someone has to put their hand up for it.

Thanks, I didn’t realize that was the context.

Eh, one can’t really make a decent analysis using vague abstract ideals like ‘liberty’ and ‘security’.

In some ways, security is liberating! For example, some religions have anonymous (private) confessionals and electoralism has anonymous private ballot booths to encourage freedom in voting. I don’t know if I’d be as honest online if I knew people with too much time and money could track my posts back to my real identity and harass me. And without security, these privacies would be merely illusions (see: deanonymization)

And obviously, on the other hand, state security understandably sees certain personal liberties (like downloading bomb-making guides and then buying fertilizer) as a risk beyond the liberty they’re willing to permit. Corporate security might see user anonymity techniques as a legitimate fraud/bot risk. I’ve picked diverse and good-faith examples to demonstrate, there’s plenty of midground and abusive examples of both, don’t worry, I know. (I left reddit many years ago partly for privacy reasons, no need to preach to the choir).

I guess my point is, security and liberties don’t necessarily contradict. But if you have governments and corporations run by the owning class, they have a material interest in suppressing your liberties for their own security. To make that appealing and tolerable, they have an incentive to rebrand this as being about your security. I’ve been in protests that obviously wouldn’t harm a fly and the police presence is consistently absurd. It’s clearly not actually about any of our security, or even the security of property owners, but rather the security of the bourgeois owning class and their way of life.

Yeah I realized my reply was a bit silly so I retracted it, I’m guessing I was a bit late and you’d already replied.

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