If power corrupts, or power attracts the corrupt, why do we have moderators?

[There are] no stupid questions, but there sure are questions with an obvious axe to grind.

Wonder what he got banned for.
- It's cool that you're in here doing Baby's First Anarchy and all, maybe you should do some reading on how anarchy and decentralized societies actually work and you won't come across so.... Like This?
  But even if I agreed with the facile points you're trying to make in this thread, you're making them in the wrong place. This is a community about learning, and you're here trying to influence people and win an argument. That's not the type of question this community is built for. You are violating Rule 5.
  But I guess if a mod removed your question for a rule violation, that would just be proving your point, am I right?

Because without mods, people tend to be horrible to each other. Just read through the modlogs sometime, it's depressing how unpleasant some people choose to be.

Having moderated for a while, it's surprisingly sad with the kind of stuff we have to remove from even small and low stakes communities
"Unpleasant" is anything that strays outside a very small circle of behavior. Moderation is a force for mediocrity and an energy-suck. And doubly so given the people who seek the job. It's inevitable
- "A very small circle of behaviour" - okay, lol.
  You can hang out in unmoderated areas with people hurling slurs around at each other, personally I enjoy a more civilized experience where people aren't just trolling each other.
  Edit: Ahhhhh, this is a new account. I guess you got banned and are now butthurt and whiny about it. Which tracks.
- You do realise that in the fediverse you don't have to have a mod, right?
  You can:
  run your own instance
  create whatever communities you like there
  have no mods in them
  federate with the rest of us
  No matter how much modding or even defederating any of us did, you would have the complete ability to say whatever you like and even see all our content.
  All we could do is choose whether to interact with you.

I think you're starting from a false premise. "All power corrupts" is a demonstrably untrue maxim.

If it were true we would never have anyone with power over anything. Being the one in charge of taking the cat to the vet would somehow be corrupting.

Because the GIFT corrupts even more, and faster.

Then do it with bots. Bots are uncorruptable or at least perfectly auditable.
- Alright, we'll write a bot that can accurately moderate arbitrary internet content with an acceptably low rate of false negatives and false positives.
  You first.
- bots are only “uncorruptible” in so far as they are built “corrupt” at their very conception
Also, the mods are subject to GIFT too. In all probability even even moreso.
Hello, yes, I think that I would be a great moral authority. I am just the person to tell people what they can and cannot say. That's me to a T.
You don't want that guy in charge in a million years.

Because some of us remember how the internet was without moderators, and how it went to shit early 2000's when "everyone" started using it.

20-25 years ago mods were rarely needed beyond booting a couple of spammers and getting rid of the occasional goatse and tubgirl. Now platform-wide efforts are needed to combat csam and gore.

There has to be an algorithm. A crowdsourced wisdom. Individuals can't be trusted. From spez to the very mods here.
- Whenever I hear someone suggest "an algorithm" without elaborating further, I'm usually correct in presuming that it makes as much sense as "a wizard will use magic". The other times it's usually someone suggesting blockchain. Sometimes it's both.
  Or, hear me out, collaboration across networks. That's what lemmy does. And it's nothing new.
- An algorithm gets programmed... By who? T Its the cover Facebook takes. "Well we didn't mean to radicalized thousands of people, we just had an algorithm feed them addictive and increasingly political videos until they were".
- but there’s no individual mods here …

Too limit the number of people getting PTSD from terrible images.

Just because some hall monitors let their title go to their heads, that doesn't mean they wield power in any meaningful way.

You're confusing petty tyrants and actual tyrants.

They control what I say. That's pretty big.
- They control what I say. That’s pretty big.
  My, but you certainly have an outsized estimation of your own importance, don't you?
  No one is obligated to host what you have to say. You want to get your message out, find somewhere that will or host it yourself.
  Like everyone else.
- They control what I say
  No they don't. They just control whether you get to say it in that particular space.
  Editors at publishing companies don't "control" what I say just because they can choose whether or not to publish my book.
- a minor personal inconvenience is not censorship

Unchecked, unanswerable power corrupts. On lemmy everyone is free to create their own sub. Heck they're free to create their own instance. That makes the "power" of moderators pretty tame.

