The plain and simple of it is that I’m not a good moderator. I have no idea what I’m doing. I wanted a community where people could post conservative stuff without it getting overwhelmed by lefty stuff, and then you could have discussions/arguments in the comment section. Bring to light stories that wouldn’t normally be seen on lemmy. Since that didn’t exist on lemmy, I had to do it myself.
Right now, there’s a lot of toxicity, some straight up telling people to kill themselves. My whole moderation policy was basically “So long as it isn’t a straight up slur, you could comment it”.
You’d think it’d be simple, just ban those who do that. Well, what about those who defend baby murder? I know lefties genuinely believe it isn’t, but I do. How do you tell what is horrible shit, when lefties act like horror movie monsters?
What about those who I’m like 90% sure are arguing in bad faith? I want to encourage discussions and arguments, and if I’m wrong, what then?
Me doing keyword-based moderating was a bad idea, but I am at a loss of how to do better, without breaking what this sub was supposed to be about.
I need ideas.
How should I moderate this community?
If you don’t want people to brigade your community, make your own instance and defederate.
You can’t have a lemmy community and not expect people sorting by local to come in. I would fully support a ban of this community if it just blindly nabbed most people on the instance for their political beliefs.
I expect brigading, discussions and arguments are half the point of this sub.
But then you have to tolerate being yelled at by people who disagree with you and are in the majority.
No complaints from me, im a liberal who reached this place because I still like to sort by local. If you moderate away dissent, I just don’t think there are enough internet using neo-cons for it to be viable.
Thats pretty much the pattern of conservative discourse - it ends up trying to blend in to plain sight either through a secret clearance level on parlor or through groyped up dogwhistle language. It is because the ideas are deeply unpopular, and will always attract tons of criticism. This might be the place to finally face up to this and engage in a healthy discussion, but there is no version of that where conservatives aren’t outnumbered.
Yeah, it’s something that I’ve come to terms with. I don’t want to ban dissent, won’t ban dissent, and being yelled at by the majority is part of that, unfortunately.