Ally, without them spaces like this here would be unusable and full of spam.
I think of them as people with a job to do. Some do it well, others do it less well. This is normal.
Yeah, it’s like asking “what does everyone think about bosses?” There are good ones and bad ones.
And then there’s the antiwork philosophy.
The “anti-work” philosophy isn’t against bosses or hierarchical structure. It’s about empowering the worker through systemic reforms like creating unions or workplace democracy - literally voting for your boss. Nobody is so naive that they want to get rid of administrative work. Workers want their just due and they can’t be faulted for that with our current systems and relationship to work.
Really? Then that’s a rather confusing name. I don’t engage there, but what I got from them is rather an “against” movement, whereas unionists usually have an agenda to strive towards.
The name is confusing, kind of like “defund the police”. If you take it at face value, you can misunderstand.
Look at https://lemmy.ml/c/antiwork 's sidebar:
We’re trying to improving working conditions and pay.
We’re trying to reduce the numbers of hours a person has to work.
We talk about the end of paid work being mandatory for survival.
If a leftist movement doesn’t have a horribly misleading and unnecessarily inflammatory name, is it even a leftist movement?
I mean the creator of the movement back on reddit was literally anti-work. They went on to get interviewed on the news and made a complete fool of themselves and the people who had a much more well reasoned approach, causing a split into “work reform”/worker empowerment communities, which this one is more along the lines of.
Just like a Janitor, or a Security team. If they do their job well most people won’t notice. If they do a terrible job everyone suffers. Kudos to anyone who does a passible job out of the goodness of their heart.
And even one person doesn’t do it well or badly all the time.
In most of the places I exist, I think of them like janitors. Doing appreciated, but not-very-fun work, to keep communities moving.
Honestly, if I was in a place with moderators that felt like adversaries, I might not stick around very long.
And, like janitors, they usually go unrecognized for the help they give and heavily criticized for anything that’s not perfect.
I think they spend a lot of their time holding back a wall of crap from falling on all of us. Unmoderated forums are so bad.
Allies.
This isn’t the 90s anymore. Today, unmoderated/poorly moderated online spaces are breeding grounds for the usual toxic assholes who ruin everything.
None of these online communities would exist without them. They do a lot of work for free so that we can enjoy them.
It’s easy as a user to say they are being heavy handed or whatever but without them it would be nothing but spam and ads. If they have to do things that seem unreasonable to make their jobs easier I don’t have a problem with it.
That said they are obviously just humans and some of them suck. This usually sorts itself out by either a community dieing or them being kicked off.
They’re necessary, but any power will always bring a chance that someone will abuse it. So I usually prefer moderators with a lighter touch, that talk to their users before taking more controversial actions.
They are an ally (that we sometimes dislike). The web would be too toxic for most without moderation.
The best ones are the ones you never know about. If you know about them, it’s probably because they’re power-trippers.
Absolutely. I feel this way about referees/umpires in sports too. The best ones aren’t flashy but just enforce the rules.
An ally when used to maintain clean spaces, but an adversary when they’re only a mod for the power over other people and not out of any sense of community duty.
I’m biased because I mod some large subs, but I’d say 95% of the time I see them as an ally.
Having seen behind the curtains, I’m glad they clean things up to keep the stage nice for me. You’d be shocked by the shit we see before it gets removed.
That said, that 5%-20% of mods that suck really suck.
Exactly. I’m a mod in a few subreddits, the biggest of which is /r/Showerthoughts. People don’t notice our existence unless we interact with them directly, and you rarely interact with users unless to ban them or to remove their content. So it is expected to be hated.
They need to exist but I don’t like them because I’m only reminded of their existence when they’re removing or Banning stuff.
They’re just random people. Sometimes they take their power a little too seriously and overstep their bounds. It’s all up to the individual mod.
No way of generalizing. Actions speak in this matter.
If you’re clearly communicating about rules and applying reason in enforcing them, ally.
If you wield the BAN HAMMER with furious vengance and abuse your power, adversary.
I think that many of them are so obsessed with civil language that they forget that advocacy for monstrous inhumanity can be done using only civil language, while civility in the face of monstrous inhumanity normalizes and encourages it.
I think that moderators who do this often find themselves to be the allies of monsters.
