Who is this dweeb?

Hello everyone. I'm Mumberthrax, and four days ago Atko responded to my post on subverserequest and made me a level 1 moderator on /v/conspiracy. In that process @fenixrisin was removed as a moderator, but I've sent him a message inviting him to return if he wishes. Level 1 moderator just means that in addition to normal moderator abilities, I can add and remove other moderators, all of whom are necessarily level 2.

Philosophy

I think that a brief statement about my beliefs and intentions regarding moderation would be in order, so I'll do that here: I believe that a moderator role is that of a public servant; those who volunteer are responsible for attending to the needs of the community they moderate, for facilitating the growth of that community and helping them to succeed in their collective aspirations. Moderators alone are not the only who may adopt these responsibilities, and because the abilities moderators have to change the appearance and functionality of a subverse is substantial, they are perhaps more crucially charged with that responsibility than others.

I believe that ideally a moderator should be more than a human spam filter. I believe that through stickying posts, managing the sidebar, and facilitating meaningful discussions, a moderator can use his or her abilities to aid a community actively. Sometimes it's fine to have mods that just filter out spam or other little things - every little bit helps, and if there isn't an apparent need for more activity than that then it's perfectly appropriate.

So bearing that set of beliefs in mind, my intentions are to try to help make this subverse the best hub it can be for sharing and discussing conspiracy theories and piecing together the truth. I like conspiracy theories, and try to keep an open mind about most things. I get paranoid sometimes, and occasionally i have to take breaks from conspiracy theory stuff when I get overwhelmed. I also try to remain skeptical, to try to weed out the fake stuff and hyperbole. You won't see me actively advocating for hollow earth theories, but until we send cameras down hundreds of miles into the earth I'll not discount it entirely.

Past experience and qualifications

I've had a reddit account for around 5 years now, been on voat for about 3.5 months. On reddit I have moderated a few subreddits, but I've usually been fairly laissez-faire (read: lazy) about managing them. The ones I am top mod of which are active, I mostly stay around on them as an insurance policy against misconduct or disaster. The little experimental ones I do absolutely nothing with.

I used to be a moderator and later a server administrator at nerd.nu ( /r/mcpublic ), the Reddit Minecraft Servers. I was not a great admin, but I like to think I tried to do good. I certainly developed experience dealing with bureaucracy, trolls/harassment, and a bit of public relations - all of which I hope has helped me to grow into a more useful person.

My most recent moderate success has been the publicmodlogs account on reddit, which provides subreddit moderators a very easy way to publish their moderation logs without requiring a third party website - and just yesterday was voted in by the community of /r/conspiracy. Many thanks to @go1dfish for doing the lions share of the work on that project.

What about the other mods?

Right now I don't intend on changing anything up with the moderator lineup. I suggested in my subverserequest post (around 24 days ago) that the /r/conspiracy mods should stick to their subreddit and let voat regulars handle things here, but since then I've reviewed some old discussions and realized that that attitude might have been hasty to adopt. While I don't approve of some of the ways the mods on /r/conspiracy do things over there, and while I do value and respect them for many of their other actions, it should be the community that decides who handles the responsibilities and abilities of moderation. To that end, I'll work on facilitating discussions on this matter in the near future.

Current Projects

Now that that introduction is over, I'd like to share a few things I'm working on currently.

I want to engage everyone here and see what we all want for this subverse. Around 18 days ago I made a brainstorming post seeking ideas and suggestions for how we can make /v/conspiracy excellent, and about 4 days ago when I was modded I stickied it so that those who missed it were be able to participate.

I intend on going through the suggestions offered, and creating a new post in the near future to aggregate the ideas and prompt some fresh discussion and development of some of the ideas more.

I've recently gone through and created a list of every post I could find in /v/conspiracy that relate to the sub, its community, or other tangentially related meta-topics. In order to keep this meta-stuff organized and in an easy-to-access place, I created /v/ConspiracyMeta and posted the list there. I think having a space dedicated purely to improving the subverse and community can be a useful tool for us. Anyone is welcome to post there if it relates to the /v/conspiracy subverse or community.

In reviewing the meta-discussions I collected into that list, I saw a few discussions about moderators where opinions differed on who should be mods and how they should be selected. I intend on creating a post in the near future to see what everyone currently thinks about those issues, how everyone feels, and what we'd like to see happen.

Since this post is getting rather long, the last thing I'll mention for now is that I'm attempting to keep a manually-updated log of my actions as a moderator of /v/conspiracy. This is kind of experimental for me, but I'll try and stick to it. Hopefully it will be of value to someone - at the very least maybe it will be of value to me as I try to improve myself.

Tl;dr I'm the new mod, I'll try to be good. Stay tuned.

If you made it this far, thanks for reading. If you skipped to the bottom, that's cool too (sorry for the wall of text... I still need to learn the art of brevity). I hope that you guys find me useful. If everyone consistently hates me then I'll step down, but I'd like to be here to help all of us make this sub excellent if you'll have me.