• rglullis@communick.newsOP
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    1 day ago

    I have to ask, then: what motivates people to do it?

    If mods are not financially compensated for it, the only rational explanation is that they are either getting some form of benefit (soft power, access to privileged information) or they are getting some pleasure out of it, i.e, power tripping.

    • JoeTheSane@lemmy.world
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      12 hours ago

      Let’s please not forget that some people donate time and money because it gives them personal satisfaction to help out with something that is meaningful to them.

      • Ulrich@feddit.org
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        5 hours ago

        Yes, which is exactly why it’s particularly devastating when they receive animosity and hate in exchange.

      • rglullis@communick.newsOP
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        11 hours ago

        it gives them personal satisfaction to help out with something that is meaningful to them.

        What about the cases where “what is meaningful to them” conflicts with “what is meaningful to the others”?

        I said on a sibling comment but it bears repeating: I am not talking about someone who enjoys a hobby and goes on to create/mod a community about it. I am thinking about the cases where someone finds themselves as part of a large community and realizes that the majority of the members keep pushing you to things you either don’t want to or disagree with.

        • TORFdot0@lemmy.world
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          9 hours ago

          Some people are willing to go against their own personal wants and desires if the majority of the community agrees. They may do it because they believe in democratic principles and whatever it is may be not what they want but doesn’t cross the their “line-in-the-sand” of what they are willing to do in service of their community.

          And when it does finally cross that line, people will step down like Kevin has done. I may not agree with the democratically elected government of America right now but I am still an American. You don’t have to agree 100% with the community to still be a member

        • JoeTheSane@lemmy.world
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          10 hours ago

          Then we are talking about two different things. The post that I responded to did not make that clear. You should be more careful about using generalizations.

          • rglullis@communick.newsOP
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            9 hours ago

            I’d say that they are the same thing, just in different contexts. But okay, if I wasn’t clear it’s on me to fix it.

        • LandedGentry@lemmy.zip
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          11 hours ago

          You sound like you’re referencing something specific but you’re speaking as if this is some broader issue

          • rglullis@communick.newsOP
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            10 hours ago

            It is a broader issue, namely: there is no such thing as doing a “thankless” job for purely altrustic reasons. This is not an issue on a small scale, but once it reaches it some critical mass we should wonder what motivates those who keep a position of authority.

            (And before I get another barrage of people saying “I do it because I care about it/ I want to help / someone needs to do it”… yeah, sure, but if you are cultivating something because you happen to like the thing at hand , then you are doing for your own personal interest and it is not entirely altruistic. And that is totally fine.)

            • LandedGentry@lemmy.zip
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              9 hours ago

              I moderated a 2mill person sub on the shithole site until I left over the API fiasco. I was never paid, I was never interviewed, I received nothing. I banned maybe 10 people over 3 years. Only a few friends know I even did it and it’s because it organically came up during the api shit.

              I legitimately did it because I had been a member of the community for years and really felt passionate about keeping its standards and making sure it remained safe for the community. I am not amazing, I am not unusual. Most mods on some level do it because they want to see a community thrive. The terrible ones exist, there are even a lot of them. But as you can imagine, people don’t notice the quiet ones who just do their thing and tend to it the same way they tend to a garden.

              Your idea of “thankless” is part of the issue as well as your parenthetical which arbitrarily decides “you can answer it but I don’t accept your answer.” The satisfying part was watching it grow and people just have a good time. Again, like seeing a nice garden. If you boil anything down enough nothing is ever truly altruistic, not even donating to your favorite charity, because you can say “well you did it so you would feel good.” It sounds to me that you just have an axe to grind with the concept of mods in general

              • rglullis@communick.newsOP
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                9 hours ago

                I legitimately did it because I had been a member of the community for years and really felt passionate about keeping its standards and making sure it remained safe for the community.

                Would you do it for a community you didn’t care about?

                Do you think that doing something because you “really felt passionate about it” is “selfless”?

                • LandedGentry@lemmy.zip
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                  9 hours ago

                  I’m not sure if you responded before I added my last paragraph. I did it quickly but there was probably a 90s gap. Have you read it?

                  I think you’re also projecting this idea that all mods claim this is some holy selfless totally altruistic and pure act. No one talks about it like that.

