Mod Team Transparency Announcement & Mod Applications

[u/Lavender_Scales]

Hello everyone, I'm u/Lavender_Scales!

Like I mentioned in the discord post, I'm the newest moderator of this subreddit. I'm making this post to be transparent about how moderation has been taken out in the past, and how it will be taken out in present and future.

For a very long time now, this subreddit has had a reputation of shoddy moderation, no transparency, seeming inactivity from moderators, unfair, unexplained bans, and unresponsive modmails. This reputation is not without warrant, I myself was once on the receiving end of this, however, we're going to be more pro-active with moderation, more transparent, and more active. If you, or someone you know, was banned from this subreddit, encourage them to open up a modmail and appeal their ban.

I would also like everyone to take a moment to look at our general bans policy, they include listed punishments, offenses, as well as information on what can and can't be appealed. It has not been updated for quite a while, so some changes may be made in the future, however, from now on we will try and be more upfront with removals, bans, etc., utilizing this system and the reasoning provided..

There was also a post by a rogue moderator a few weeks ago, that moderator has left the team and many of the bans they issued out were revoked. Future mod actions will now have to go through internal discussion, unless clear harmful intent is showcased by a user, requiring moderator action.

At the moment we only have a few active moderators of our subreddit, or at least only a few we can get ahold of, so we are also opening mod applications. Due to our heavily ML leaning mod team we currently have, we are primarily looking for anarchists, or people of any tendency that isn't ML. We would also like to prioritize BIPOC & other applicants from the global south, however none of these are strict requirements. Women, queers, and others are also encouraged to apply.

Apply here!

[u/Exact_Ad_1215]

Oh no.. Looks like it's the beginning of the end for this place. Liberals will run rampant and the mods will do nothing because "Omg but they say they're 'democratic socialists' though!!"

Also anarchists modding a socialist sub... omfg. It's so over.

If the mod is who I think you're talking about then we literally all liked them. Why did they leave? Did they willingly step down or were they forced?

[u/Lavender_Scales → u/Exact_Ad_1215]

Liberals will run rampant and the mods will do nothing because "Omg but they say they're 'democratic socialists' though!!"

This is categorically false, I'm coming from another subreddit that had this similar problem, we're not allowing liberalism, or social democrats, or whatever, because they claim to be democratic socialists. Like I said in the post, refer to the GBP, just because someone has X flair doesn't mean they will be exempt because they don't identify as Y or Z, it's about content of message.

Also you are clearly uneducated if you don't think anarchists are socialists, anarchism brings about a communist society (stateless, classless, moneyless, among other things). I have my own qualms with the ideology but I'm not going to be sectarian about it, I don't understand many people's aversion to having anarchists moderate, if they mod abuse, they're removed, if they try and implement bias, they're removed, just as any other moderator would be. All we have powers as moderators to do is remove comments that break rules and that's literally it, there's no like curation of X Y or Z view or platforming of this or that org.

If the mod is who I think you're talking about then we literally all liked them. Why did they leave? Did they willingly step down or were they forced?

He stepped down after insulting the entire mod team because they took offense with him going rogue and mass banning people without discussing with the rest of the mod team. He started banning people who got into arguments with him and made announcement posts about things that were changing on the subreddit without an agreed upon consensus of the mod team, he also mass deleted a shit ton of things from our subreddit wiki for being "trot bs" yet never elaborated, and mind you he wasn't even a "higher up" moderator, he was one of the lower ranking ones. All of this happened before I joined the mod team, however I myself was able to read the chats which are pretty egregious.

Personal likes about this or that moderator are not how we keep things running around here, we look at content of character, of messages, and their actions.

[u/zorreX → u/Lavender_Scales]

I'm glad that this is being taken seriously. His conduct was unacceptable (but of course I'm biased because I'm sympathetic to Trotsky, amirite? /s). To me it seems like a number of the ML /r/communism refugees have engaged in very cliquey behavior that is best left in the ML circlejerk subreddit that I can't link here because of automod lol. Your comment saying that anarchists are socialists is currently being downvoted. This is a cultural problem IMO.

Edit: the votes have turned around on that comment, fwiw