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.
I'm having a lot of "yes but no" feelings in this thread, and here is another one.
I think the beginning culture of a community has a big influence on what happens downstream, and choices you make in the early days can have long term ripple effects. I also think the structure and features and user experience on a platform have an impact on how people behave on it, and I think there's a whole grab bag of incentives and disincentives - removing then re-adding karma for text-only posts, disabling downvoting from a user's comment page, etc. The very existence of upvotes and downvotes, or the way disocverability works, and on and on.
I don't think that lowest common demoninator is necessarily inevitable, or that if you believe it is that you should use it as a rationale for not doing anything to make it as good a platform as possible. But I also agree with you, that resorting to votes gamifies, and exposes the irrationality of online mobs, which are some unintended consequences.
I guess I think there really are things that can be done (e.g. strong modding, community norms and rules that set a cultural tone), maybe some structural things, but I also believe in the structure as it is now. But I don't think the democraticizing thing would work as intended.
It does, but culture is funny. It gets transmitted from person to person, with the larger group's culture overriding the smaller group's. This means that when growth hits a certain rate, the once larger group can find itself overwhelmed with the incoming group's culture.
You won't be able to control that, either. Or shape it. If you try to throttle the growth, then another curious thing happens... you sap everyone's reason for wanting to be part of the network. This was reddit once (and Digg before it, and Slashdot before that, etc). When Reddit hit that growth peak, despite the cultural damage, it still felt good to be a part of it... before, there were only a few subforums, and only broad topics were available. Sure, no one minded if you posted something really niche to the big subs (culture still hadn't completely gone to shit), but the chances of someone else there who also enjoyed whatever that niche thing was were small. So when it got big, and suddenly there were enough people who enjoyed it to have an actual subreddit on it, that (at the time at least) outweighed any cultural erosion.
Until you get the shitfest that it is today.
Some online forums went the other way. The growth never hit that level where cultural erosion occurred... but they then never got big enough to maintain their userbase. Kuro5hin, for instance (that one's interesting... they had some of the same factional splits you see here already, which just sapped their userbase even more, Hulver left and created Husi, and a third of the users went with him).
In the end, whatever initial culture you initially had is not that important after all. It will either be lost because growth annihilates it, or growth won't sustain and users drift away.
But people have more influence on the structure and features. Thus, they'll change the the site until bad features abound.
Like, right now. Though moderation is almost certainly the worst approach, you have people here clamoring for more of it, not less.