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.
Technically no, they cannot modify comments, at least not through hacky workaround like modifying the CSS and that wouldn't show up if you're using New Reddit or a mobile app. The only thing they can do is remove it, or attach a community award to it.
Only Reddit Admins can modify comment, and we all know how well that turned out.
I didn't have a reason to hate u/spez (cause I never paid much attention to the founders and employees), but now I do.
I think that little episode sucked, but it wasn't sufficient reason to bring on the amount of hate it did, and it was kind of opportunistically used by angry mobs.
The background context was that mods were bringing down the hammer on places like /r/thedonald and /r/fatpeoplehate, (my timeline may be a bit off and those are just illustrative, stand-in examples). The spez thing was weaponized opportunistically by people looking for anything to put reddit mods on the defensive. They wanted to do that because reddit mods were taking action against toxic behavior of terrible communities.
I feel like it's totally appropriate to take action against people or communities that violate ToS, but to alter comments and change what they're saying is totally uncalled for. You can ban people, delete their comments, but changing what they said is too much for me. That's a slippery slope.
I agree that it's bad, and should be reacted to in proportion, and as I said, there's a lot of context that suggests that people were taking a legitimately bad thing but nevertheless taking it out of proportion for reasons that didn't have anything to do with the offense.
I think one of the weird only on the internet style biases that gets exploited by angry mobs is i the nability to take stock of things in proportion to their relative merit.
I'm a bit confused by your stance: are you trying to say that the ends justify the means in this case?