                  • rglullis@communick.newsOP
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                    9 hours ago

                    No, I missed it before.

                    My “axe to grind” is not against mods. My “axe to grind” is against Small Fedi. I can elaborate more later if you want, but now I need to get back to work…

    • TORFdot0@lemmy.world
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      9 hours ago

      Some people volunteer and contribute out of their own good will for the betterment of society. Especially people who believe in FOSS which is a reasonable expectation out of someone who admins FOSStodon

    • poVoq@slrpnk.net
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      1 day ago

      Funny how some people expose their own sad world views by projecting it onto others 😅

      Some people chose to do the right things because they are right, not because they benefit from them.

      • rglullis@communick.newsOP
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        1 day ago

        Some people chose to do the right things because they are right

        This is just another way of saying that people do things for moral validation - a.k.a, self-righteouness - and is no at all different from “power tripping”.

        • zenforyen@feddit.org
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          1 day ago

          That is a rather toxic way of looking at the world. I get it, I kind of can rationally understand the idea that you can explain all selfless behavior as being selfish because the least you get out of it is dopamine, so you are wired to feel good doing what you think is right.

          Now, can you tell me how this is just not a very shitty and cynical lens to view humans through? I’ve had my nihilistic phase in my 20’s. I hope you also find a way out of the hole of the “arbitrariness” of ethics.

          Because each other is all we have, and ethics is ultimately what makes us human. The ability to reprogram our own pleasure circuit and maybe, just maybe, just use it to be not an asshole, just to start with. And then at some point just do something nice for others. Because if everybody did that, the world would not be the shithole it is.

          I’m thankful to mods who volunteer their free time to tend to the garden of the communities they care about.

          • rglullis@communick.newsOP
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            1 day ago

            I am not at all talking about the cases of someone who is passionate about some topic and then goes on to cultivate a community around it, and I am not saying “every moderator is doing it for some ulterior motive”.

            I am talking specifically about the types that put on themselves to become mods of dozens of subreddits. Or instance admins that go months in a row begging for money to be able to pay their own bills, instead of shutting down the instance or make it only for those that contribute back.

            IOW, I am talking about the cases where people act beyond what anyone would consider “healthy”.

            • zenforyen@feddit.org
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              15 hours ago

              Okay wow, thanks for the clarification. That is indeed weird. Yeah, then I guess I agree, it’s really … Just not very healthy behavior.

              Okay I mean for some people maybe this whole Internet thing, becomes too much an end in itself, maybe they are missing something in life and trying to get it that way.

              If you are employed, have family and/or friends and a hobby or two, how do you even have the time to mod dozens of subs and stuff like that?

              So if they are doing it while being nice, one can actually say they could need some empathy. If they are not being nice, well, for such cases it might explain why the other things in life might be lacking.

        • 3DMVR@lemm.ee
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          1 day ago

          Nah I get no dopamine from doing the right thing its neutral, some ppl just help build the place they want to see, obviously no one does anything for no reason at all?

        • poVoq@slrpnk.net
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          21 hours ago

          Yeah, right 🤦 Sorry but I must conclude you have some serious intellectual stunting if you truly believe that. Ayn Rand level of delusion.

          • rglullis@communick.newsOP
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            23 hours ago

            Hey, any comparison to Ayn Rand or their fans should be an immediate ban. No need to go that low.

            All I’ve been arguing with you could be summed up as “if we want the Fediverse to be universal, we will need to grow a lot faster and we need to accept the reality that not everyone values the same things as you do” and you responding “No, I don’t to make the Fediverse universal because most people are too morally weak to stand for the things I care about”.

            (And if you think I am exagerating: don’t make me look for the conversation where you said that people should be okay using this crap because the other open source alternatives committed the grave sin of “raising money from investors”.)

            • poVoq@slrpnk.net
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              21 hours ago

              Fine I didn’t need to go as low as Ayn Rand.

              But I think you still didn’t get my argument last time. Tl;dr: there is no point in doing what you propose as it just results in recreating the same shit we already have. This has nothing to do with moral failings and everything with strategy and not repeating the same mistakes all over again.

