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.
r/privatelife founder here. Not a power mod, not a typical Redditor. Just one of you. This is an important comment for this post. Everyone should read it.
I can not just agree to, but I was the lone wolf that hand to, singlehandedly, take up the colossal task of changing the weirdly propagandistic privacy community scene on Reddit.
r/privacy, r/privacytoolsio and now r/PrivacyGuides are all controlled by the same monolith, the infamous trai_dep and his friends. I experienced and documented what was lots of censorship, insults and harassment (still do). I built r/privatelife alone and when I had 26 members (yes, 26, 2 digits), trai_dep attempted to leverage his power to get me sitewide banned. I had to take help of reddit administration, and since then so many people supported me, I have over 10,000 members that are civil and do not induce paranoia in privacy seekers, or engage in conspiracies.
I was alone and had to fight these demons off in what is still an ongoing crusade to sanitise the privacy community of grifters. I want a pro privacy libre culture, and that is my mission. And that is why I put myself on the frontlines for Lemmy all the time. I do not want those problems coming here. I have been a long term Reddit user, and I am old for most people here, and so I know well what goes on in forums and on Reddit.
Reddit has a problem of moderators being overpowered, and Lemmy admins and folks like us must figure out ways to resolve this virtual dictatorship problem, so there need not be cases like that of mine, where a "senior" privacy community moderator gets to brigade their 200K member communities against one person.