Hi all, as with most of you, I’m an immigrant from Reddit. I never used to go on to the NZ or regional subreddits because frankly, I felt very unwelcome and those places were extremely negative.

How then do we build a new community that is based on being positive and accepting, even of those with different points of view, political leanings, religious beliefs or lifestyles? Everyone deserves a voice, no one deserves to be shouted down or made to feel unwelcome or belittled because they have differing thoughts.

Even festering cunts like Brian Tamaki and his ilk, deserve a seat at the table. We live in a free country and that means everyone should get a voice. Everyone gets to speak their piece, even if you don’t like it.

How do we stop this community devolving into yet another online echo chamber?

  • gardner@lemmy.nzEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    As I said the subreddit is shaped by them so if you don’t like the subreddit the blame lies only with the moderators. As far as I can see there were several problems. One was that they were arbitrary in their decisions. There were rules but they didn’t matter. If they liked you then you could violate any rule, if they didn’t like you they banned you. Another problem was that they used alts to participate in the subreddit and again if you got into an argument with one of them you had no idea you were arguing with a moderator and consequences could be severe. Finally some of the moderators were downright bad people. They harassed people, threatened people, online stalked people, doxxed people etc.

    All of that sounds like it would be resolved by a lighter moderation approach with fewer rules. Additionally, it’s way easier to fork a lemmy community when things get weird. People can tell when community leaders are bad. “Hospitality Club” and “NZ Mushroom Growing” are two that jump to mind where the ego of the leaders makes the communities difficult to participate in the community. People leave when they figure it out.

    • BalpeenHammer@lemmy.nzEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      You are right. Distributed communities do allow you to jump ship but I suppose the same arguments got made on reddit as in “make your own subreddit”. Unfortunately on reddit the mods camped on all the NZ related subreddits. They set all of them up and the same set of people ran all of them.