hwagoolio

I believe I saw in the other post that the admin team was planning on moving to a Russian server. Is this true?

Given current circumstances in the world, I would like to know if the server fees paid are going to the Russian government (via taxes) and thereby supporting an ongoing conflict.

I'm very understanding and sympathetic to the fact that running large communities is difficult.

My impression of the current situation is that trust is especially low between community mods/contributors and the admin team. The only way to repair that trust is through transparency, and I would suggest that your team implement as many measures as possible.

For example, mastodon.world discloses all of their finances.

Content banning and user banning processes need publicly posted procedures. How many warnings does each user get? What is the appeal process like? Banning of communities or users should never occur unless it is in violation of an existing policy. It is not okay to change the rules and ban simultaneously (e.g. as was done with c/scat or c/rapehentai). Instead, provide some advance notice. Ideally, suspend before banning. Provide the banned community or user with information about why they were banned.

In a situation like this, where there is so much wild speculation about the content policy, my honest opinion would just be to make the entire process transparent. For example, I used to write minutes for the mediawiki community I was in and sometimes I would publish saved IRC logs. Example minutes:

• Date
• User A submitted this proposal (linked)
• User B, C said X about the proposal
• User D said Y about the proposal
• The vote on this proposal was #-# (# did not vote)
• The proposal passed and will be implemented on future date Z

Although I suppose it was more important for our community to track all the minutes because we were a volunteer community with elected admins. However, for the situation that you are in, I really think it would be beneficial to pursue transparency to that degree.

To be clear, the volunteers/admins at Wikipedia are not paid either. From my personal experience in Wikimedia communities, my sincere advice is to consider and take transparency seriously.

The most important resource in volunteer spaces like this is 'trust'.

I hope you and the admin team recognize that in order to run a website like this, you also require the trust and buy-in from moderators (who are also unpaid) to invest the many hours into their communities just as you have done for the server. Hiding things from moderators, sending mixed messages, and making secret deliberations (with rumors that some admins are eager to remove large quantities of content) is really damaging for that relationship of trust.

The recent content policy changes (even before padded's leak) have been dictatorial top-down decrees. However, these unilateral rule changes are impractical/meaningless when moderators have not agreed to enforce those rules -- and I've personally experienced this (at best, only 30% of the content that I've reported for content policy violations have been addressed by moderators). Realistically, no moderator wants to enforce rules they don't believe in, and if they leave, the departure of skilled talent cripples this website and leaves communities effectively unmoderated in practice.

Please consider improving the transparency of these content policy deliberations, and at the very minimum, incorporate community moderators into the discussion and ascertain that they are in agreement with the rules before rolling out changes on the drop of a dime.

I wanted to express that I'm extremely concerned about the banning of @paddedperson and the deletion of their thread saying that they were migrating away from lemmynsfw.

As far as I can tell, @paddedperson was banned for leaking preliminary information about upcoming content policy changes from the admin discussion group. In my view, they were legitimate concerns, and retaliatory action taken against him are very concerning with respect to treatment of whistleblowers.

Can admins comment on this incident?

Truly transparent non-profit organizations (e.g. Wikipedia) typically release meeting minutes (a summary or transcript), or allow the public to attend voting meetings as part of the audience. Can the admins provide a summary or transcript of the votes taken on various decisions?

Related to this subject -- when a post by a moderator is reported, it ends up going to back to the same moderator to decide on it... when they are most definitely not a neutral party when their own possibly underage flat-chested anime schoolgirl post is reported.

Moderator reports should go to an unrelated third party to adjudicate.

Otherwise, in practice, moderators just resolve all the reports they don't agree with.

I feel like the admins are disproportionately biased against drawn/hentai artwork.

A lot of the gonewild communities here are allowing unverified reposted images, and I’d venture a random guess that maybe 30% of the content is posted without the model’s knowledge or permission, which poses issues with privacy/consent law (etc).

So why ban hentai scat/bestiality communities yet leave the actually illegal communities untouched? If the admins were as strict with IRL content as they were with hentai, all of these legally questionable communities should be “temporarily” banned until better moderation tools exist.

There’s clearly a double standard here that exists.