The plain and simple of it is that I’m not a good moderator. I have no idea what I’m doing. I wanted a community where people could post conservative stuff without it getting overwhelmed by lefty stuff, and then you could have discussions/arguments in the comment section. Bring to light stories that wouldn’t normally be seen on lemmy. Since that didn’t exist on lemmy, I had to do it myself.

Right now, there’s a lot of toxicity, some straight up telling people to kill themselves. My whole moderation policy was basically “So long as it isn’t a straight up slur, you could comment it”.

You’d think it’d be simple, just ban those who do that. Well, what about those who defend baby murder? I know lefties genuinely believe it isn’t, but I do. How do you tell what is horrible shit, when lefties act like horror movie monsters?

What about those who I’m like 90% sure are arguing in bad faith? I want to encourage discussions and arguments, and if I’m wrong, what then?

Me doing keyword-based moderating was a bad idea, but I am at a loss of how to do better, without breaking what this sub was supposed to be about.

I need ideas.

How should I moderate this community?

  • PizzaMan
    53·
    1 year ago

    Perhaps this community should be called “conservatives allowed”

    Another guy did that on lemmy.world a few months ago. That sub didn’t last more than a few weeks because he kept breaking instances rules over bigotry.

    This prevents the set of voices from becoming skewed, as it does in places where conservatives get banned for being conservative.

    Thats actually a common misconception. Aside from subs like c/leftism and such, nobody gets banned from the generic c/politics type ones for being conservative. Instead they get banned for breaking rules and bigotry/hate/aggressiveness.

    The users TJD, MonoTimeToDie and Jimbolauski are good examples of this. TJD in particular has been calling users slurs left and right. One conservative user by a name I don’t remember had a bit of a breakdown telling literally everyone to kill themselves in a thread they made to complain about liberals. It isn’t a coincidence.

    Edit; See bellow, MonoTimeToDie proving my exact point by calling me a rat.

    • intensely_human
      34·
      1 year ago

      Aside from subs like c/leftism and such, nobody gets banned from the generic c/politics type ones for being conservative.

      Again this same fallacy. I see this everywhere: people making assertions of the form “X does not occur”.

      You’re wrong. I have been banned for being conservative from many communities not labeled as leftist.

      Generally speaking if you’re about to make a statement of the form “X does not occur” just stop. There’s no way to know a thing like that, without having been everywhere and seen everything. Have some mental discipline. Recognize the limits of your own knowledge.

      • PizzaMan
        41·
        1 year ago

        I’m using the colloquial sense of the word “nobody”, therefore I was not stating it was an absolute. Have some mental discipline and ask for clarification before assuming something about what somebody is stating.

      • PizzaMan
        43·
        1 year ago

        Thank you for proving my point.