Here’s something I have been thinking about today. It came from voat going down yesterday and looking at some of the other options out there for those voaters who were displaced.
I personally like the level of admin involvement here. It’s the perfect mix for me.
We know what it looks like when a site has zero involvement with the community (voat/putt)
I’m curious, do you guys think sites like phuks, voat, poal, etc can be over moderated by admins? Do you think the admins should have a somewhat stand off approach until needed?
Just a curious thought.
Edit: do we have a casual conversation sub? This might fit that sub and my other thoughts better as I’m just looking for some light conversation. I can’t access the sub key on mobile.
I think there are certain duties the admins should have. Any completely automated system is going to fall victim to brigades, etc. As far as Voat is concerned what they should have done was elect a subset of admins to run the website who could be trusted, all they'd have to do is delete illegal content and hand over subs, etc. As far as backup admins probably best to have one.
In a free forum it would be nice to have some way to flag content as fake news or deceptive while having any mod actions transparent and logged. The issue is on Voat (I'm not experienced enough here to tell) someone can post a news story with a deceptive headline and it'll get a bunch of upvotes and maybe one comment saying that OP intentionally misrepresented the article (or in some cases even made the title exactly the opposite). So the majority of readers think they are learning basic facts about the news without reading because they saw an article trending on Voat. I think that could happen on any forum.
Also an admin has a right to ask the hate groups to foot their % of the bill, especially if the admin is one of the groups the hate group wants to exterminate. Free speech sure but people are not entitled to give away $$.