If you look at the content feed of /c/conservative most of the recent posts seem to be fairly anti-conservative, or at least not very flattering. For example “Almost Twice as Many Republicans Died From COVID Before the Midterms Than Democrats” was just recently posted.
In other words they may be modding both subreddits because they’re not actually conservative.
Scroll back to see what they were posting originally, the stuff with the downvotes was nasty. That’s why people got together to change that.
You’d think the moderators would be removing the anti-conservative stuff though if they were actually conservative.
“FWIW I un-removed your removed comment(s)” - mod of conservative
Having people that strongly agree OR disagree with the political beliefs of a communty be the mods of this community is suboptimal at best. If you align the beliefs of the mods with the communities, you get a “positive” feedback loop, making the place more radical as time passes. The opposite will happen if you oppose the beliefs of the mods and the communities. Good mods of political communities will not express their political beliefs. Modding politics is not about liking or disliking opinions and beliefs but more about enforcing agreed upon and sensible rules that don’t have to be related to the political topics at times.
To make the example easier to understand, I will use a radical example.
If you let Neo-Nazis that actively take part in the community be mods of a political community, you will ineviteably see a positive trend towards national socialism. Posts that don’t align with their beliefs at all get removed, this will increase over time and wheir boundaries will also get stronger with time.
It doesn’t even really matter if the community was auth or lib or left or right to begin with.
Probably creating many communities. Though I agree it is difficult to remain impartial on topics like this.
Yeah, their “moderates” list is huge. I hope that with individual instances having more control here, we don’t see quite as many of these absurd thousand-community mods.
The benefit of the fediverse is that if something like that does turn out to be a problem, the server admin can replace mods or we can use a different instance.
Honestly I don’t think that’s quite it. Switching to a different instance is no different from switching to a new sub: sometimes it’s just not realistic. What I think the advantage here is is that Reddit is effectively one instance, and they have no interest in doing any kind of community admin. There will be instances like that here too, but it’s not going to be all of them (I suspect not even most)
Good grief, their community list is absolutely bloated, probably an attempt at powermoderating or domain squatting if I had to guess. It is unfortunate that they’re modding LGBTQ+ though, they seem to suffer from a case of “enlightened centrism” and that is pretty harmful given today’s climate for trans rights. (For context, the post in question is a single panel comic of a trans person dragging a child into an gender affirming care clinic, basically perpetuating the groomer libel of LGBTQ+ people)
@Goathound @Hurts @Izzent Maybe he was over here a long time ago. Went to reddit. Saw all the popular communities and Created all of them. I would signup for another instance, create the community you want. then link everyone. enough people then they will get bigger then the one on lemmy.world instance. Worth a shot
This is both the upside and downside of Federation!
@667 @Hurts @Izzent @Goathound Yep. I’m noticing that
Yeah it really sucks that a conservative could actually like gay people
I think they are more concerned about the damage someone running a community in bad faith could do to folks who may be vulnerable and looking for some relief and mental health tips within a safe group, opposed to a conservative liking gay people…
I go to a lot of recovery groups online and having a mod from a pro usage/drug group would be very concerning.
Who says he does? Who says this isn’t an attempt at controlling the narrative?
Since they seem to mod liberal as well as conservative, all bets are off.
I think this is the most likely answer, just another power mod.
I wonder how long it will be before “power mod disorder” gets into the dsm
Centrists spits are conservatives who just don’t feel comfortable calling themselves that, and in a country where fascism is already on the rise, they’re effectively collaborators.
They do seem to be actively posting in a lot of the communities, so maybe it’s just someone trying to seed new Lemmies. There’s a lot of people that want new communities but also don’t want to moderate, so someone like this could be filling an actual gap if they have good intentions.
This is correct. I have already passed off ownership of c/conservative, I’m simply just another moderator now. I have also added mods to any of the communities that actually have content (most of them do not without me seeding it). I have not rejected a single request from anyone that reached out to moderate any of the communities (the biggest ones are c/nba, c/nfl, c/baseball, c/pics, and c/news). I was discussing adding someone as a mod on c/news last night before I logged off and one will be up today. I haven’t received any requests on c/pics but the volume of posting isn’t really unmanageable.
Edit - And anyone wondering WHY I didn’t remove posts from the one guy that was posting there, the answer is because I believe the voting system should be allowed to do its thing. All of his posts were heavily downvoted, it shows exactly where the community there or those passing by stood on the posts. I don’t believe in overmoderation which Reddit fell victim to and curated those echo chambers by removing content and posts they disagreed with.
