After being harassed in multiple discord channels by powermod FlyingSquid the news mod blackbeard has shuttered his account and moved to bluesky.
https://lemmy.world/u/Blackbeard
"The recklessness with which people downvote polite disagreements reminds me of all the worst parts of Reddit, and it proves to me that this isn’t the social media savior I’d hoped it would be, and is instead just another echo chamber. I hope eventually lemmy.world (and the fediverse more broadly) can grow out of that, but some of the behavior I’ve seen on the inside from both mods and admins doesn’t really inspire much confidence for that kind of evolution in the short term. "
FlyingSquid is the same mod who has the power to siteban people from lemmy.world
Why does lemmy.world keep having issues with their powermods and admins? Why do powermods get the ability to siteban their enemies from the largest instance?
Because it is a hostile approach what are you on about. People aren’t clairvoyants to be able to see the future and read minds of mods who will take a look at the reports. They won’t know that their reports are causing a single mod to boil over in anger, especially when apparently there were two reports in two weeks?
So now you have a situation where one person sees something and reports it, and the other has been pissed off for two weeks, but not communicating their annoyance.
So the mod overreacts and reaches out to say “don’t report!!!” To which the other person says “I think this is a valid report”. Which then evolves to “ok I won’t report anymore”.
First, why the fuck would you confront someone over two reports in two weeks? Second, why not end the conversation like an adult - saying “reporting this as misinfo is against our rules” and end it there? Third, why leave the site and their modding duties alltogether over a single interaction - with someone who hasn’t been confronted before about this issue and was unaware of it? Fourth why call “ok I’ll not be reporting” childish / immature as if reporting is some divine duty of the user?
The way it should’ve been handled is a) don’t confront people over nothing. Check HALT - hungry angry lonely tired and don’t start anything when that’s the case. B) if they need to confront, talk to your fellow mods first to present a unified front. C) be succint and state what you find to be a problem. Don’t be an ahole about it. D) when the other person reacts with “I don’t want to report anymore” reply with “I am sorry to hear that and I’d rather you wouldn’t stop, but ultimately that’s your choice to make”. Don’t antagonize further for no reason.
The 2 a week occurrence was just the past week and it was clear this has been going on for some time. Look at what BB said “you routinely report simple disagreements as misinformation” and “This has been going on for months”. BB just didn’t make a big deal out of it. Regardless of the frequency, our moderators moderate the communities out of their own free time. If they want to go to someone on the side and say “don’t report stuff like this” to save themselves time they are well within their rights to do so. That’s how the conversation started, no hostilities or anything. Just saying “Hey this doesn’t break our community rules so please stop reporting it”. A mature and adult-like response to something like this would have been “I disagree, but fine.” It didn’t need more that. A mature person could have also said “Can we look into making it a rule or having a discussion about it at least?” if they were feeling passionate about the subject. FS then had a very childish response of saying “Well I just won’t report anymore then”. That’s not an appropriate way to respond to something like this. I’ve flagged comments before that got ignored even though I think they should. I’ve never had a mod have to have this kind of conversation with me but I also never made it a big deal and just re-thought about what comments should be reported.
As for your steps, I agree with you for the most part. I don’t know if BB should have talked to the other mod(s) before having this kind of conversation as I feel that’s a bit extra and unnecessary. If mods had to deliberate over every report and comment than they would get nothing done. Also, I don’t see how BB antagonized FS. He was well within his rights to say “stop reporting stuff like this”
One clarification, it was two reports in one week, I don’t know why I typed out two weeks. You’re completely right though. No one needs to put up with being berated, the peaceful offer to just not do reports anymore is a lot more kind than I would have been about it.