I don’t think that the type of power that a janny has is able to meaningfully corrupt the janny. At least, not in most cases; because it’s practically no power, like it or not your online community means nothing in the big picture.
Instead, I think that bad moderators are the result of people with specific moral flaws (entitlement, assumptiveness, irrationality, lack of self-control, context illiteracy) simply showing them as they interact with other people. They’d do it without the janny position, it’s just that being a janny increases the harm that those trashy users cause.
Why the alternatives that you mentioned to human moderation do not work:
- Bots - content moderation requires understanding what humans convey through language and/or images within a context. Bots do not.
- Voting - voting only works when you have crystal clear rules on who’s allowed or not to vote, otherwise the community will be subjected to external meddling.
Nicely rendered. You have given me food for thought.
Power corrupts, but that doesn’t mean that we don’t need positions of power…
Because for anything that is built, someone else will set out to destroy or manipulate it for their own purposes. For example, spammers will use social media to try to boost their SEO and as an avenue for free advertising.
As much as I’d love if everyone could act with the best intentions towards others at all times, there is too much motivation and reward for anti-social actions. As a result, we have to have a complex system of rules and enforcement.
Yes, we need a control. But control by the worst of us is a bad control. And yes, there is a race to the bottom for control here.
Unchecked, unanswerable power corrupts. On lemmy everyone is free to create their own sub. Heck they’re free to create their own instance. That makes the “power” of moderators pretty tame.
Compare that to the power a corporate CEO has over the typical employee. Especially since the 1970s and 1980s redefinition of the primary responsibility of the directors of a corporation to be “maximize shareholder value” instead of “maximize stakeholder value.”
Even in (small d democratic) politics, at least an aggrieved voter can run to replace a corrupt, abusive politician. Not many companies, probably no publicly traded ones, have a mechanism for the workers to replace the management. That’s where major corruption by power can be witnessed.
Too limit the number of people getting PTSD from terrible images.
Because some of us remember how the internet was without moderators, and how it went to shit early 2000’s when “everyone” started using it.
There has to be an algorithm. A crowdsourced wisdom. Individuals can’t be trusted. From spez to the very mods here.
but there’s no individual mods here …
You parse sentences like a bot.
Whenever I hear someone suggest “an algorithm” without elaborating further, I’m usually correct in presuming that it makes as much sense as “a wizard will use magic”. The other times it’s usually someone suggesting blockchain. Sometimes it’s both.
Or, hear me out, collaboration across networks. That’s what lemmy does. And it’s nothing new.
I offered an alg up there in the thread. Browse for 1.5 seconds, you’ll find it.
And I saw it. What’s your fix for botnets and brigading?
An algorithm gets programmed… By who? T Its the cover Facebook takes. “Well we didn’t mean to radicalized thousands of people, we just had an algorithm feed them addictive and increasingly political videos until they were”.
well I offered one up there in the thread.
To quote Dr Cox: “People are bastard coated bastards with bastard filling.”
So we elect some people to be chief jerkfaces against all the other miserable sods, then the rest of us pricks have to bully the mods to keep things fair… or unfair in so many directions at once that the scales still balance out. Thus turning our weakness into strength.
Or at least, that’s the plan.
The worst are the good in heart, slinging bans and censors for the good of the underprivileged and downtrodden. They suck hairy balls.
hup, and there it is …
clear as mud. Come on, risk an opinion.
I think you’re starting from a false premise. “All power corrupts” is a demonstrably untrue maxim.
If it were true we would never have anyone with power over anything. Being the one in charge of taking the cat to the vet would somehow be corrupting.
I feel like you are close to asking good political science questions. Close. Are you advocating for anarchy? Or communism? No? Just a technocracy that “works”?
A self-reflective hivemind evolving towards moral perfection.
Then nothing will ever improve or get done, because perfection is a myth that varies from person to person and even at it’s base definition (the quality or state of being perfect: such as freedom from fault or defect) is an impossibilty since anything created by man is gonna be as faulty as we are…and for those that choose to follow it, what happens is they become hard procrastinators, because they’re setting stupidly high standards for themselves or others that border on impossible to keep.
There’s a reason why saying like “perfection is the enemy of good/ finished” and “aim for good, not perfect” exist.
Not even gonna touch on morality. That’s a whole other can of worms I’m too exhausted to open.