Compare that to the power a corporate CEO has over the typical employee. Especially since the 1970s and 1980s redefinition of the primary responsibility of the directors of a corporation to be "maximize shareholder value" instead of "maximize stakeholder value."

Even in (small d democratic) politics, at least an aggrieved voter can run to replace a corrupt, abusive politician. Not many companies, probably no publicly traded ones, have a mechanism for the workers to replace the management. That's where major corruption by power can be witnessed.

I don't think that the type of power that a janny has is able to meaningfully corrupt the janny. At least, not in most cases; because it's practically no power, like it or not your online community means nothing in the big picture.

Instead, I think that bad moderators are the result of people with specific moral flaws (entitlement, assumptiveness, irrationality, lack of self-control, context illiteracy) simply showing them as they interact with other people. They'd do it without the janny position, it's just that being a janny increases the harm that those trashy users cause.

Why the alternatives that you mentioned to human moderation do not work:

Bots - content moderation requires understanding what humans convey through language and/or images within a context. Bots do not.
Voting - voting only works when you have crystal clear rules on who's allowed or not to vote, otherwise the community will be subjected to external meddling.

Bots - content moderation requires understanding what humans convey through language and/or images within a context. Bots do not.
so, like. bots are programed by people. all they really do is put a buffer between the actions of a moderator and the (real) moderators.
- The origin (being programmed by people) doesn't matter, what matters are the capabilities. Not even current state-of-art LLMs understand human language on a discursive level, and yet that is necessary if you want to moderate the content produced by human beings.
  (inb4: a few people don't understand it either. Those should not be moderators.)
  all they really do is put a buffer between the actions of a moderator [user? otherwise the sentence doesn't make sense] and the (real) moderators.
  Using them as a buffer would be fine, but sometimes bots are used to replace the actions of human moderators - this is a shitty practice bound to create a lot of false positives (legit content and users being removed) and false negatives (shitty users and content are left alone). Reddit is a good example of that - there's always some fuckhead mod to code automod to remove posts based on individual keywords, and never check the mod logs for false positives.
Nicely rendered. You have given me food for thought.

To quote Dr Cox: "People are bastard coated bastards with bastard filling."

So we elect some people to be chief jerkfaces against all the other miserable sods, then the rest of us pricks have to bully the mods to keep things fair... or unfair in so many directions at once that the scales still balance out. Thus turning our weakness into strength.

Or at least, that's the plan.

The worst are the good in heart, slinging bans and censors for the good of the underprivileged and downtrodden. They suck hairy balls.
- hup, and there it is …

Power corrupts, but that doesn't mean that we don't need positions of power...

Because for anything that is built, someone else will set out to destroy or manipulate it for their own purposes. For example, spammers will use social media to try to boost their SEO and as an avenue for free advertising.

As much as I'd love if everyone could act with the best intentions towards others at all times, there is too much motivation and reward for anti-social actions. As a result, we have to have a complex system of rules and enforcement.

Yes, we need a control. But control by the worst of us is a bad control. And yes, there is a race to the bottom for control here.

I feel like you are close to asking good political science questions. Close. Are you advocating for anarchy? Or communism? No? Just a technocracy that "works"?

A self-reflective hivemind evolving towards moral perfection.
- Then nothing will ever improve or get done, because perfection is a myth that varies from person to person and even at it's base definition (the quality or state of being perfect: such as freedom from fault or defect) is an impossibilty since anything created by man is gonna be as faulty as we are....and for those that choose to follow it, what happens is they become hard procrastinators, because they're setting stupidly high standards for themselves or others that border on impossible to keep.
  There's a reason why saying like "perfection is the enemy of good/ finished" and "aim for good, not perfect" exist.
  Not even gonna touch on morality. That's a whole other can of worms I'm too exhausted to open.