I can't stand by and watch stuff like this happen around here. I will not support subverses (by featuring them or making them defaults) with moderators who impose questionable rules such as "your post has to end with a questionmark". Moderators need to calm their tits and focus on nurturing and growing their communities. Rules can always be bent and what better time to bend the rules then now, while Voat is still growing and under development?
I am thankful for moderators who help keep Voat spam-free and I respect your work. I really do. I started working on automoderator for comments and submissions and your job will be made much easier when this is implemented, but for the time being, moderators need to relax and focus on removing spam and eventual illegal content. If I submit a new post and it gains some traction (hundreds of comments, views and upvoats), and my post gets removed because I broke a rule by forgetting to include a question mark in my submission title... well, I would be pissed. People take removal of their comments and submissions very seriously and moderators must think twice before removing stuff if they want to avoid offending users. Voat has a ranking process where time acts as gravity and older posts will eventually fall off the frontpage. Voat also has automatic public moderation logs and everything you remove will still be visible in these modlogs and your actions may be questioned by the community, just like what happened yesterday.
This action can be reverted if /askvoat mods can convince us that the issue has been dealt with or if some other, less restrictive community takes over.
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Kad ago
You didn't listen to people who calmly and succinctly told you what you did wrong, and you kept supporting the behaviour which was deemed inappropriate by the community. Don't cry abuse when you threw the first stone; true a lot took it far too far ( their reactions are arguably understandable). But you threw the first stone and failed to realize it, then you doubled down and threw another stone, and another, and you let the person throwing acid put it into a fucking hose and spray it everywhere.
You have no place being a moderator of a community if you cannot handle it in a manner which doesn't add fuel to the fucking fire. Its simple PR.
If a community vastly disapproves on the way a rule is being enforced, you must not keep enforcing it in the same way. You panicked, and it is good that you admitted it; but being a mod in a forum as large as that one on a site as small and young as Voat, means you have to pay attention to the tides of opinion, and you cannot panic in a manner which locks you into a course of action. You cannot ignore it and double down on your mistakes. Its like lighting a fire, then because a bee caught on fire, you decided to add gasoline to the hive and set it alight as well; in the interests of seeming impartial.
You got locked into a course which was wrong, admit it to the community and ask them for help and you'll probably find a lot of these issues will be resolved quickly and without much more drama. While this is happening you need to catalog (fairly) a record of this incident and make it publicly available for scrutiny.
Mistakes were made, don't repeat them.