              And besides that I agree that Siskin isn’t great, and most likely suggested this instead. And that “open-source alternative” is now open-core and can’t pay their bloated expenses now that VC funding has run dry. I hope you see the irony in what you just wrote, because that is really a clear example of how unsustainable and ill advised that kind of growth is.

              • rglullis@communick.newsOP
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                20 hours ago

                it just results in recreating the same shit we already have

                This is you passing opinion as undisputed truth. I am not proposing “Let’s take on the big corporations by building another big corporation”, I am saying “we can get rid of the dominance from big corporations if we help foment an economy of small, independent businesses.” and I am saying “if we keep this anti-business culture where we are hostile to even some food truck owner trying to connect to their customers, then don’t complain when the food truck owner continues using Facebook/Instagram/Twitter”.

                And that “open-source alternative” is now open-core

                Synapse is still AGPLv3. Their closed parts are for Enterprise. No one is being locked out of crucial features. No one is being locked out of reaching out other users of the network. No one is being forced to “upgrade” after reaching a certain size. To call it open-core is just yet-another display of bias.

                and most likely suggested this (Monal) instead.

                Monal does not make video calls! Not having video calls was a non-starter in 2015, let alone today.

                because that is really a clear example of how unsustainable and ill advised that kind of growth is.

                Is it? Because so far I managed to talk with a lot more people on Matrix than I ever did on XMPP, and that wouldn’t change even if Element closed shop tomorrow. And even if it did, the odds would be highly in favor of some other company like Beeper picking up the pieces to serve its customers and it would still be in their interest to keep things open to have the ecosystem around.

                So, at the end of the day, yes, I’d rather have this “unsustainable” growth than claiming any moral victory for sticking to the Betamax of chat protocols. This “unsustainable” system gave me and few hundred million people something that is far from perfect, but at least it can make video calls on iOS.

                • poVoq@slrpnk.net
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                  19 hours ago

                  Lets not repeat the entire argument, but you are being extremely naive and literally play lipservice to what Mark Zuckerberg thinks the Fediverse should become.

                  And, no. Vital parts for running a somewhat decently sized Synapse instance are not AGPLv3 licenced, Element requires a CLA so they can easily alter the deal even further, and their own marketing people go around fearmongering about the AGPL, which is a classic play of open-core companies. If it walks like a duck and all that…

                  And Matrix had never even close to a few hundred million users. By their own admission during the presentation at the last FOSDEM, their MAU is barely above 300k. That’s what IRC had before Matrix started canibalizing them 🙄

                  • rglullis@communick.newsOP
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                    12 hours ago

                    Matrix had never even close to a few hundred million users.

                    Yeah, completely typo’ed here. I wanted to change from “hundred of thousands” to “a few million” and ended up with the worst combination. Too late to edit, now.

                    what Mark Zuckerberg thinks the Fediverse should become.

                    If you ask me, I think Zuckerberg wants to commoditize the social graph and position his company to become the AWS of social web applications. It would be the best way to skirt all regulations (because he would claim that he is only providing infrastructure and is not liable for the content) and it would let he profit from the others by providing service and by snooping on the data they get through their servers.

                    And you know what? I’d be absolutely fine with him trying to do it. I actually would like to see how this would play out. I’d rather have a world where Zuckerberg has the "AWS of social media’ than a world where he has “Facebook/WhatsApp/Instagram and whatever competition he manages to kill by buying them off”.

                    A world where Zuckerberg owns the AWS of social media implies a world where others like Hetzner, OVH and all the gajillion VPS low-end boxes can exist. As horrible and morally bankrupt Zuckerberg is, letting him make this move would be an improvement over the status quo.

                    Even if some compromises have to be made, a world where Zuckerberg controls 30-40% of the social web leaves us all some room to work and maintain a healthier alternative to our friends and family. And this is a better world than the one where we pretend to pass ideological purity test but inevitably need to install and use WhatsApp to talk with a friend or to send a picture to my parents.

                    Vital parts for running a somewhat decently sized Synapse instance are not AGPLv3 licenced.

                    Define “vital” and define “decently sized”. What point does AGPL Synapse becomes impossible to use? Are we talking about an instance for an university with a few thousand students and faculty? A company with a few hundred employees?

