Hey all,
Moderation philosophy posts started out as an exercise by myself to put down some of my thoughts on running communities that I’d learned over the years. As they continued I started to more heavily involve the other admins in the writing and brainstorming. This most recent post involved a lot of moderator voices as well, which is super exciting! This is a community, and we want the voices at all levels to represent the community and how it’s run.
This is probably the first of several posts on moderation philosophy, how we make decisions, and an exercise to bring additional transparency to how we operate.
It’s great to hear from the mod team. I understand Beehaw as being a place that values respect, trust and discussion in good faith. I’d sum it up as “good vibes”. I made note of a comment somewhere on here that I gauged as primarily intending to rile up OP (effectively “what is the point of this post”). Not a horrendous comment by any means, but I’d classify it as being “not nice”.
Using Beehaw instead of other instances comes at the cost of missing out on places like lemmy.world, although they can certainly be used in parallel. In my view, the gain of being here is respectful conversation. I accept that some emotional volatility is to be expected when politics or the like are being discussed. Are users ever given a gentle nudge to “be(e) a little bit nicer next time”?
yes, both through intervening on reports and temp-bans. we also have section bans at our disposal (although usually someone bad enough to ban in one section is bad enough to ban sitewide)
I think the next post I want to do is specifically on the subject of moderation actions, escalation (nudge > direct request > content removal > community ban > instance ban) and how we make the decision for both the appropriate response for the infraction as well as what users can and should do when interacting with moderators asking them to change behavior.
The short and simple answer is vibes. If we step in and ask you to be nice and you swing back at us, we’re unlikely to be nice in response. If you aren’t the one escalating and you’re responding in kind or trying to deescalate then you have nothing to worry about. Being on our instance as opposed to other instances also means we’re gonna assume more good faith, since you’ve decided to abide by our rules and chose this place for a reason.