I’m moderating a handful of communities, and I’ve done so on Reddit for a long while as well.
It’s generally not a good practice to stop people from discussing how things are run. If the criticism is unfounded, the mods or users can reply with why. If the criticism is valid, then it’s a good way to improve the community. What people don’t like is when mods use their power to remove criticism
Some cases where it might be ok to remove the posts might be
- the user is posting in bad faith and breaking some other rule (ex. complaints about the removal of rule breaking content, or if content in the meta post is hateful, etc.)
- the subreddit has very strict post format rules. In this case, there should be some other way to talk about the issues, such as regular meta threads or a separate meta community
In this case, I don’t think removing the post helped much. It was a low stakes discussion and the movie/TV communities on here are already very small.
It might be nice now if the mod leaves a comment about why the other post was removed, and what they’d suggest instead
Enkers@sh.itjust.works 9 months ago
That seems to me like an incredibly bad policy decision, in general. If there are legitimate meta/moderation issues, it’s important to be able to address them in a proactive manner. Banning that sort of discussion outright is going to lead to problems in the long run, as you’ll be making a pressure cooker with no outlet.
If there’s maybe a concern that meta content might displace other content, you could always designate a specific day for meta discussions.
jordanlund@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Well, there are two fields of thought on moderation…
One is that it should be invisible. It happens, but nobody knows how or why. Like pruning a garden… You never see it happening, you just know the end result is beautiful.
I’m in 100% the polar opposite camp in that I believe in transparency. If some post or comment is bad enough to remove, everyone is going to know why. If something is reported for bullshit reasons, I’ll keep it, and tell everyone why they can stop reporting it.
This paints a target on my back and I’ve picked up stalkers because of that who then go on to post meta posts attacking me or the other mods, which then causes them to get permanently banned because other mods and site admins a) don’t have time for that kind of crap and b) have an entire back channel for communication where we share notes on users who are abusing the system, making sure they get banned.
Blaze@lemm.ee 9 months ago
Seems reasonable