Looks like r/antiwork mods made the subreddit private in response to this post
This fiasco highlights that such forums are vulnerable to the whims of a few individuals, and if those individuals can be subverted than the entire community can be destroyed. Reddit communities are effectively dictatorships where the mods cannot be held to account, recalled, or dismissed, even when community at large disagrees with them.
This led me to think that Lemmy is currently vulnerable to the same problem. I'm wondering if it would make sense to brainstorm some ideas to address this vulnerability in the future.
One idea could be to have an option to provide members of a community with the ability to hold elections or initiate recalls. This could be implemented as a special type post that allows community to vote, and if a sufficient portion of the community participates then a mod could be elected or recalled.
This could be an opt in feature that would be toggled when the community is created, and would be outside the control of the mods from that point on.
Maybe it's a dumb idea, but I figured it might be worth having a discussion on.
Here's a github issue for it, with some other threads linked. @nutomic@lemmy.ml and I are both very sympathetic to the idea, because there's been so many of these cases where a top mod will wreck or subvert an entire subreddit.
Hierarchical moderation is definitely a weak-point that I replicated here for only one reason: I've never seen a system of democratic moderation work in practice. You could hold "elections", but then who approves the voters, and makes sure they're legitimate, and not double or triple voting? Now you have to institute a reputation system for the voters. How often do you hold these elections, and what initiates them? Who decides when elections are to be held? How do you circumvent people from "faking" reputation scores, or double voting ( creating many accounts, faking content and upvoting themselves, etc ). How do you prevent someone putting forward 3 of their alt accounts for modship, and voting themselves in?
And then doing all of that is somewhat overkill, and only seen as necessary because of reddit's obsession with subscriber count, even if 99% of those subscribers are inactive. It takes two seconds for people to subscribe to an alternate, and these alternates sometimes explode in activity within a few weeks. I've changed the sorting and emphasis for communities away from subscriber count, and towards active users / month, to mitigate that inertia here a bit.
Also a lot of reddit's issues wouldn't be replicated on a server like this where the admins actually participate for the health of their server. If a mod goes rogue, and the community dislikes that, we can just boot them and appoint a different one. If a server creator / admin like myself goes rogue, people can just start their own server. Reddit does not give you that choice.
Again I'm not completely against it, I just have yet to see any system of democratic moderation work on forums or online communities anywhere, and that's likely an unavoidable consequence of internet anonymity.