Just another quick one, as I ran across it, but there are some people, quite a few in my opinion, who just have no business being in charge of anything. Ever. This is especially true of online public forums. We’ll get into the details below the fold, but if you can’t keep your personal opinions out of your moderation, sod off.

I think this ought to be pretty clear to most people, but online moderation, voluntary as it is, is often really terrible. People pushing their own agendas, regardless of the subject matter of the group or the forum they are moderating. Those people need to step down.

Unfortunately, you get to the point where the lunatics are running the asylum and it’s difficult, if not impossible, to remain. Mostly, I don’t. I just walk away. As Blade once said, some motherfuckers are always trying to ice skate uphill. What’s the point if the people with any “power” won’t let you speak, for reasons all their own?

One of the first times, “recently”, that I ran into this was over on Reddit’s r/atheism. It’s pretty well known that if you aren’t a 14-year old hard-core lefty, you’ve got no reason to want to be there. The entire moderation staff is all dyed-in-the-wool Trump haters and if you say anything that they can interpret as “anti-progressive”, you’ll get banned so fast your head will spin. It doesn’t matter how true what you say is, or if it’s against the stated rules, you’re gone if you make them feel bad. I wound up getting bounced, probably 7-8 years ago now, when I answered a question, something about feminism or abortion, something like that, with full attributions and links to evidence, and the mods decided “he isn’t one of us so we don’t want him here!”

I know it’s still going on because people complain about it all the time. In fact, there are other subreddits that have been started, solely to make actual conversations possible without the absurd biases of the moderation team. That’s one place I’m never going back to.

Now there’s another. Over on Facebook, in an entirely unrelated group, the owner and sole moderator is kind of a dick. He’s incredibly opinionated and what he likes goes and what he dislikes… well, it doesn’t stick around. Yesterday, someone asked a question about the writer’s and actor’s strikes and I answered, saying I am not remotely impressed by either and why should I want them to come back if they’re just going to be writing the same kind of crap that they were before they went on strike?

The mod didn’t like that. It’s not against any rules, but he took personal offense to it, like he does with tons of other things, and my post got deleted. The funny thing is, lots of people responded before he nuked the post and all of them agreed with me. So now, my post isn’t there and lots of people saying I’m right are.

I just gave up. I unsubscribed from the group and am not going back. It wasn’t a big deal regardless, there wasn’t a lot of worthwhile conversations going on, mostly because I think people are afraid of the mod going off on them. If I’ve got to worry about censorship, I’m not  going to bother.

These people have no business at all being in charge of channel or forum business. These are the immature idiots that most of us roll our eyes at and wish would just go away. If you can’t be dispassionate and step away from your feelings, you shouldn’t hold the job. You’re just making it worse for everyone else if you do.