this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2023
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As a communist, I'm also receptive to a more democratic and less-hierarchical style of moderation. A LOT of reddit communities have been wrecked by an absent top moderator, who suddenly and suspiciously "becomes active" and removes the moderators who have been keeping the sub going for years.
We've had several people make proposals on github, but my issue has always been this: these are mostly untested, and potentially insecure. In the online space without any sort of real-person verification, If some kind of voting on mod actions were implemented, people could just create fake accounts to game the system, or find other ways.
AFAIK there hasn't been any forum or community software that doesn't implement the top-down chain of trust model. And of course this is less of concern with decentralized software like lemmy, where people always have the option to host their own instance, or create their own community, and moderate it exactly as they see fit. That's not an option you have with reddit.
Part of what you would need to create is a qualified voter system.
For a meme sub, maybe the qualified voters are known participants in the community over a period of time.
For a more technical sub like what AskHistorians is on Reddit, voters are those qualified to answer questions.
It doesn't have to be open to everyone, just the interested.
And you keep coming back to the federation model as a way to keep this in check, but it is still a dictatorial model and the only answer to dealing with a bad head mod is to destroy a community and lose the history of that community.
"qualified voter system" sounds all too much like karma that's readily gamed with repost bots creating a worse experience for everyone.
Mods can alter who becomes qualified.
But lets face it, there are already a ton of reposters here already.
I'd be surprised if users routinely recognised one another, but perhaps I've just not participated much in the past.
Interestingl, linked elsewhere in this thread, there is a middle ground between global karma and existing mod opinion: https://lemmy.ml/comment/2377401
Effectively rather than considering the total upvotes/down votes you could consider only the votes cast by already trusted members. Although it may be a little too close to MeowMeowBeenz
Yeah. I would pick karma within the community as a rough basis. Even then, I would keep the karma limit low to prevent a MeowMeowBeenz issue. It just shows that you're a participating member of the community.