I’ve been seeing more often (and others have posted the same) that some of the elements of “Reddit etiquette” seem to be taking over here. Luckily I can still find discussion comments but it seems the jokes and general “downvote because I disagree” are slowly taking over.
So the question becomes is it the size or the functionality of the site? The people or popularity? What’s your thoughts?
edit: should I change it to Lemmy-hivemind? Exhibit A: the amount of downvotes without a single explanation (guessing it’s anything to do with Reddit being talked about).
On Lemmy the safeguard to mod abuse is instance admins. On Reddit this can take place, but rarely does. The only time admins on Reddit really step in is when mods are allowing illegal behaviour on their sub, or when mods are protesting against their own shitty behaviour. But on Lemmy it’s much easier to reach out to an instance’s admins if something is going wrong. Mod actions are all public, so you can create a post explaining what happened and it’s not just a “he said/she said” situation.
If they aren’t being responsive to feedback, the appropriate response is to start up a new community, preferably on a different instance. Or, in the extreme case, to block that instance entirely. You can even build a consensus to doing this with a “panel” consisting of…every user on the platform. That’s essentially how [email protected] became the de facto Star Trek meme community, rather than [email protected], after the mods of the latter community were shown to be abusing their powers and the instance admins refused to take remedial action.