How easy it is to stir up shit, right? Start calling users shills publicly without bothering to provide any evidence and the door is wide open to respond.....

The mods on /v/greatawakening need to grow up and just do their jobs and no more, or relinquish them to someone who can and will. They make it seem like prepubescent teenagers are running things here. Maybe they are.

SOCK PUPPETS

@MolochHunter claims that hunting down sock puppet accounts takes up 90% of the mod's time. Really? Is that your job to worry about more than anything else, on a site that is wide open for creating multiple accounts? Is that a good delegation of your time as moderators under that condition? How many sock puppet accounts have you identified in all that time, and how do you determine that they're even sock puppets, and how have these these alleged sock puppets caused problems that you are prepared to show evidence of? Is this sort of endeavor really worthwhile compared to other duties that aren't being dealt with, like moderating posts for being on topic, accuracy of information, and having sources?

SHILLS

Calling someone out publicly as a shill is a serious charge. You are attempting to destroy their ability to take part and exercise their freedom from censorship, no matter that you don't like what they post in comments. That's not your call, and you're only causing more problems for yourselves by doing this. You can't win that game. You should know that and I think you do, so you probably have personal reasons for doing it that don't reflect your duties.

Mods should not be going around labelling users as shills without providing strong supporting evidence that clearly indicates an agenda to destroy discourse or flood out informative posts with nonsense.

A person who is purposely annoying is not a shill. There must be more than just immaturity involved. You must be able to show a distinctly damaging purpose to their activity, and the evidence of such damage. These mods do not bother to do that. They just publicly label certain users in order to seek out others who will support their baseless claims and help them target these people.

MODERATING

Mods are only needed to maintain the subverses they moderate, and that should only involve making sure that post submissions are on topic and properly sourced and not empty of useful information. The comment sections should be out of their jurisdiction since this is a censorship-free site and anyone can say anything they want, even to the point of being annoying.

These annoying users are often just doing it to exercise their freedom to do so. Get used to it and learn how to deal with it or go somewhere where they censor everything so you can be the overly-sensitive little shits you obviously are. I don't see the people that have been named being such a problem that an announcement that labels them as shills is going to do any good, but just the opposite, and you deserve it now if it does. You made your own bed, now you can lay in it.

BLOCKING

There is a blocking feature that anyone can use to block users they don't want to see. That's how far the censoring should go, and no further. It works very well to get rid of annoying users. Mods should be telling people this instead of acting like Nazis and compiling lists and posting them publicly in order to have these users shunned by the community without even a trial.

Making these public lists is the closest they can get to censoring, and since that's what they're obviously attempting, they need to be watched themselves because they have an obvious agenda here.

What do the mods do to help make information flow more freely while reducing/eliminating garbage? Why do they choose to focus on the comments, and not stick to the post submissions that most people come here to see? The submissions have become flooded with garbage posts because the mods are so busy tracking their enemies in the comment sections. The comments are usually filled with useless shit anyway, so why focus there, except as an excuse to target certain people that post there? Why are you worrying about comments when you can't possibly monitor them all? Why are you targeting these few users when others you don't name are doing as much or worse by posting bogus information as facts and not providing sources? Learn how to delegate your own responsibilities and deal with what's more important and can be dealt with easily, instead of trying to take it upon yourselves to censor certain users. It's that fucking simple.

I've quickly come to not trust these mods and not really like them much either, based on how they conduct themselves. They just want people to kiss their asses and suck up to them. I really hate people like that. They're more about pumping their own egos and power-tripping than about making sure others have access to good information on the subjects they moderate. Whining about annoying users and making them out to be shills just shows their own lack of maturity and intelligence. They just become shills themselves when they do that.

I will be posting more on this in the future if the mods choose to continue with their own shilling tactics. My point is to define the limits of their power as mods and to see that they remain within them and not start censoring certain others that they choose to target for frivolous reasons and without clear evidence.

If they are interested in their subverses being popular for the quality of the content, they need to do a fuck of a better job than I see them doing. Instead, they're making a big stink about a few users while shirking their real responsibilities, and this is causing the place to quickly fall apart.

Blaming the 'shills' is not going to work. That's not really the problem. The mods are destroying this place by how they're not doing their real duties and instead focusing attention on what they call shill activity, thereby putting the blame and the cause for the real problems elsewhere. Is that their intention? They can't moderate effectively so they look to blame others to distract from their own lack of abilities?

If the mods can't just moderate, then get the fuck out!

Frivolous shill-blaming is another way to censor when censoring isn't allowed. Stop trying to censor people by leading others to shun them! PROVE that they're shills with an agenda, or SHUT THE FUCK UP!!! You aren't our babysitters! Lack of censorship includes accepting annoying people and learning how to deal with them properly so they can still have their freedoms as well, and still be annoying if they choose to be.