The thing which bugs me with modern centralised social media is that moderation is woefully under staffed.
People are impressed "wow facebook has 20k moderators that's huge!" But they have over 2 Billion users!
That's one moderator for every 100k users.
Imagine being on a forum where one person has to moderate 100000 users! It would be terrible.
They get around it by setting content guidelines to help moderate without context or being involved in the community they moderate.
Which is not a healthy way to mod communities where standards for polite conversation are very different between communities.
One persons polite hate speech, filled with unoticed dog whistles, is seen as okay. The victims swear laden retort gets them suspended.
This is why it is important moderators are involved in the communities they moderate to know when someome is being 'politely harassed'.
It's this environment that let sealioning becoming so effective. Allowing mods to wash their hands of people asking many offensive qs politely.
(liked for clear explanation, not for phenomena described happening, the phenomena have been getting leveraged by a lot of awful shitbags of late, even on the AP fed at times)
it ends up with unclear community expectations and a dilution of what the rules actually meab
@ada ... This is exactly the same problem as police patrolling in cruisers instead of on foot. (leaving aside all the other problems with both social macromedia and police forces)