mod recruitment thread
Dissatisfied with the quality of content moderation on leftypol? Well here is your chance to be part of the solution!
Our volunteer trust and safety team is the invisible backbone of leftypol. They keep the topics organized and the community safe and free from spam, as well as remove content that could result in legal action against the site. They regulate user access and curate discussion in order to encourage prosocial conduct as well as facilitate the production of edifying and entertaining user generated content.
Depending upon your interests, there are many paths on which your leftypol staff journey could take you in the future, including organizational development and growth, information technology, administration, and much more.
Leftypol is a modocracy, meaning a democracy of the volunteer moderators. By becoming a member of the staff, you will not only play a critical role in maintaining a very unique digital space, you will also get a chance to make substantive contributions to our site in the future, including policy, governance, and technical direction.
To apply, join the linked element room and ask for an interview. What are you waiting for, become part of the moderation team today!
Instructions:
Join the leftypol waiting room here:
https://matrix.to/#/#leftypol-antechamber:matrix.orgOr, if you have already been admitted to the leftypol element/matrix chat, then
feel free message me or @ me directly, @cyberbarbarian:matrix.org or another mod.
If I or another mod/admin sees you, you will be invited at some point to an interview room in which you will be vetted. Please be prepared to answer questions and provide an example post so we can look through your post history. This may be a time consuming process as many mods are not available in all time zones. Please be patient. We look forward to seeing you as a future member of /leftypol/ staff!
>>35673It's really not, it's fairly chill though there are obviously the usual issues of organisational dynamics.
>>35674This part is true, but if you're gonna browse the site anyway why not have the power to also delete spam and so on?
>>35677How many mods have left in those three years and publicly decried the mod team as being toxic while doing so?
Everyone who has tried to make real changes to the site, as you suggest people will have the opportunity to do in that video, has ended up resigning in frustration. The dictatorial and stubborn nature of certain individuals in the mod team is a common complaint.
>>35683Can we get a history of these votes with their results?
I want to see how regularly a vote is held, if there's only two per year that doesn't count for much. And for all I know these votes could just be a rubber stamp for policies already decided on.
>>35685Well if all the votes are passed unanimously for instance that suggests there isn't actually a democracy, but only a facade of one.
Or say is a dispute about a user being banned escalated to a vote or is the boss's word final on such a matter?
>>35691>bourgeois democracy isn't real democracyspoken like a true retarded lib lmfao
<existing democracy doesnt meet the arbitrary requirements of the democracy in my headliteral idealist nonsense that causes libtards to be obsessed with even some fucking niche website having to be democratic holy lol
>>35695Exclusive, backchannel access to the hot pockets HQ. Flavors you didn't even know existed lie in there.
>>35684Voting as a method usually happens in bursts, doing stuff like renovations on the site or approving new features or what have you. It's unusual for votes to fail, but thats most often because things are workshopped until enough people are on board to actually pass it - voting is more a method of making everyone collaborate with the due process in this way. Votes which would "fail" and don't get any better consensus from workshopping are usually just dropped instead - there is no benefit for failing a vote, and you might have the conditions to better make the case for it later. Plus, forming in-groups and out-groups of reliable voter support for specific agendas or ideas is just a recipe for internal factionalism, so we try to avoid that kind of thing as a principle.
Bans and stuff are usually handled more informally instead. Usually it's just that mod + 2 other active mods to agree to remove a ban off of someone (ofc obviously exmpting stuff like bans made in error or accepting appeals for short bans or minor offenses, which anyone can do).
>>35697Which
tl;dr, the voting system is not run as a bourgeois democracy with parties and agendas but as a generally consensus democracy where its pretty common for people to modify their initial proposals to get a majority support.
>>35708why would you organize like this instead of having a read-only board where only staff can post
it's a rhetoric question, that would be too transparent for people that only really care about psy-op'ing their own user base
>>35710>>35713You know what, this is now an official FOIA request to the /leftypol/ mod team. I would like an audit of all the votes and their results dating back to 2021, including the way each mod voted if you don't use secret ballots.
If you had just posted the vote results when they took place this wouldn't be such an undertaking. You should probably start doing that from now on.
>>35720do you understand what
<read-only board where only staff can postmeans? it is not about participation but transparency. the problem is that most conversations can't be public because they love antagonizing the user base. so whatever was made public would be just a front for the actual private conversation. it is the fractal of internet discourse where there is no incentive be open or honest
I guess you want me to say that I don't actually care about the site because ultimately I can just close the tab and post somewhere else, and you are correct
>>35715>>35721What you are suggesting actually used to exist on a board called /assembly/. You may be able to find archives of it somewhere.
It was a read-only board where a thread was made with a proposal, and each mod would make a post in the thread voting either for or against the proposal with their name and mod tag on. It worked well and I have no idea why they got rid of it and moved the whole system to private matrix chatrooms. That's the question you should be asking.
>>35727you are taking the bait from a guy posting t roosevelt quotes about how "doers" should ignore criticism
>>35726>I don't care about water or electricitybecause your political consciousness has been neutered by liberal democracy. is it that you don't care, or that you have essentially no say in it anyways so you have convinced yourself you don't actually care? why wouldn't you care about having water and electricity? this is like when housewives would tell the suffragists that they didn't care about politics, it's cope for an internalized castration
a website is different because you can live without it, it's just a website
>>35731Yea, i thought it was around that time, imaybe it was bunkerchan times though thinking of it.
>>35736Isn't that just a list of report messages?
Well, i guess not because they have line breaks but i think it's a mix of verbatim reports and additional commentary through the mod.
>>35701It's not a hard requirement, just a very easy way to prove you are a community member in "good standing" so to speak, otherwise you'll need some other means of proving you are active in leftypol somehow. People who had no real post history for using TOR / VPNs have been made mods before if they can reasonably prove their history prior, though.
>>35704I don't think we've really actively cataloged them, plenty have 404'd in /assembly/ (which ofc no longer exists) and there have been different matrix chats we used for the task, which generally aren't archived either. Most aren't long-term binding decisions which aren't enshrined in one document or another though, so it was never really seen as relevant to keep the Grand Voot Document.
>>357110 engagement with the votes, same reason why any flavor of "user democracy" is just a pipedream. 99% of the users just want the site to function for the most part, and the 1% that do care usually care enough to become mods anyways. The minority that don't are just eternal malcontents which there is no point in trying to please anyways. Most mod talks happened in the matrix chats already anyways, so we just rebased them all there for ease of discussion.
>>35747read
>>35721do all mods struggle with reading comprehension?
>>1957276 (whoops)It is very easy to block all VPNs since most VPNs are registered in big IP registeries as being from VPNs (in fact that's usually how we tell that a user is using a VPN), all that would need to be done is to create a script to check every post's IP at point of posting against one such database and not let it post if it is a VPN. But, there basically is no reason to do it - handfuls of mentally ill anons running around shitting and farting with a VPN don't really meaningfully affect site function, since we have plenty of ways of mass-deleting posts which don't rely on IPs to begin with. Bans are just useful for stopping or slowing down bad content, removing the viability of bad content ultimately supersedes all (especially since /leftypol/ loves to take the bait).
>>35749Imho chans as a format are dying, but once 4chan goes (and it shall go) then all other chans will have a bit of a bounceback from nostalgia. If /leftypol/ can survive that long, I think we'll have a lasting niche as a small but interesting little chan community. We just need to keep up a continuity of community and the institutions of moderation until that point, however possible.
>>35750Fair enough, while I find it unlikely, it's something. And something is better than nothing.
>and it shall goIt's a household name and they rarely disappear.
Unique IPs: 25