Its almost as if the system of unpaid volunteer moderators has its limits.

I’m here on Lemmy because as limited as the system of unpaid volunteer moderators is… its better than the CEO of Reddit who has begun to influence the discussion from the top down. If there is a system of unpaid volunteer moderators, at least they should be supported. And Lemmy seems to be place for that.

Yeah, this is what I’m here to protect. “BestOfLemmy” isn’t a political channel. But it is a manual curation and manual sharing community.

The idea that you like a post and feel like that’s enough to share is what I’d like to encourage. It gets weird with politics because now others are less inclined to post here because of this post however. But if the priority is to encourage posts and sharing here, I cannot delete a topic like this that was posted in good faith.

Its not like I’ll accept all topics of political nature either, but given how close we are to the election it makes sense why you’d be thinking about this right now.

There are two rules currently written for “BestOfLemmy”, and they are:

1. Manual Curation – If someone thinks its best-of material, it is allowed here.

2. Newbie to Lemmy perspective – Posts should be beneficial to new Lemmy users. I’ll ban topics on a case-by-case basis that violate this (ex: deep server vs server feuds or other “community vs community drama” topics).

From #1: The poster clearly thinks its worth sharing, so it deserves a topic. That’s sufficient. For #2: it is a very political season (with only days remaining before the USA’s voting days), so I think most people looking into Lemmy here would forgive us for a politically charged topic like this.

I evaluate that this topic was posted in good faith, and that newbies would accept such a topic here. So that’s why it stays.

From a “BestOf” perspective: my main problem with the post is that it links to a picture of the post, rather than the original topic and the original discussion that created this particular post. I might make a rule against image-posts (ie: do not make unnecessary screenshots. Prefer to link to various topics and other discussions on Lemmy. Screenshots are counterproductive to the greater Lemmy community).

I realize that this is a very hot political season. Its impossible to keep a “good vibes” feel with this year’s election politics, so I’m not asking for “Don’t be an Ass” or other such naive statement. But please try to be on your best behavior. This is “BestOfLemmy”, and not a political debate site.

I’ve nuked a couple of subthreads that have gotten too hot. Please report anything you think is unhelpful to the greater discussion. I’ll remove distracting posts as I see them, but I don’t promise “good moderation” here. I’m just gonna cleanup what I can see and when I see it.

The general rule for “BestOfLemmy” is to be an appropriate place for a Lemmy beginner to get a feel of Lemmy in general. Yall are somewhat forgiven for the heated topic, but its not a complete pass. Try to keep the perspective of “newbies to Lemmy are stopping by here first”. And think about how you’d like to present yourself to them.

This is my guiding principle for moderation. This isn’t a debate subsite, or debate community. I’m not necessarily interested in having everyone here complete their back-and-forth discussion (especially if it gets heated, swear words, accusatory tones, etc. etc.).