With recent events hilighting the value of quality moderation, it got me to consider: How can we help you out?
What steps, considerations, encouragements or warnings would you give the userbase regarding best practices for using the report feature (or other interraction with mods)? Reporting less, reporting more, putting more detail in the form, or just leaving it blank?
I was thinking of maybe putting together a psa-style infographic (a la think before you post) if the answers you give are poignant or significantly unknown to the average user.
I’ve done that before and had mods threaten to ban me if I reported anyone again. Ironically, it was someone that was harassing and being uncivil that I was reporting. Like WAY worse than most comments I’ve seen removed. And this was on a fairly popular community here that is still around.
It’s not always so easy to assume that mods are going to be fair. Reporting people comes with a risk.
If you have that happen to you I recommend reaching out via DM either to your instance’s admins or the admins of the server their community is on. Give them the context of the report and also explain how that mod reacted. If a mod acts like that they are very likely an abusive moderator, so make sure to let admins know about that.
If your description of the events is accurate: that’s a shitty mod, and a good example of what I wrote in the last paragraph. We should be denouncing this sort of crap, and avoiding comms where it happens.
I’m not assuming that the mods are going to be fair. I’m taking into account that shitty mods do a favour to you when they out themselves, as they’re basically showing you which comms to avoid.