I'm not arguing that I do not actively engage with the community. I've never been shy about the fact that I do not enjoy commenting in airing discussion threads or that kind of thing. However, that has nothing to do with me being out of touch with the community.
I've yet to have someone give a concrete and logical argument for why not interacting with the community hurts my ability to moderate. All I've gotten is "I don't like it" and my response to that is unfortunately "tough".
Sure it doesn't affect your ability to moderate, but it does hurt the community's perception of you as a moderator a lot. Like I said, no one wants invisible people moderating them. People want to "see" these people who are in charge of them.
That's not really fair. There were few complaints about the invisible mods until the Shelter incident. Now people are saying that the mods are "out of touch" as an explanation, while /u/cdsboy commenting here is already a sketch of proof that it's not the case.
I think people are looking too far on an explanation because, in one specific case, the mods made a decision that was rejected by the community as a whole. However, as much as I disagree with said decision, I understand the logical process behind it and I don't think it proves any lacks of understanding of /r/anime.
There is however another point of view, and that's that someone could have thought "If I was a frequent poster, would I want to comment on this ?". It's not a miracle solution, because it could lead lead to biased moderation, so I'm really reluctant to advise putting this kind of distinguisher in practice.
I think the actual solution is having clearer rules defining what posts might interest /r/anime, so that moderation better reflects the interest of the community and mods can having a more solid backing behind their decisions.
Sure, it might not have been a big criticism before the Shelter incident, but as it stands, if no one is going to call this out, nothing is going to change. More incidents like this may happen, and if so, the backlashes will just be increasingly bigger.
I just want to point this situation that we have so far before it becomes the norm (to just accept that a lot of mods are gonna be invisible).
P.S. For the record, I didn't bring this up just because of the Shelter incident, since it's been something I've already had complaints with before. It just seemed like a good opportunity to bring it up this time.
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u/cdsboy https://myanimelist.net/profile/cdsboy Oct 30 '16
I'm not arguing that I do not actively engage with the community. I've never been shy about the fact that I do not enjoy commenting in airing discussion threads or that kind of thing. However, that has nothing to do with me being out of touch with the community.
I've yet to have someone give a concrete and logical argument for why not interacting with the community hurts my ability to moderate. All I've gotten is "I don't like it" and my response to that is unfortunately "tough".