This post is going to be about the loss of cultural knowledge/memory about moderation because of the corporations growing enshittification of the Internet and attempts to control and throttle it. I'm going to briefly reference with no names a fediverse meltdown related to modding, and then I'll dig into my own experience with modding.

I'm a researcher, so I'm the one on mod teams that often digs deeply to find resources, knowledge, tips, etc. by other marginalized people on how to best do things or hands-on approaches that worked or didn't work. However, having said this, the big issue I've found is a growing loss in our knowledge and ability to pass on knowledge.

So let's talk about it.

I read through a long thread recently about a recent fediverse meltdown between admins/mods and a user, and do people not realize time stamps are a thing?

Like, the time stamps support the user not the admins/mods. It also revealed how people in positions of power often will go to great lengths to avoid holding themselves accountable. It also revealed yet again the problem of gaps in our moderation knowledge and transmission of said knowledge.

In many ways, corporate media has broken the flow of cultural knowledge of how to moderate safer spaces.

Note I safe "safer" for a reason. Creating a truly "safe" space is very difficult if not near impossible in our current society. However, we can work in solidarity to create *safer* spaces for our most vulnerable people.

To create a *safer* space, we often must make hard decisions, but we also need to approach it from a learning standpoint, a willingness to own our actions, take responsibility for mistakes, document to aid in learning from the mistakes, engage in repair, and do better. We also need to learn from our more vulnerable members, and listen to their needs and find ways to incorporate a safer approach for them. This isn't easy to do for sure.

There's a really great book that digs into ways to build up a safer space. Yes, it's more about the punk scene, but it has some decent tips that can aid in moderating spaces. "Making Spaces Safer" by Shawna Potter.

Honestly, I think mods ought to read the book and have hard discussions about its topics.

Moderation is difficult. I know because I was a mod for Legendfire (before we had to close it in 2017, though we reopened it in 2021) for eight years. I'm going to talk about this experience a bit to illustrate the difficulty in having a group of mods and the gap of cultural memory that hindered our efforts.

In the old version of the site, we had a mod for majority of each sub forum (sometimes a mod would handle two subforums rather than just one, depending on the frequency of use of that subforum.) I handled the highly trafficked Shredder forum -- called that for the thorough word-by-word, line-by-line critiques that are done there -- and the resources forum (highly read but people didn't post as often there).

One of the big issues I found was some of us didn't have a good handle on what moderation meant. I'm a researcher, so I researched what I could on moderation to make sure I could do the role well. I found a lot of good advice on various parts of the web that are now lost to us today - I was searching for stuff in the late 2000s. (So many lost livejournal blogs, MySpace accounts, Facebook groups, Twitter accounts, even fediverse accounts from servers that died). A lot of the knowledge I found back in the day didn't get fully incorporated into the Internet Archive. I can only find bits and pieces of it today.

So at the time I was a mod at Legendfire, I was able to access some of that cultural memory for moderation, many of it written by marginalized people on how to craft Safer spaces.

One of our big issues was privileged people failing to understand the needs of marginalized people in building up a safer space. Despite all the research I did, sometimes privileged people fail to listen to us, who are more marginalized.

Why? Part of that is society socializing us to not trust marginalized people's stories and knowledge, and some people don't realize they are subconsciously doing that. They double-down in the harm. Although they can be ousted from a moderator role, the damage done while they were in that role has a lasting impact, which can take a long time to repair.

Knowing how to engage in repair is not easy either, but it's absolutely required for moderation of communities. We will mess up as human beings as no one is perfect, but we MUST own our mistakes, we must be willing to listen and learn, and we must then do better. That's part of moderation too.

The knowledge of how to handle such situations, by the time this issue escalated in 2017, had started to vanish from the web. It became harder to track down and share, and thus, at the time, we were floundering on how to handle a growing schism on how to handle all of this.

However, at this same time, we were getting swamped with a lot of problematic users, and there was a growing burn out amongst all of us mods and admin. Bad faith actors started to try to take advantage.

