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?
I’ve floated an idea before, having “conservative only” posts. Not all of them, but allowing posters to tag their posts and I’d moderate accordingly. But that goes against what I’m trying to do here.
Maybe in the future I’ll revisit it, but for now, I’m going to leave it.
It’s also what makes Reddit’s r/conservative effectively an echo chamber.
Honestly a big part of why this community/set of communities is interesting is because I’ve never seen the start of a conservative internet community before. I know the end result (r/conservative echo chamber), and I have no doubt that if this place becomes more poplar it will end up becoming a proper echo chamber as well.
But how yall get to that point is interesting.