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.
The fundamental idea behind work is that certain things need to be done in order for people to live whether people like doing these things or not. We need to produce food, build housing, provide sanitation, healthcare, and all the other things that make a society function. The necessity to do these things isn't going to go away, and therefore the idea of work will not go away either.
Yep. Like it or not, crap needs to be done. Compensating individuals fairly for their contributions to society should be a priority for everyone. Currently, people working in low skilled but often physically demanding jobs are severely overworked and underpaid. We really need to start addressing that, and the whole antiwork approach to this is not helping.
The other big aspect of this is the nature of work. One big question we have to ask as a society is why we work, or what purpose our labour and resources are allocated towards.
Under capitalism, the means of production are largely owned by a small group of capitalists and the purpose of work is to create further wealth for these people. Any social benefit from work is strictly incidental, and much of this work can even be actively harmful to society. Corporate lobbyists are an example of a job that creates negative social value.
I think that the purpose of work should be to create social value first and foremost. Any required work should be directed towards making life better for everyone. The only way we can achieve that is through public ownership. We need to move away from the capitalist model and move towards socialism where ownership of the means of production is in the hands of the general public.
That's labor though, I get that the dishes need to be washed, but at home for example it's not done through work.
A lot of things can't just be done at home. For example, compute chip manufacturing, or making things like N95 masks, etc. These are complex research and industrial projects that require a high degree of organization. These simply don't work as ad hoc efforts where people just do stuff when they feel like it. Basically, what's described here.