No Stupid Questions

[There are] no stupid questions, but there sure are questions with an obvious axe to grind.

Because without mods, people tend to be horrible to each other. Just read through the modlogs sometime, it's depressing how unpleasant some people choose to be.

I think you're starting from a false premise. "All power corrupts" is a demonstrably untrue maxim.

If it were true we would never have anyone with power over anything. Being the one in charge of taking the cat to the vet would somehow be corrupting.

Because the GIFT corrupts even more, and faster.

Because some of us remember how the internet was without moderators, and how it went to shit early 2000's when "everyone" started using it.

20-25 years ago mods were rarely needed beyond booting a couple of spammers and getting rid of the occasional goatse and tubgirl. Now platform-wide efforts are needed to combat csam and gore.

Too limit the number of people getting PTSD from terrible images.

Unchecked, unanswerable power corrupts. On lemmy everyone is free to create their own sub. Heck they're free to create their own instance. That makes the "power" of moderators pretty tame.

Compare that to the power a corporate CEO has over the typical employee. Especially since the 1970s and 1980s redefinition of the primary responsibility of the directors of a corporation to be "maximize shareholder value" instead of "maximize stakeholder value."

Even in (small d democratic) politics, at least an aggrieved voter can run to replace a corrupt, abusive politician. Not many companies, probably no publicly traded ones, have a mechanism for the workers to replace the management. That's where major corruption by power can be witnessed.

I don't think that the type of power that a janny has is able to meaningfully corrupt the janny. At least, not in most cases; because it's practically no power, like it or not your online community means nothing in the big picture.

Instead, I think that bad moderators are the result of people with specific moral flaws (entitlement, assumptiveness, irrationality, lack of self-control, context illiteracy) simply showing them as they interact with other people. They'd do it without the janny position, it's just that being a janny increases the harm that those trashy users cause.

Why the alternatives that you mentioned to human moderation do not work:

• Bots - content moderation requires understanding what humans convey through language and/or images within a context. Bots do not.
• Voting - voting only works when you have crystal clear rules on who's allowed or not to vote, otherwise the community will be subjected to external meddling.

Just because some hall monitors let their title go to their heads, that doesn't mean they wield power in any meaningful way.

You're confusing petty tyrants and actual tyrants.

To quote Dr Cox: "People are bastard coated bastards with bastard filling."

So we elect some people to be chief jerkfaces against all the other miserable sods, then the rest of us pricks have to bully the mods to keep things fair... or unfair in so many directions at once that the scales still balance out. Thus turning our weakness into strength.

Or at least, that's the plan.

Because for anything that is built, someone else will set out to destroy or manipulate it for their own purposes. For example, spammers will use social media to try to boost their SEO and as an avenue for free advertising.

As much as I'd love if everyone could act with the best intentions towards others at all times, there is too much motivation and reward for anti-social actions. As a result, we have to have a complex system of rules and enforcement.

Power corrupts, but that doesn't mean that we don't need positions of power...

I feel like you are close to asking good political science questions. Close. Are you advocating for anarchy? Or communism? No? Just a technocracy that "works"?