Oh man this ones got some flavour to sink ones teeth into 😅

I take the side of the admin. If someone can't accept or understand that a cat eats a meat based diet then they deserve to have reality thrown in their face. Better than some poor animals being tortured.

Respectfully, I believe this incident serves more as a learning opportunity for the admin team rather than a reason to amend the rules.

This isn’t the first time I’ve observed Rooki acting inappropriately for an admin of a community. As an admin of a (admittedly much smaller) corner of the internet, I’ve learned to interact with users in a way that is polite and ensures they feel safe and heard. This is at least the second instance where I’ve seen Rooki respond emotionally and rather adversarially towards users, which has, in my view, undermined their credibility, to the point that I hope to avoid future interactions with them.

I understand that managing LW, one of the largest and general-purpose instances, especially with Lemmy’s still rather limited moderation tools, is challenging, and I appreciate the hard work all of you, including Rooki, put into maintaining it and making it run as smoothly as it does. I'm NOT asking for their removal; however, considering that this is not the first time I’ve seen Rooki behave uncivilly and antagonistically towards users, I hope that this will be a formative experience for them.

(Edit for clarity)

It's great that the admins are putting so much effort into getting this right.

Sadly, I don't think this is the way. Adding this to the ToS means you admins will always be in the centre of every unwinnable situation that arises.

You need a committee to deal with these issues on a case by case basis. There are many advantages to this:

• You can be tough but flexible and adaptive
• you can enlist the help of people with more time
• you can enlist the help of people with experience writing policies
• committee members can resign or be discontinued when they become embroiled in some shit storm.
• you can retain veto power

I don't want to be critical of the ToS because someone has put a lot of thought into it, but the most charitable thing I can say is that its unlikely to serve its intended purpose.

Walk into a vet office and tell them you want your cat to eat a vegan diet and watch their eyes roll at the speed of sound out of their skull

The biggest issue with Reddit and Facebook was that they let stuff like this stick around it and eventually consume it.

It's a good policy imho, and I'm happy to see it

Science should prevail

As a former site admin, I will say right now that leaving any kind of rule "open to interpretation" is the WORST thing you could do. The only interpretation of the rules of your site should be the your (the site admin's) interpretation. That's it. Rules should be easy to understand and easily convey the correct interpretation.

Leaving the rules open to interpretation only leads to disagreements and arguments. It is better for users to have concrete rules with a reliably consistent correct interpretation than for everyone to complain because their interpretation of a rule lets them do whatever they want. Just my two cents on that.

Any chance the relevant incident could be unpacked and used as a demonstration of how these changes would alter the outcome or encourage a different outcome?

As someone who only saw pieces of it after the fact, I am potentially in the dark here about the purposes and context of these changes.

That being said, from what I did see, it seemed very much like an instance admin imposing themselves and their superior power on a community when there were probably plenty of other more subtle action that could have been taken, where subtlety becomes vital for any issue complex and nuanced enough to be handled remotely well. I'm not sure I'm seeing any awareness of this in this post and the links provided.

For instance, AFAICT, the "incident" involved a discussion of if or how a domestic cat could eat a vegan diet. Obviously that's not trivial as they, like humans, have some necessary nutrients, and AFAICT the vegans involved were talking about how it could be done, while the admin involved was basically having none of that and removed content on the basis that it would lead to a cat dying.

And then in the misinformation link we have:

We also reserve the right to remove any sufficiently scientifically proven MALICIOUS information posted which a user may follow, which would result in either IMMINENT PHYSICAL harm to an INDIVIDUALS PROPERTY, the PROPERTY of OTHERS or OTHER LIVING BEINGS.

In the context of cats and their food ... which "living beings" are being harmed and who is encouraging or discouraging this harm?

Whether you're vegan or not, this seems to me formally ambiguous and on the face of it only enshrines the source of the conflict rather than facilitating better forms of communication or resolution (perhaps there are things in the by-laws I've missed??).

Two groups can have exactly the same aim and core values (reduce harm to living beings) but in the complexity of the issue come to issue a bunch of friendly fire ... that's how complex issues work.

So, back to my original question ... how exactly would things be done better?

As noted in my post on the "moderation incident", by adding more subjectivity to the rules, you are opening the door to even more instance moderator misconduct. There is already evidence of how that would go.

Rooki felt it right to intervene in the !vegan cat food thread (and got a pat on the back with the new rules made to justify their actions), then not only took no issue with comments like "Meat is not something diabetics need to worry about." but also fueled the fire in the same thread by saying "To be honest linking something like meat to death of people is like saying everybody that breathed air died."

So much for taking action against harmful dietary advice.

While I disagree with the stance the vegans took in this. The ~~mods~~ admins reaction to the situation was way out of proportion, and it definitely seems like you're updating the ToS to justify what he did retroactively instead of addressing his behavior, which was way out of line.

Don't feel there are many people who actually use the phrase "free speech absolutist" these days, as a forward self-identification, who have much personal integrity or actual understanding of what that phrase might mean.

Peer reviewed scientific sources for people talking about health stuff? I can understand modding out "cyanide makes everything taste yummy" but at the other side, this isn't Wikipedia. It's a discussion forum and a lot of the topics will be about users' own experiences and perceptions. If you want to run an academic journal instead, this isn't the right way to do it.

The parent post also offers no answer at all about what decision was reached regarding the c/vegan intervention and whether such things should be allowed to happen again. Is there any update about that?

I didn't consider admins any more qualified in parsing medical journals than mods are. I've got letters behind my name and am not supremely confident in that. That said, anything like a pro-ana community should be quickly purged.

I've got no idea about the context of the vegan drama though.

I’m glad to see site-wide action taken against the spread of harmful disinformation.

It's not the same thing, but IMO the best things the admins can do is establish a runbook of sorts of how to deal with these situations - because they're not out of the realms of possibility.

Where I disagree with some is in the rules needing to be black and white. There are instances, say for example a self-harming support group or a community that deals with conditions with no medical cure. IMO this is where nuance is key, because people will share misinformation or procedures that could cause harm/illness. This is where a case by case basis is needed, and ultimately the "path of least harm" is where this will excel. Regardless, admins and mods should contribute to these runbooks for their case, so that there is an established plan that is transparent to all.