/r/StarTrek founder and primary steward from 2008-2021

Currently on the board of directors for StarTrek.website

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • Then moderators make many stupid rules to try to increase quality and overmoderation takes hold

    This is so true. One of the best decisions I made during my tenure as mod of /r/StarTrek was changing the rules to be spirt-based instead of language-based. People will literally try to lawyer their way around the language of any rule, and it leads to mod burnout when they are getting drawn into rules-debates when it’s obvious the person is just trying to get around the spirit of the community’s purpose.

    For example we had a rule that was literally just “be nice”. There’s no wriggling around that because it’s not some legal text. If someone is ““concerned”” about a request to “be nice” or “be honest”, they are not someone we wanted to be around anyway. These are discussion communities, not civil society, not everyone has a right to participate in every single one of them.

    As you said the beauty of the fediverse is that each instance can have it’s own preferred method of discussion.





  • Moderation on the Feviderse is different than on commercial platforms because it’s context-dependent instead of rules-dependent. That means that a user accout (bot or otherwise) that does not contribute to the spirit of a community will not be welcomed.

    There is largely no incentive to run an LLM that is a constructive member of a community, bots are built to push an agenda, product, or exhibit generally disruptive behavior. Those things are unwelcome in spaces built for discussion. So mods/admins don’t need to know “how to identify a bot”, they need to know "how to identify unwanted behavior".














  • Corgana@startrek.websitetoFediverse memes@feddit.ukThis Aged Well
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    2 months ago

    Eh, if an instance allows trolls, then that instance typically gets defederated from very quickly (at least it does on my instance). The only reason it is an issue now is that two of the big three instances (.world and .ml) have very lax moderation standards. If the lemmy-verse grows to the size of Reddit, then two lax instances won’t be as big of an issue.