preface: not speaking as a mod here in an official mod context. this is in chat for a reason.

i’ve been watching a community melt down over its new community conduct policy. that policy took probably six months to draft—and the backlash to it may have honestly cost the community six months of hosting money, because for all the good the moderators who drafted it have done they made one big fuck up in drafting it. (bad enough they’ve since reversed course, but the damage is done)

i have many thoughts on this, and the general implications it has.

it goes without saying: we (as moderators) will make decisions You will not like sometimes. that’s just how it is. we cannot accommodate everyone, and it will almost certainly be necessary at times to disregard user opinion to do something for the greater good.

but: can we count on You to understand why we do that? will You give us the good faith and benefit of the doubt that even if You disagree, and stick by us so we can all build something better?

my pessimistic sense is no, absolutely not. i think that a lot of people have been conditioned—by reddit, by twitter, by other platforms—into just assuming the worst of moderation. i think most people have given up on giving any benefit of the doubt to platforms, too. it’s understandable: moderation and Existing is shit on basically all of them. there’s no face and even less accountability. rules are inscrutable and haphazard. enforcement is farcical and comical. you are much better trying to just improve things in Your vicinity than hope these sites do it for You, and to never trust a word any moderator says.

but we’re not those platforms. the community i’m watching is not a platform like that—it tries very hard to give a fuck, and to build something special. we are like them in trying to give a fuck about everything we do and build something better, and i think it shows in everything we do.

and yet it still feels obvious that when we inevitably fuck up something here, we will go through the ringer as if we’re a reddit or twitter. all the community and good faith we’ve built will immediately be discarded in one swoop, and we will not recover to that point of community trust again—because everyone has been conditioned to assume the worst. we will probably lose donations and in kind possibly financial stability. we, from that point on, may then have to scale back our involvement and start to assume worse of You just for safety reasons—we are people too, and we are being vulnerable in the level of transparency being offered here.

and i guess i just i don’t know what to do about this dilemma—or what even can be done. it’s part of why this isn’t being said in a moderation capacity, just a user one shooting off into space. what can i say, even? words hardly bind you to giving us leeway and understanding when we err.

but, to awkwardly conclude: i feel like we need that leeway and understanding for this all to work, and go differently than everything else. the implicit nature of the reaction to these fuck ups is that we have to be perfect Or Else, but we literally cannot be. that’s the nature of moderation, and of people, and i’d hope people get that when we inevitably fuck up it’s not because we’re like reddit or twitter—it’s because we care, and we care about making this place good for you too.

idk. goodnight, folks. i’ll be off for parts of tomorrow hiking.