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.
Voat had a lot of admin involvement in stuff for a few months after the Reddit blackout, which is understandable. It did kind of set a precedent for everyone to keep asking or expect Atko or Puttitout to get involved in stuff that they really didn't need to be directly involved in though, and that turned into more of a problem after Atko left.
Most of the moderation here is done by admins, we don't have the userbase to fill all of the defaults with mods we know will put together solid rulesets, be smart with deletions, not require a bunch of oversight etc. If there is something happening that is not strictly against the TOS or whatever, I try to get involved as a user rather than an admin. In cases like that, there are usually discussions about how certain things can be handled by tweaking site features, rather than directly getting involved every time something happens. I think that is more important from an admin perspective, and something that should have happened on Voat a long, long time ago, rather than the situation being ignored or directly fixed.
Being involved as a user does make it easier to make informed decisions as an admin though, also something that did not happen on Voat, and it's part of the reason why groups of users managed to kind of dominate the site from time to time.