I’m still a mod in my city local subreddit.

One of the other mods is also involved in a Whatsapp group which, over time, has evolved to a quite active community, with subgroups dedicated to several topics to help people settling in the city (housing, finance, parenting, etc.)

The Whatsapp group has recently requested to add a link to their website in the subreddit sidebar. One of the WhatsApp group admins is also part a mod of the sub, and brought the topic in the mod chat.

One of the oldest mods (which isn’t even modding that much these days, it’s mostly another one single person, poor them btw) replied with the statement in the title.

Seems so weird to me to want to gatekeep the FAQ of a subreddit that much. The objective is to help newcomers to the city integrate, why make it difficult to have all pointers in the same place?

In addition, this is probably the kind of reactions you’ll get when trying to talk about a Lemmy community on a subreddit.

  • j4k3@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    27 days ago

    I don’t care for proprietary platforms and supporting them, but a good mod is always an invisible mod. My personal opinions are irrelevant as a mod. Mods are community janitors in service to said community. If the community moves in the direction of another source or platform and a mod stands in the way of that, the mod is the problem that should be addressed and removed. It is one of reddit’s and link aggregators’ biggest flaws. There is a massive blind spot where the membership and momentum of established communities are neglected as irrelevant, with “start a new community” as the only effective solution to bad root mods. Admin do not seem like a very effective governance system for the nuances involved in specific niche communities, but I am quite naïve about the activities of admin on various platforms like reddit. In my experience they were absent when a terrible mod violated reddit’s terms of service.