RFC: "kicking" posts instead of removing them

submitted by morrowind edited

(I haven't submitted an official rfc yet, want to see what people think)

This is inspired by Ruqqus, a now defunct Reddit alternative.

The idea is simple: 1. There is a "global" or "default" community with no topic or extra rules, 2. Community moderators, when they feel a post is inappropriate for their community can "kick" a post to the global community

The reasoning is as follows: a good amount, probably the majority of posts that are removed by mods, are not removed because they are inappropriate for the site as a *whole*, but because they are inappropriate for that specific community (off-topic, banned site, low effort, etc.). But currently the only option they have to deal with this is a full blown removal, which is quite frustrating for the poster.

This proposal would allow mods to keep curated communities without needing to do unnecessary removals.


As a bonus, this would create a default community where people can post when they're not sure where to post something. Posts can be later be crossposted into more specific communities.

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14 Comments

Rogue

Yes.

It has always been a pet peeve of mine that I would find an interesting topic while browsing all on reddit, with a healthy number of upvotes and comments but regardless mods will bluster in and lock it because it's not quite on topic.

Back in the early days of Internet forums when moderators found an off topic post they would move it to the relevant sub , and there would typically be an "Other", "Off-Topic" or "Random" as a catch all.

I've never understood why threaded social media is missing such a basic moderation function.

nutomic

There is an open issue for moving posts to a different community which would allow for this functionality. But so far no one has worked on it yet.

ladfrombrad 🇬🇧

It's definitely something we could get on board with over in !android@lemdro.id and shunting app requests etc that belong over in the respective !askandroid@lemdro.id community.

But I think like @Dessalines said re-writing posts rings true with us because over on reddit, when we got to a post that violated our rules but had already met a threshold of engagement (100 votes / 10 comments) before we got to it left it up (with a sticky comment explaining why) regardless.

Anyhoo, my 2c and thanks for all your work :)

Kichae

Because it abandoned the idea of the site admins being responsible for moderation, in the name of expanding to unmanagable size.

On Reddit and Facebook, groups do not have a common moderation team, so they lack the right to dump a post in someone else's group.

ShellMonkey

I could see two significant problems here.

1: people getting lazy and just chucking everything into the generic bucket and the admins/global mods having a mess to deal with.

2: I'm the event of an ability to move content to another community other than the instance 'global' how do you deal with cross-instance moves? For example if the most prominent version of a comm is on one instance but a post gets put on another, the logical place would be to be on the more prominent community, but just dumping posts on another instance isn't going to be well received I would guess.

Valmond

Maybe several "global" like one for good pists that doesn't belong on a specific sub, one for low effort memes etc.

morrowind [OP]

Maybe a NSFW one, but beyond that I feel like it would defeat the point

Aedis

I thing there's something here. I don't think that this is the solution though.

What I think is good: * A default place for posts * A way to remove posts from a community without nuking the user's post * Possibilities of cross posting and for de-duping efforts

What I think is bad: * A default community managed by admins (unscalable) * seems like a huge deviation from the current activity pub spec (which is kinda terrible ngl) * will need a very specific adapter to keep compatibility with other existing activity pub front ends.

morrowind [OP]

We could certainly have mods for this default community too, that's not crucial to the idea.

Could you expand in where this conflicts with activitypub? I thought AP was too general to care about something like this

ladfrombrad 🇬🇧

We could certainly have mods for this default community too, that's not crucial to the idea.

It is thou, and why /r/reddit.com got archived eventually since the reddit admins (mods) couldn't keep up.

Where do you pool them from?

JASN_DE

While I can see the appeal, it would probably need what amounts to a different system, I.e. not Lemmy.

morrowind [OP]

I'm no expert on how lemmy is implemented, but I don't see why not. Would probably just involve a post removal + a post creation, with some scaffolding code to handle the uglier details

onoira [they/them] , edited

i like this. i think for now as a workaround: one could lock the topic and leave a comment asking the OP to crosspost it elsewhere, with grace for posts which have high engagement (as ladfrombrad suggested).

i don't agree that crossposting works to 'move' posts. as far as i know: the OP is not notified when their topic is crossposted by someone else, and in that case they also won't be 'subscribed' to comment notifications.

ladfrombrad 🇬🇧

So furthering on this would shunting things to a !bucket@instance.com (maybe a somewhat better named community since I'm terribad at these things might work better....) within Instances but still viewable *and* crosspost-able by other, Instance users?

This would negate the need for a global admin since the Instance could have mods of that particular /c/, allowing the other Instance admins to review it for suitably if and when they drop in?