Comment by jacquesm
2 years ago
Depends on the subject matter as well. I've moderated a - large - forum for years and in the beginning I was also a user of the site. That quickly led to people figuring out that the moderator is a part of the scene and so you get people that try to get into your good book and others that try to set each other up. Every word you write gets lawyered over and so on. If your Sub-Reddit doesn't have those problems count yourself lucky. But personally I think that the way dang here does it is perfect (see: sucking up ;) ), he only enters the conversation to explain his moderation actions, but does not actually take a position on any of the issues discussed, thus leading to perceived impartiality (he still gets plenty of flak but imo that is undeserved).
> (he still gets plenty of flak but imo that is undeserved)
Yeah I don't think it's possible to escape the criticism even without taking a position. That said, of the two options, I agree that not wading in may have less of a chilling effect and thus encourages more interaction.
It gets more complicated behind the scenes. If you're making a lot of content moderation decisions without disclosing them, you may be introducing bias without realizing it. Eventually people are going to be hip to that. Platforms are rife with this right now: selective invisibility, visibility filtering, ranking, visible to self, reducing, deboosting, and "disguising a gag" are all words platforms use internally or externally to justify non-disclosure of content moderation decisions. Without public awareness of the existence of these secretive moderation decisions, administrators may feel they have to use them in order to compete with other forums.
I think transparent moderation is the sustainable way forwards for social media, and I recently made my case for that here:
https://meta.discourse.org/t/shadowbans-are-bad-for-discours...