Yeah, was it the run-on sentences that made my post confusing? It’s something I’ve been noticing more and more often in my own posting.

Or was it the unhinged and disconnected copy of a lot of nasty things people say about those who choose to stay on Reddit? I didn’t try to make those too sensible and understandable. I typed the post you replied to in a fit of emotion and it was a big mistake. I’m getting better at not posting when angry, but I’m still not perfect. I get really frustrated.

People say “kbin is so nice” but then there’s the same namecalling of people you don’t like instead of an attempt to understand and sympathize with them. To be clear, when I talk about people not understanding and sympathizing, I’m talking about namecalling mods here. It happens in this very thread, unironically, not like me doing it as a mocking callout of people who do that (and I really shouldn’t have resorted to that, I don’t like being able to truthfully say I’ve mocked people). There has been an influx of alt-right types here which is definitely not nice, and I want to clarify that I am not asking people to sympathize with alt-right perspectives. (It’d be nice for people to understand how regular humans might end up there though. Not everyone supporting the alt-right started out that way, and it would be great to get people out of the alt-right.)

My perspective is also likely borne out of my own personal experience. I usually stay in my small niche communities and have never experienced a power-tripping mod. (The only reason I’m here is because kbin does not respect the fact that I asked my default view to be Subscribed. It shows me All upon login. I logged in. This post was in All. I clicked it. Bad choice, always leads to me getting angry.) This may be why I react strongly to “all mods are power trippers” or “most mods are power trippers.” In my experience, mods have always been people taking on the necessary but unpleasant duty of removing hate, harassment, and NSFL images. People doing something I, an oversensitive person, would never want to do because I do not want to see it in the first place. I’m grateful for this. I also just get very upset when I see namecalling. I was never raised to talk like that, and nobody I talk to resorts to it when we have conversations. I’m also lucky enough to never have been bullied. So I haven’t ever had to develop a “thick skin” against it. I’ve never been treated that way and do not see why other people should have to get treated that way either.

I understand intellectually my experience may not be the dominant one, but surely not every community others have interacted with had a power-tripping mod? I think the good ones tend to be invisible. They do their work behind the scenes and don’t stir up any controversy, so you don’t notice them. You just browse the community and talk in it. You usually don’t get your posts and comments removed either, and so you have no interaction with the mods. The bad ones receive a lot of publicity, and humans tend to remember negative events more than positive events, so they make more of an impression on you. Now every mod seems to be a power-tripper, because you don’t remember the good ones.

I dunno. It’s hard to separate the two roles of mods. One role is in preventing abuse–posting illegal content, hate speech, etc. But another role is in policing the content for what does and does not fit a forum’s purpose. You can do the first and keep section 230 protection, but the second is inherently and inextricably editorial in nature, and you can’t do that without losing protection. And I don’t think the lines between these are well-enough defined to enable you to make them two separate jobs without getting into trouble. Like, a lot of communities allow a little self promotion, but not spam. Managing that is a ton of work, but probably can’t be a paid role because it’s a judgment call. That sort of thing.

It’s frustrating, because it’s pretty clear at this point that this is one kind of web site that we really want to have exist. But the laws around this are really janky, and trying to revise them is a problem because the debate around them is even stupider than the laws themselves.