Hey all! Friendly neighborhood mod here!
I’ve just been added (along with @FlyingSquid@lemmy.world (HEY SQUID!)) to the OTHER World News community, “worldnews”, totally separate from this group “world”.
The reason being, the mods there had effectively retired. Hurts, the lead mod, stepped away and hadn’t been active for MONTHS, and post and comment reports were PILING up, to a point where the Admins asked in our Discord chat going “Hey, what’s going on with worldnews?”
Which left ME confused, because “world” has a friendly name of “World News” and is generally up to date on the report queue unless two users are engaging in:
Which, (sigh), happens way more often than I’d like, but what are you going to do?
Before they left 5 months ago, Hurts had pinned a question to worldnews asking, basically, “Do we NEED world AND worldnews?” which I think is a valid question.
There are some key differences, world doesn’t accept video links or text pieces, but there’s no rule against that in worldnews, so it’s a little more free-form than world, although both require legitimate news sources.
So for now, consider the discussion OPEN! Keep them both? Close one or the other?
The volume difference is pretty dramatic:
world:
worldnews:
Edit: The following is a criticism of the moderation practices in this community.
Jordanlund seems cool with comments not only out of the blue attacking others for their religion, but also of using their mod powers to add flaired “context”in support of those attacks when reports of such abuse come in.
begin original post:
Although there may be consequences to me speaking out, I believe it’s important that I address this issue.
I recently came across a comment here in !world which appeared to be a clear rule 4 violation. Link: https://lemmy.world/comment/8955763 I am not a part of the religious community that this commenter chose to attack. But to me, there was no context or invitation wherein this attack was qualified as healthy community debate. It seemed entirely out of spite and bad faith.
For context:
Rule 4: Posts or comments that are homophobic, transphobic, racist, sexist, anti-religious, or ableist will be removed. “Ironic” prejudice is just prejudiced.
I proceeded to report this comment for violating rule 4. What precipitated next was very concerning. OP, a mod in this community, saw my report of the comment, and doubled down on the comment’s spiteful thesis in a new comment. Again, there is no context that invited debate, it was just dogpiling anti-religious sentiment. The comment is still up, you can see for yourself.
My concern is that the mod should have either:
- Taken action on the report and moved on
- OR ignored the report and moved on.
Either of these would have been fine. I can’t pretend to know about religious context enough to know how this is best dealt with.
However, instead of either of these acceptable options, we have an indefensible scenario. OP jumped into the conversation with more unasked-for debate, quoting a bunch of anti-religious sentiment simply because of my report.
Again, fortunately I am not a part of this religious group. But others on this site probably are, and users should not have to worry about their reports getting dogpiled by mod-flaired comments.
With this comment I ask for accountability from OP and the other mods on this team. What can we do to make sure that users do not feel unsafe reporting content that they may find deliberately offensive?
I don’t believe flyingsquid has an appropriate temperament to moderate a current events community
FlyingSquid seems fine for the most part, but OP here has routinely pushed some crazy right wing stuff in past comments. This seems like what happened at reddit with certain subs being taken over in an organized way to silence certain viewpoints/content in favor of others.
At least here we can create identical communities on other instances, so we’ll have to wait and see how things turn out.
OP has now tripled down on their behavior so my judgement is pretty much decided. If this was a highly specific political/philosophical community maybe, but for a community that claims to represent world news this behavior is laughably unacceptable.
Curious to know what others think. Gonna start curating my feed perhaps. Any sublemmies you would recommend?
If this is a pattern I would call for replacement of staff. Haven’t seen evidence to support that yet personally.
My comment’s in regards to jordanlund; I don’t have an opinion of flyingsquid.
As a mod, it’s my right to ignore your report as well as reply to the thread to add context.
Today is, largely, considered a monotheistic holiday even though the vast majority celebrating it is blissfully unaware of the polytheistic origins of it.
I didn’t call you out on your report, I simply left the comment in situ as it broke no rules, and added context to it.
Oddly enough, I come to this discussion not caring what your “rights” are lmao. I’m here to care that a community that handles a tremendous diversity of topics is run in a professional manner.
Your response has made it clear that you don’t value that at all, so genuinely thanks for the confirmation that you will continue this behavior.