Edit 3 - Grammar
Yeah people are making so many assumptions about how there is a conflict of interest with moderation in /c/lgbtq while there is literally zero activity in /c/lgbtq. There are so many baseless assumptions being thrown around. People should start posting in /c/lgbtq and if @Hurts proves to be an issue moderating there, he clearly is more than willing to step down as head mod there just like he did at /c/Conservative.
Oh. This is interesting. Now we need /c/lemmydrama …
grabs popcorn
I don’t the the community is actually conservative, but rather critical of conservatives.
Scroll back, you’ll see what it was like before a concerted effort to change that happened.
You can always come to kbin’s LGBT or queer communities and avoid that drama.
Federation is awesome!!
I really hope it’s in good faith, cause if it is, that may be a slimmer of hope that conservatives can co-exist amongst LGBTQ+. I’m more of a centrist (no, that does not mean I play the both sides are equally bad or I play both sides, get that out of your heads) and I have a few conservative opinions. This does not mean I agree with the extremism of the U.S. conservatives pushing laws and misinformation to opress LGBTQ+ and other minorities. It’s sickening.
What does “conservatism” mean to you? In my opinion there is no functioning definition of it that is safe for LGBTQ coexistence.
I’d argue that the aging gay NIMBY community in San Francisco is an example of being both LGBT and conservative, though they vote almost 100% democrat. I don’t think Republicans and queer folks can coexist, given the whole “want to erase anyone not straight from existence” thing. But conservative and queer is definitely a thing.
@hurts is also a mod for both “Republican” and “Democrat”.
I’m not sure. They may be a power mod, trying to grab as many communities as possible, they may be trying to infiltrate one of the communities, or they may be some form of a centrist or conservative queer person. One of the good things here is that the mod logs of these sites are open to the public, so we can keep an eye out for unjustified bannings or iffy behavior from this user and move away from their community if needed.
beehaws LGBTQ+ community seems pretty good if anyone is looking for an alternative
I agree, it’s great :)
@Izzent Ever heard of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_conservatism ?
I have. Those views and values clash when it comes to US conservatism.
I’ve defended myself in comment replies but I guess I’ll address the post directly as well.
Kind of shitty to wake up and see this and a whole thread shitting on me, when I’ve done nothing but try to seed and build communities here. Any communities that have gained traction I’ve gladly accepted new moderators for (see c/nba, c/nfl, c/news, c/baseball), as well as stepped down as the head moderator at c/conservative.
The literal only action I’ve taken as a moderator at c/conservative before this morning was reapproving comments that were removed for no reason besides disagreeing, and messaging that moderator and telling them that isn’t how we will be doing things, which is because I don’t intend to ever cultivate an echo chamber. See here to view the message
To automatically assume that I have no LGBTQ+ affiliation or some insidious agenda is nothing short of slanderous and disingenuous. I have already personally stated that I am gay multiple days ago when one of the commentators on c/news attempted to call me out for this. See here for the comment chain.
I have not rejected a single person that has requested to moderate any community that I started/seeded, and have already passed off ownership of one community out of the 5-6 that actually gained a bit of traction. The only thing I’m doing here is attempting to fill this site with content and keep any personal moderator bias’ aside whether that is from myself or the people I appoint as moderators within the community. Here is a screenshot of messages I exchanged with a user from c/news yesterday, where I again explicitly state I prefer the posts to come from sources that aren’t incredibly biased in either direction.
I have stated in another comment that I am very centrist. I am not passionate towards either of the main US political parties more than the other, and I think that quite frankly makes me more fit than most of the people here to moderate these communities as I won’t curate echo chambers.
Starting an entire thread to brigade and witch-hunt someone that is trying to prop this site up and provide content and communities from Reddit to ease the transition is a great way to quickly ruin this site. The fact that an admin at 2am EST intervened on a community because it upset some users for having different views and handpicked a moderator doesn’t bode well in my thinking that this site would be any different than Reddit.
Because of all the closeted Republicans. Why do you think they constantly talk about Gay and Transpeople all the time ? Its what they are thinking about 24-7
That’s pretty dumb thing to say
I always think about Ted Haggard when this comes up.
Is the right way to link federated magazines just @conservative?
Ignoring the whole… thing… is this something kbin has the ability to prevent? Is first-come-first-serve moderation baked into the platform, or do we have a way to democratize/decentralize moderating, recall moderators, etc.
Or do we just have to accept the inevitability of mediocre power mods?
The only way for owner of a magazine to step down, currently, is to elect someone else as co-mod and then leave. Users on any platform could always sub and post to other instances and leave the powermod holding his dick, but this kind of thing may need to be addressed in the future.
Not sure whether voting people in/out of mod powers is the way to go, as it leaves good mods hyper susceptible to takeover brigading. At the very least, some hard limits need to be the norm. Maybe restrict it to 10-12?? No one should need to mod 30 different things on any instance.
