Hi,
Some of you may know me from over on reddit as a user who has been fighting an uphill battle to preserve free speech on that site in the face of intense pressure from both the reddit meta and the admin team to abandon such ambitions.
I came to whoaverse (now voat) back when I felt reddit was near the point of collapsing. I watched as the users from /r/conspiratard used bots to register every user name of /r/conspiracy regulars that they could get their hands on. I also watched as a user (pyro) spammed /v/conspiracy with memes for 12-24 hours straight in an attempt to blockade this subverse.
Although I am more active on reddit currently (working to prevent unjust removals on /r/worldnews and protect /r/conspiracy from the likes of bipolarbear and emr), I also visit voat daily in order to make sure that content is being allowed to flow freely on this subverse.
To that end, I am a bit concerned with the current push to add new moderators for one primary reason;
There is currently no mod log available on voat, which means there is no way for mods to know what content (if any) is being removed by other moderators.
I feel we have a team here who can be trusted to adhere to the ethos of free flowing information which is constantly under attack on reddit, and, until mod logs are added on voat, I would be quite weary of any new additions to the mod team.
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Kamicolo ago
It's been awhile since I logged in here (last time it was still whoaverse), and I am a little behind on the topic. Who is pushing for adding new mods, and why? Hopefully someone will clue me in.
The_Oracle ago
That would be me, I started a discussion yesterday about clearing all the moderators and starting afresh, because of the censorship of reddit and the deletion of posts with zero accountability by moderators, which I think is the main reason why people have been moving over to here in the past few days, myself included. What I didn't factor in is that others might come in to try and co-opt the sub if the moderators were all replaced, so a solution has been proposed whereby all moderator actions are logged and are totally transparent to the members of the sub, so that we can be the judge of moderator actions and keep them in check if needs be. This has led to me being accused of being someone trying to take over the sub myself, that wasn't my intention at all, I just wanted to make sure that unchecked moderator control didn't leak from reddit over to here, which I thought could happen with the same moderators from the reddit sub. But since the transparency solution has been discussed, I think the idea of wiping all moderators has been put to bed in favour of the logging system. Hope that helps.
Kamicolo ago
Thanks for filling me in. I'm all for transparency, as FlyTape and Assuredly are well aware of. We had a small scuffle on reddit over the recent mod election. (My Kamicolo account was shadow banned during the Officer Go Fuck Yourself fiasco. I go by BloodWillow now.) I'm all for adding new blood to the mod team, if there is an open vote with checks and balances. But starting from scratch I think is a bit much.