I’d appreciate it if you replied to concerns raised privately over mod mail.[1] Seems to me like you stonewall whenever faced with hard questions / concerns, regarding the website content[2] or with moderators abusing their power (in the threads they themselves participate in, or due to fanboism for their fav service/tool or due to bias of whatever kind), which per many of those big/heavy posts around here, is not in the spirit of established policy.[3] That has happened four or five times with me; unsure if there’s a pattern here that others have noticed, too.
I mean, how many times has the “team” warned/banned its own members? Or are held to same standard as others? It isn’t because mods themselves never break guidelines / policies (you’d know), that much is clear, while they’re happy lawyering or worse engaging in mob-like behaviour in threads they themselves participate in (and don’t we all hate such hypocrisy?).
Besides, before taking extreme steps, the mods can be more thoughtful, if they want to be more welcoming. Example of extreme steps:
- Deleting an entire post because ONE sentence or word violated policy.
- Deleting an entire post as off-topic instead of breaking out the relevant discussion to another topic.
- This is scandalous as almost any topic that has any semblance of participation from multiple folks WILL tend to bring in other tangential topics. These things aren’t deliberate and do not happen unprompted for the most part.
- Scandalous even more so to delete posts as off-topic that course-correct dis/misinformation.
- Deleting threads instead of locking them.
To top if off, the claim that “all mod actions are final” is outrageous as it is insulting. Especially since all of this is meant to be a community effort.
I am happy to make those mod mails public. ↩︎
(ex: publicly pointing out that the VPN page is non-neutrally worded against PG’s own policy and is doing VPN company’s marketing for them … also has made no difference) ↩︎
“Even moderators are strongly encouraged to use the flagging system instead of directly taking action on off-topic or low-effort posts, or posts which violate our standards on civility, conduct, and spam.” Community Moderation Basics ↩︎