I, being the researcher, tried to find resources on identifying and stopping bad faith actors. I also sought resources on burn out, on recovering from burn out and maybe even preventing burn out. That's when I discovered just how bad the growing gap in cultural knowledge was becoming.

Many of the reputable sites that had great advice written by marginalized people? Were missing, broken, or lost. Some of their writings had gone to published books instead, but it would take me a few more years (which wasn't in time to save the old LF) to find those.

At the time, I also was escaping abuse, and my friend had her own struggles. I had just left as a mod due to my health, so I witnessed the end. It was traumatic for the community as a whole. Some of us migrated to Discord and kept in touch, and one day we would rebuild it (in 2021).

We learned a lot from those mistakes and from the problems we faced. We kept receipts and still have most of those documents to help guide the new version, so we could pass on our personal knowledge to the new mods. Modding is improved, but as it always will be, it's a work in progress as we learn, rebuild, try out things, learn from mistakes, and do better.

However, even as we built up a new version of the forum, we realized there was gaps in the cultural knowledge of moderation and the tips folks shared online about it.

Some blogs that had excellent tips were lost or missing. Others existed in small snippets in the Internet Archive. Those that existed on corporate media were lost forever. Some ended up locked up in inaccessible formats, particularly for us disabled users/mods.

This gap made the rebuilding of the site a trifle difficult. Our personal history and documentation helped us rebuild somewhat, but the growing lack of knowledge concerning building up safer spaces was mostly due to the corporate world's enshittification of the web and it's harmful targeting of marginalized voices. Plus, some of the information became inaccessible (sites like Reddit are highly inaccessible spaces to begin with, and when they start blocking APIs, that shuts down access for those of us with disabilities, who already struggle to access information.)

I retell this story to show just how difficult it can be to locate accessible information, to find that cultural memory, and to lean on it in the process of rebuilding a safer space.

Some of the knowledge has reappeared in the form of published books or archived sites (like Potter's book above or in some of the excellent books by writers in the Black Lives Matter movement and in Sins Invalid Disability Justice movements). But other parts of this knowledge, especially some of the hands-on knowledge was effectively lost to the corporation's growing destruction of the web that was.

Now we're being flooded by misinformation and bullshit from the terrible LLMs/AI craze that pumps out randomized crap that makes research even harder. This enshittification also disrupts the passing on of cultural memory/knowledge.

This loss of cultural memory of forum modding holds a heavy toll on folks, especially those somewhat new to this. For those coming from corporate sites that handled the "modding" by outsourcing, they may have little knowledge on best practices, especially for building up safer spaces. Then there's the issue of those that did modding in "groups" on the corporate social media, who may not realize all the behind-the-scenes modding that the corporate site did that bolstered (or hindered) their own. So they often I see folks overwhelmed by how *much* there is to modding when you are building from scratch.

We struggle to share that cultural memory/knowledge and we struggle to keep what we still have alive to pass on to others who may need it.

I don't have a solution to this. I'm only identifying that this is a problem.

I also recognize that some people also see this problem and are trying to gather information to build up various tools to assist. But there's only so much software tools one can build.

In the end, that knowledge of what works for moderation, of prior mistake and what was learned from those, how to do things better -- that cultural memory cannot be built by software. It is built by people.

We must build it together, but that requires listening, requires being honest, requires taking accountability, requires working in collaboration, requires doing repair when needed, requires building in support networks to help avoid burnout because modding can be painfully hard, and requires learning and seeking understanding.

It also means if the evidence shows your actions are fucked up? (Time stamps, people, time stamps)

Then don't go back to edit shit to paint yourself the "good one." Own your actions. Take accountability.

Learn from the mistakes.

Do better.

Collate the knowledge learned into the archive, so we don't lose the cultural memory again.

Anyway, I rambled enough. Hopefully that made sense. Thanks for reading!

#moderation #ThoughtsOnModeration
#BirdRambles