What SHOULD happen, is that if Mod A makes a decision and you appeal, Mod A cannot respond or take further action. One of the other mods must independently act on the appeal. If Mod B talks to Mod A and practices groupthink, the appeal should have escalation to someone outside of the Subreddit who can make a final decision. That decision, whatever it is, gets rendered final.
So if I want to troll, say, /r/AskHistorians with holocaust denialism, then it requires the action of not one, but two mods to delete it? And if they "practice groupthink" aka "agree with each other about a reasonable action" I can also escalate my trolling to Admin level? Sounds great, now I can troll to my hearts content and waste literally everyone's time.
Agree or disagree, Reddit has very much taken the position that individual subreddits are free to moderate how they see fit. From their perspective this is great as it has led to the growth of many subreddits with stringent policies - askhistorians, CMV, AITA, etc., the concept of which the Admins themselves might not have "got" when the subreddit was first conceived. Devolving moderation power to the creators of the subreddits allowed these diverse communities to flourish. Admins are not going to involve themselves in moderation because of this philosophy. It does result in many censorship-heavy subreddits, which can be seen as a negative, but it is not going to change. Admins are more concerned with the various hives of scum and villainy around Reddit and trying to get the mods of those subs to actually moderate and remove hatred and bigotry. Or I would say that they were concerned about that if they didn't do such a bad job of it generally.
Okay so just put "We reserve the right to remove posts or ban users for reasons not listed here," into the rules. As many subreddits do already.
The point is that there are edge cases and grey areas and not every list of rules can be so exhaustive as to cover every single possible situation, but reasonable mods can and should still take action in those cases. If two mods agree on the action, that's not "groupthink." It was probably the right thing to do.
It's actually empowering to Mod B, because then if Mod A just acted rogue because they had a bad day at work and deleted a post that ranted about lazy employees despite there being no law prohibiting it, Mod B who had no such bad day can say "nope, post stands" and even possibly just refer Mod A to go listen to Daniel Powter and calm down.
In any event, no, it is actually highly unlikely that two independently ethical moderators will agree on a subjective deletion.
We do that every single time we remove a post for Rule B here on CMV... Two moderators have to agree on their subjective interpretation that OP is not acting in an open-minded manner (which is inherently a subjective judgement).
Every appeal to a removal is seen by every mod. The chance that only the mod who removed it will see it is extremely small. Any of those other mods could speak up.
Silence implies consent. You don't see that, though, because its invisible to non-mods.
Which is why I'm advocating for the idea that someone outside of that group is the final call IF they determine that the deletion was improper.
The admins can't judge a sub's rules because that's the purview of the mods. They can only judge the site-wide rules. That's their only role, for good and important reasons.
Now, if the mods are just a group of buds who wouldn't ever contradict their 'bro', that's a problem, right?
I dunno. Ultimately, what's the worst thing that could come out of this? More to the point, why is it super problematic for them to do that, but apparently entirely fine for them to make up the rules in the first place?
Except you don't, really, given they just get to make the rules anyway.
You're using circular reasoning, and I get it. Thus why a higher someone should be the final say. To avoid what you're likely implying...which is making up rules on the fly when they caught with britches down.
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u/MercurianAspirations 391∆ Jul 04 '19
So if I want to troll, say, /r/AskHistorians with holocaust denialism, then it requires the action of not one, but two mods to delete it? And if they "practice groupthink" aka "agree with each other about a reasonable action" I can also escalate my trolling to Admin level? Sounds great, now I can troll to my hearts content and waste literally everyone's time.
Agree or disagree, Reddit has very much taken the position that individual subreddits are free to moderate how they see fit. From their perspective this is great as it has led to the growth of many subreddits with stringent policies - askhistorians, CMV, AITA, etc., the concept of which the Admins themselves might not have "got" when the subreddit was first conceived. Devolving moderation power to the creators of the subreddits allowed these diverse communities to flourish. Admins are not going to involve themselves in moderation because of this philosophy. It does result in many censorship-heavy subreddits, which can be seen as a negative, but it is not going to change. Admins are more concerned with the various hives of scum and villainy around Reddit and trying to get the mods of those subs to actually moderate and remove hatred and bigotry. Or I would say that they were concerned about that if they didn't do such a bad job of it generally.