I agree with you.
But can we let the Karen thing go now? It’s been long enough
In my personal experience, the people I see posting to [email protected] deserved the actions the mods took, and are looking to whine to someone.
As a newly-appointed moderator myself, I think “customer service representatives curating a space” is going a little too far. I see myself more as a janitor taking out the trash while doing my best to leave all the art alone, whether I like it or not.
Communities are not owned by moderators. They are built by those that participate. The primary fallacy I see is the idea that anyone can start a different community and that size and momentum are meaningless. That is simply not the case.
An authoritarian or very active mod, in any community with public participation is actively abusing those users when they act in opposition to the interests of the community. A visible mod is a bad mod. The job of mod is as a janitor acting in the interests of the community. If you care about authority or steering, you shouldn’t be a mod or admin.
Nothing about being a mod is hard. You don’t need to read every post or comment. All you do is setup the basic guidelines and trust the community to vote and flag bad stuff. The community will always flag the bad stuff. The only part that really matters is that you set yourself aside and really look into any flagged issue while giving the benefit of the doubt in absolutely every possible way one can imagine while never allowing bigotry type abuse. This is how to be a good mod, to be an invisible mod. The job is only to herd bad bots and sort the flags from others.
“The ultimate test of a society’s freedom is not how it treats its good, obedient, compliant citizens; it’s how it treats its dissidents.” - Glenn Greenwald
Okay, sure, but Greenwald’s an absolute fascist-apologist piece of shit who only hides behind a liberal-libertarian veneer when it is convenient.
Past that, the problem you run into with dissent is that it is heavily predicated on whether you are willing to endorse the dissenters. The more alien a community’s political views and activities, the less tolerant admins become. The cause of Luigi Mangione is the most notable one, as certain communities seem to reveal in cannonizing his image while others furiously scrub out anything but the most derogatory mention of his name.
How do you distinguish between the dissident Freedom Fighter and the dissident Terrorist? What do you perceive as the limit of tolerance towards the intolerant? What kind of advocacy is constructive and what is merely provocative or trollish?
When you’ve got a guy like Glenn paling around with Tucker Carlson and bemoaning the Woke Antifa Left one minute, then crying over their own community of MAGA Truthers getting deep sixed by the Deep State, it seems the very idea of legitimate “dissent” is predicated on whether you align with it or not.
In his own words:
Independent, Unencumbered Analysis and Investigative Reporting, Captive to No Dogma or Faction.
He criticizes the duopoly and the oligarchy, but I know those loyal to the duopoly tend to become tribal if people don’t outright support one side and hate the other.
Glenn has proven himself as a journalist with his reporting of Edward Snowden and much more.
He does not fall into simplistic political groups, so I understand the frustration some political factions have with people like him.
Which people do you recommend if Glenn Greenwald does not meet your standards?
