should we be worried about powers-moderators/users?

dunloap@lemmy.fmhy.ml to Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 68 points –

Power mods are one of the main problems with reddit. The same thing is already happening with Lemmy.

This is concerning because it allows for control of what becomes popular content.

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Right now there are people who sign up with an instance like lemmy.world, who then create loads of communities, because they don't fully understand the nature of things and can't quite believe that the URLs for lots of different IPs are available. For Reddit, if you snagged the likes of r/starwars early on, that gave you some power. For Lemmy, it's meaningless: if you just want to moderate 100 communities, and not spend time actually building a Community up, then you'll just be overtaken by the Community at one of the many other instances.

Exactly this. On Reddit, you would end up with stuff like r/TrueStarWars and such as a result of bad mods moderating badly — but those communities would have a harder time taking off due to the name being less searchable, and individuals needing to be "in the know" about why one sub has "true" out the front.

With everyone being able to take the same community name, just across different instances, there's a potential for a better, more competitive process to take place instead. It won't be perfect — @starwars is going to be in a much more immediately advantaged position than, say, @starwars — but in theory the playing field is closer to being level.