Hey all,
Moderation philosophy posts started out as an exercise by myself to put down some of my thoughts on running communities that I’d learned over the years. As they continued I started to more heavily involve the other admins in the writing and brainstorming. This most recent post involved a lot of moderator voices as well, which is super exciting! This is a community, and we want the voices at all levels to represent the community and how it’s run.
This is probably the first of several posts on moderation philosophy, how we make decisions, and an exercise to bring additional transparency to how we operate.
I think the next post I want to do is specifically on the subject of moderation actions, escalation (nudge > direct request > content removal > community ban > instance ban) and how we make the decision for both the appropriate response for the infraction as well as what users can and should do when interacting with moderators asking them to change behavior.
The short and simple answer is vibes. If we step in and ask you to be nice and you swing back at us, we’re unlikely to be nice in response. If you aren’t the one escalating and you’re responding in kind or trying to deescalate then you have nothing to worry about. Being on our instance as opposed to other instances also means we’re gonna assume more good faith, since you’ve decided to abide by our rules and chose this place for a reason.