Hi there.
A short introduction: This is an alt account. I’m a moderator here who has been unhappy with the state of news/political discussions here for a long time. The admins have kindly given me the opportunity to see if we can make some improvement the community here.
We will be doing some major revision of the rules left by the previous moderators and will use discussions in this thread as feedback on the direction we should take our community.
This will be an open discussion on the state of our community, the rules and our moderation practices. Feel free to give your inputs.
I can tell you that the mod in the exchange with naturalgasbad and the mod who removed the comments are different.
Nevertheless, dismissing valid concerns about inconsistency in rule enforcement, threats of escalating bans, talking down to our community as children, as well as using mod power to remove valid criticism, as YoBuck has demonstrated, are all unacceptable behavior for LW moderators moving forward and will not be tolerated.
I have requested the moderators in question to apologize here, and based on the sincerity they demonstrate, I would be recommending further actions from our admin team.
I’m not holding my breath waiting for an apology. I might not like mods’ agenda, but they have the power here.
While I did not ban you I may have removed some of the posts or comments in the past that were reported for rule violations.
I apologize if the process for appealing is unclear or if any of your posts or comments were removed in error.
Above all else I apologize if you were made to feel unwelcome here as it has been important for me the past 6 months moderating this community to try and develop a place for discussion from many sides on topics around the world.
Before the most recent additions to the mod team we had a practice of using a 1 day temp ban, 3 day temp ban, 7 day temp ban, and then permanent ban for many rule violations. (the exception being clearly racist trolling type of users) I think it would be good to return to a standardized structure as well as removing the MBFC requirements as the best way to fight misinformation is to prove its bias in comments rather than being the arbiters of good journalism.
I appreciate the work you mods do to clean up the community and respect that y’all can’t be perfect when cleaning up rule violations. I don’t think I’ve had any issues with your moderation in particular (it’s been fair and level-handed as far as I can tell) and I really love to see all the work you’re doing to make this community more welcoming. Looking forward to seeing what the new mod team does!
Happy New Year!
Thanks, I really appreciate that. Happy New Year!
Still waiting for that apology from jordanlund. Figured as much. Some of the mods here are great (or at least have good intentions - I respect that), but one bad mod ruins the bunch.