For example, people on Reddit asking redundant questions and give equally redundant or unhelpful answers.
Whenever every ‘What’s the worst show you’ve seen?’ is asked, you’ll get 10,000 “Kardashians” answers, which is just easy karma farming.
If someone posts in a community that’s geared for something like opinions, but someone elects to just go on a full scale rant instead.
I suspect powermods are more of a myth than reality, but I agree we should be concerned with any instance becoming the defacto site for Lemmy.
I think the best way to avoid this is already in motion (though slowly), which is to have smaller topic instances which house the topic in its entirety and don’t have as many users (for example there is one for Star Trek and one for Android already). This way, regardless of your instance you still have access to the topic.
That’s just my 2 cents, anyways.
Powermods exist, but they are important to how Reddit functions.
They effectively act as a knowledge base on how to moderate large subs. They know how to use a lot of specialty software to moderate large subs and will typically act as a lightning rod for other mods on unpopular decisions.
They also get drunk on power, but Reddit never provided for a better way to control their communities. Of course, technically neither has Lemmy, yet.
That’s quite interesting.
To be honest, I was never active enough to encounter a power mod; but I suppose anyone could go overboard trying to protect their community (even if they wind up doing more harm than good). Without having encountered any power mods, it’s hard for me to say what percentage fell into that category.
In your experience, did the level of power of the mod seem directly proportional to their level of overboardness/corruption?
I apologize if the answer seems obvious. I keep hearing about the power mods, but since I’ve never seen one in action, I would certainly like to learn more.
No, but they did have their bad days and being a mod of large groups can be very damaging to a person’s sanity. For those who were kicked off, I saw it less as getting what they deserved and more as them getting the break that they really needed.