[leibwiht]

The title of this is extremely amusing to me because I've only ever thought of online moderators as basically the lowest form of life, almost exclusively petty tyrants and ego-tripping jerks who try to flatter and ingratiate the people above them and are heavy-handed despots to anyone beneath them. Their role as "gatekeeper of ability to communicate with people via the medium under their control" is typically done by encoding their adolescent morality into policy and silencing anyone who goes against the grain or threatens their social standing.

It's actually gotten me thinking a lot about distributed moderation. Wouldn't it be better if access to any particular medium of communication (a forum, an IRC channel, a mastodon server) was federated? Democratized moderation would mean that people could then subscribe to whichever style of moderation they prefer, and people with unpopular styles of moderation (e.g. "ban everything I don't like", the style of the vast majority of forum moderators) would cease having so much power over mediums of communication.

[tabletiptop]

Speaking as someone who moderated a torrent site forum in my teens, there's unfortunately so much truth in what you said in that first paragraph. Especially the part about adolescent morality as policy.

[Tharkun]

I was exactly the kind of petty, bordering on tyrannical, moderator back when I was a teenager. I moderated a website with an active community of over 10000 teenagers. This was a big deal in the 1990s. It quickly went to my pubescent, hormone-fueled teenage head. But it ended up being a valuable experience. In terms of being confronted with my own 'dark side', and in terms of learning how to deal with people.

[boomboomsubban]

The power hungry moderators you describe certainly exist, but they are generally just the loudest not actually near the majority. Most moderators deal with general internet bullshit as quickly ad possible while trying to avoid making more work for themselves.