What to do regarding "community hoarders"?
What to do regarding "community hoarders"?
EDIT 2: Ruud has posted some guidelines for community moderation
EDIT: I want to clarify that the purpose of this post isn't to call anyone out in particular, and I think it's best to approach this issue with a gentle hand. Users who are doing this aren't necessarily ill intentioned, but may not realize the negative affect their actions may be having on the instance, hence why it's important to have this discussion. That being said, I removed the link to the user originally mentioned in this post to avoid any possible witchhunts.
Original Post:
I'm not sure what to call them, but I've noticed a few instances of users on this server creating dozens, and in some cases over a hundred different communities, and doing absolutely nothing with them. No sidebar description, no logo, banner, welcome post, or anything.
I understand that some people may be doing this in good faith in an effort to make sure that these spaces exist in the first place. That's fine and all - as long as you're allowing other community members to step in and help maintain and grow these spaces you've created, I don't really have a problem with it.
However, I think there are a good amount of people who are grabbing communities... just to squat on them? For some odd reason?
Take a look at this user's account [redacted]. Doing a little poking around, it seems they're an account that's owned by a [redacted] company based in [redacted]. They also don't have a single post or comment on record. So... Why do they own over 100 communities, many of which are simply duplicates of existing, popular Reddit subs?
I think the biggest problem here is that we may have users who want to create, cultivate, and grow communities that they feel strongly about, but when you go to set up a community only to find that it's owned by someone who isn't putting in any effort to make it a place for discussion, or outright doesn't care about it at all, it's going to discourage people from wanting to contribute in that way. First impressions are important, and these users might be turned off of Lemmy from an abundance of seemingly dead or spam communities.
What do you guys think? Is this an 'issue' worth thinking about, or will it sort itself out with time? I know it may not be super important in the grand scheme of things, but it's a question that's been on my mind for a few days now.
A few thoughts on this no particular order:
- perhaps there should be rate limits for users trying to create new communities?
- perhaps communities should expire into the wild if they are bagged and not used for X days/weeks?
- perhaps there needs to be some manual burden to keep 'bagged' but unused communities live, say every five days a prompt "hey looks like you are not using xyz community. If you still need it please solve this CAPTCHA, how many of these squares contain road signs?"
The term 'unused' would probably need finessing since a bot could likely post junk once a week to keep things from flagging, for that reason you might be wise not to be too transparent about what rules are being used, just that there are rules and checks?
I would normally say that those problems solve themselves with time, but the account you linked is indeed suspicious, only 18 hours old, 0 posts and 0 comments, and being mod of 169 communities.
I would report it to the admins to keep an eye on it, in case their purpose is spamming.
If this problem isn't under control, then I suppose people will just make a community with the same name on another instance with more strict community creation standards.
But it'll damage the perception of THIS instance if this was not addressed.
So, I'd just say do:
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Limit the maximum number of communities one person can mod (10 per user is too generous, I'd say 5 max, unless they've shown themselves to be able to mod well)
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Remove them from communities they've started where they are clearly not interested in build a community and are just squatting for whatever reason, like zero activity, or having it just to prevent people from posting there (Remember r/blackfather? Yeah. Bad look.)
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and prevent them from starting new communities/bans for repeated offenders.
Ultimately, this is up to the admins though.
There's a question here about whether or not /c require a community. You might be the only one interested in whatever, or your /c might just not be of interest.
I say this as someone who on other site had a simple /r where I just reposted things I found interesting to my friends, (all 4 of them) who mostly lurked with the occasional upvote.
I think that in creating 'rules' or 'guidelines' like this, we've got to be flexible enough to allow for very, very small communities to exist without requiring a level of community interaction.
It may be better to have a 'minim effort' level? Like, fill out sidebar, have one post every X months, something like that?
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I was thinking about this today and would love to see a limit established. I don't think it's unreasonable to create a 10 limit rule. I can't see how it wouldn't be a good thing. Quality of moderation would be greater.
I agree in premise but it doesn't stop people from just having numbered (or whatever) alt accounts to then create as many as they want.
Limit to own max 1-2 communities and mod max 5 communities (including the ones you own) + setup and comment activity requirements.
Make it hard work gaming the system but still no obstacle for those who want to actually run a couple of communities.
I'm not convinced this is a major issue that needs a coordinated response.
- There are hundreds of Lemmy servers, one can always make a community with the same name on another server. If an account is mass-registering one or more names across dozens or hundreds of servers, I'd consider that abuse that warrants a ban and closure of the communities.
- If you want to mod that community on that server, talk to them and ask to join the mod team. If they don't respond, petition the server admin to oust them as inactive.
Creating dozens of communities and then ignoring them is irritating, but unless it becomes quite common and is coupled with follow-up behaviors to keep the inactive communities, it's not real clear that it matters.
This sounds like a good compromise. As long as a community isn't doing something illegal, an instance owner forcing changes is a bit onerous.
Corporations or paid users moderating their own communities is a conflict of interest. It represents a massive threat to accurate information and a free internet. Yet, it is legal. Therefore, I disagree. Instance owners have a responsibility to watch out for these kinds of things
Piggybacking off of this, how do people generally feel about good-faith community squatting?
Like most people here I'm sure, I'm part of the reddit Exodus. I was never a regular or very active participant of any particular sub, I casually browsed and occasionally commented on probably hundreds of different ones. Most of the biggest ones of course already have close Lemmy equivalents that aren't too hard to find, but a few haven't quite made the jump yet.
I have no real interest in being a mod or anything of the sort, but I've thought about grabbing a few of the community names to give others a landing space to reestablish some of the communities that existed on Reddit so when they search for them here they see a familiar name pop up with the intention of turning them over to the reddit mods or someone else who has actual interest in running those communities, and then wash my hands of it. Mostly I just want to make sure that they don't get snatched up by some spammer/bot/absentee mad asshole/etc. before someone with actually interest in running the community has a chance to claim it.
I don't know if that's something people here would generally approve of, and I haven't given a whole lot of thought to how I would actually work that. Probably something like sit on it for about a month hoping a former reddit mod shows up, and if they don't, I'd turn it over to the first person who expresses interest and makes a compelling argument for what they'd like to do with it.
And if I did go that route, I don't know what kind of proof/verification/credentials I should ask for to verify that the person was mod, or to make sure they were actually any good at their jobs and not some power-tripping, karma-farming, superuser powermod asshole who made reddit a shittier place. And while I waited for someone else to step up, those communities would probably go almost completely unmoderated, which wouldn't exactly help them to grow and get established here.
Just looking for other's thoughts on this.
My current intent is to "garden"; to bootstrap the site with communities and then release them if they reach critical mass and have a competent moderation team (excluding me).
I guess there could be some super-mod or something who goes around, notifies subscribers of duplicate communities that they need to move because they're going to delete that community.
It's a bird... It's a plane...
Itβs Super-Mod!