I’m generally in favor of “hands off” moderation, as in allowing the community to decide which content to promote and which to discourage. I prefer to only step in if someone is violating the rules, either of the instance or of this community.
That said, this community has seen a lot of recent activity, and I’m worried that people who want to discuss libertarian concepts are being overrun. For example, this recent post has more downvotes than the most popular post has upvotes (by a large margin), yet I think this type of post is quite relevant to libertarians.
So I think we’re getting a lot of non-libertarian (by pretty much any definition of the word) users in this community, and I’m worried they’re not here in good faith.
So, I’d like to know what kind of moderation we’d like to see. I’ll be reviewing voting records for posts to try to sus out who I subjectively think are here in bad faith (not planning on any bans though, just getting an idea) since I don’t think votes will be particularly relevant for this post. Some questions:
- should moderators (so far just me) ban serial downvoters?
- should moderators ban low effort posts, regardless of applicability to libertarianism? (e.g. the recent memes and whatnot)?
- should moderators pin subjectively higher effort and relevant posts to promote similar content?
So far I’ve done no moderating because everyone seems to at least be civil, but I don’t want this to become a “bash on libertarians” community or I’ll just close it.
I created the community to discuss libertarian concepts because the rest of Lemmy seemed very leftist. I basically want something like a mix of /r/libertarian and /r/neutral_news, where citations are encouraged (if not required) and content generally focuses on how to solve problems with less government rather than more. That doesn’t seem to be happening, so either we need strict rules or to just close the community down.
Almost no moderation is the best moderation.
This all seems like a great case study in demonstrating libertarian values. Perhaps on the bigger picture what may be playing out is an example of libertarianism in practice.
Perhaps.
I’ll publish my findings regardless, and I’ll try to find time to make high quality posts myself (a little tricky since I have a pretty busy schedule).
I’m also low-key looking for other moderators since I don’t want to rely on my personal opinions alone (and I honestly am not interested in actually putting time into moderation). I’d like to eventually “elect” moderators once I trust that the community is actually libertarian-friendly.
But, then again, maybe Lemmy just doesn’t have enough interest generally in a libertarian community. I guess we’ll see.
Who governs least, governs best.
That said, it is also necessary to have a very few absolutely necessary guidelines and to enforce them. By “few,” I mean four or less. Moderation with the lightest touch to keep the ship moving forward seems best.