                    Couldn’t that issue be solved by simply breaking a larger instance into smaller subgroups? Couldn’t this “soft-ceiling” on instance size be actually a positive thing, as it would encourage better distribution of the user base among different service providers?

                    But more importantly, why should I care so much about theoretical, technical limitations that affect virtually no one and give preference to an alternative ecosystem that does not even have an decent client that people can use to make video calls?

    • comfy@lemmy.ml
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      18 hours ago

      I like high quality communities, which cannot maintain quality without staff, and which would probably struggle to maintain any funding.

      One example of a community I became a moderator for often had trolls occasionally show up and post obviously malicious content, and commercial ad spam. Due to timezone differences, these often took hours to be deleted by existing staff.

      So it wasn’t about morality, righteousness, money or power. It was about me wanting to develop a community I cared about.


      Edit: in a comment chain, you mentioned people who clearly moderate for other motives. They exist, I’ve seen them and helped get some removed in one particular community. Like you said, there are other motivators. Sometimes a community is so desperate for volunteers that they keep junk ones on-board, sometimes the admin personally likes them and enables their abuse, or sometimes the admin is too absent and no-one can kick the abusive staff out. And worse, if a staff team is toxic, it’s harder to bring good volunteers in.

    • Sean Tilley@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      I think a lot of people do it because they want to build communities and bring people together. It’s easy to underestimate the workload and what kind of problems come up. A big problem is that people start instances, and gradually realize that they’re basically stuck running things until they either hand it off to someone else, or shut down.

    • Meldrik@lemmy.wtf
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      1 day ago

      You can do things because you want to make a difference. A good difference. Not everything has to have an ulterior motive.

      • rglullis@communick.newsOP
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        24 hours ago

        What “difference” is someone doing by being a mod of 50-odd subreddits, like the case of the mod in question?

    • iopq@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      I moderate a privacy community because they were looking for mods. I just delete spam from time to time

      • rglullis@communick.newsOP
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        1 day ago

        When the stakes are small, sure.

        But if you were to find yourself with a community with hundreds of thousands of people, and let’s say that 0.01% percent of any group is made of people who seem like they are out to just make everyone’s life miserable, so every week we will have to deal with a couple of dozen cases of obnoxnious behavior, petty disputes, etc… how long do you think you’d be able to endure it?

        Speaking for myself: I was remembering the time when I found myself as the owner and main mod of the University’s group on Orkut. When it was mostly discussions among actual students and faculty, it was all nice. Even when discussions were heated, they were not out of control. But when Orkut exploded in Brazil and it became a place for soapbox politics, spam, shouting matches between the student factions, people wanting to share articles about city events, etc, etc… it became too much for me and the handful of co-owners that joined me in the period.

        • iopq@lemmy.world
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          17 hours ago

          I’m just not invested enough to care. At the end of the day nobody forces me to check the reports

    • Ulrich@feddit.org
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      1 day ago

      Well I only moderate 1 community and there is a compensation component to it.

      But for others, I’m sure they just enjoy having a community. Some of them might also just not care what the naysayers say.

      • rglullis@communick.newsOP
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        1 day ago

        Well I only moderate 1 community and there is a compensation component to it.

        So many questions… :)

        • What community?
        • From this account, or some other? You profile page doesn’t show you as moderator for anything.
        • What form of compensation are you talking about?
        • Ulrich@feddit.org
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          1 day ago

          Don’t really want to get too deep into it but its a Facebook community and its relevant to my business and I use the community to promote my business. It’s become a large source of my business. It’s the only reason I can’t delete my Facebook profile.

          • rglullis@communick.newsOP
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            1 day ago

            Ah, I thought you were talking about something here on the Fediverse.

            In any case, I wish people didn’t feel afraid to talk about business here. Maybe more people would realize that behind the majority of “business” there are genuine people and not just the cartoon capitalist pigs.

            • Ulrich@feddit.org
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              1 day ago

              I have a Ghost blog for my business. It’ll be in the fedi as soon as they make that available for self-hosters. For now, it’s just crossposting via MastoFeed. I’ve also contacted them about posting them to Lemmy, as it seems like a much more fitting platform.