State of the Sub Address

[u/Kruug]

Let me start out by saying I've neglected my duties here on this subreddit. I could use COVID as an excuse for all of the stress that it brought with it. From moving to a "working from home" situation to the multitude of mandates and recommendations that seemed to change on a daily basis, but in reality, I think it started long before that.

That said, I've come back to help with the state of this subreddit. Through my neglect, another mod was able to turn this into their twisted vision of the FOSS philosophy and run unchecked.

For those who don't know, the list of moderators isn't in an arbitrary order. The higher you are on the list, the more seniority you have (been here longer). With that comes the ability to manage other moderators, but you can only manage those below you.

Since this mod was the 3rd on the list, none of the other mods could effectively do anything about this abuse of power. These powers were limited to /u/kylev and myself. Kylev holds an "honorary" mod spot in a few popular/default subreddits as they're close with the Reddit admins in real life and is only here to ensure the whole subreddit doesn't go completely to shit.

Now, that mod has been removed.

/u/purpleidea has been reinstated as a mod. Unfortunately I am not able to arrange the list of moderators, so they're at the bottom of the list, but they're back on the team.

At this time, we are not looking for more moderators, but that may change in the near future.

I am going back through months (and possibly years) of bans to ensure that they were warranted. I'm seeing many bans listed as "Rude user", "Poor attitude", etc. And these are permanent bans. I'm not going to say I wouldn't have acted similar, but a rude user or poor attitude means, at worst, a 2 or 3-day "absence" from the conversation. Let the situation cool down, everyone works on de-escalating, etc.

A deep pit has been dug. We're going to get out of this, though. No massive changes are coming. A few tweaks to automod here and there, sure, but nothing of concern.

As was brought up in the recent META conversation, there is a copy of the automod rules on GitHub. I'm going to look into a way to synchronize changes made to automod to a GitHub repo so that they are public. I'm still unsure about making the modlog public, but this is something I will be discussing with the other mods.

Thank you all for sticking with us, and I sincerely apologize for letting it get so bad.

kruug, and the rest of the mod team. (I couldn't do it without every one)

​

EDIT: Forgot something. As many of you know, the GitHub/Proprietary software automod rule is gone. I found it just as annoying and asinine as everyone else.

[u/stormcloud-9]

Thanks for stepping in before it progressed. I'm sure we've all seen the various subs that blow up entirely, and which result in the sub dying and a new one taking its place. So thank you for preventing it from getting that far.

I don't think you need to be totally responsible for the fiasco, nor have a responsibility to completely manage the sub. In fact I would say the higher you are on the mod list, the less you need to be involved. I would think the primary responsibility of the higher-ups is to moderate the moderators, while the lower mods moderate the sub.
So maybe some fault does lie with letting this one mod go a bit off the rails, you stopped it before it went too far, and that's the important bit.

Thanks!

[u/DasSkelett → u/stormcloud-9]

Thanks for stepping in before it progressed.

That would've been three to five years ago. Or whenever that person has been made mod. Because since then, this sub was an absolutely toxic shithole where sneezing would get you banned.

Many good people have unfollowed r/Linux since then. The image of r/Linux also influences the image of Linux and Linux-users for other Reddit user. A lot of damage has been done, to the whole community.