What they’re talking about here is a blueprint for stamping out individuality.

Or you could have thicker skin and get away with basically zero moderation.

I banned someone for using automated software to flood a group on Gab once. Apart from that we don’t have rules in the New Zealand Gab group. Nobody can tip toe on the edge of rules when there are only about three rules: don’t doxx, don’t threaten violence and don’t post pornography. Someone either does these things or they don’t, there’s really no toe tipping here. The guy we banned did complain - his bot software must have warned him that the posts were failing. He didn’t start a campaign against us.

Sounds like the sewer of the internet. If there’s so much trouble then people need to make private clubs where users have to apply to join and only a handful get in per week. I moderate a couple of groups on Gab and I’ve never banned anyone except people who used automated software to flood the groups. Arguments are actually funny and we don’t stop them. Just because someone’s “hot take” offends someone it doesn’t mean we ban. Even if half the users were offended we wouldn’t ban. We are adults on Gab unlike reddit. I don’t log into Gab looking to moderate and patrol for trouble because it’d make the website less fun for everyone. We aren’t a bunch of sissies but neither are we an image board for pornographers and freaks. I think the problem is reddit and the idiots it attracts. Once people get out of their twenties they will discover other websites and stop using reddit. The problem is that there are always new children being born, then they’re allowed to post online and suddenly the problems you describe appear.

I have an account on Gab and when the website was new, they created a New Zealand group. It had no moderation from about 2019 until 2024. The only problem we had was this one guy who was using software to automate posts all the time. He flooded the group for months (years maybe) until my friend paid for a Pro account and was allowed to become the administrator. We banned the bots and that was it.

We’ve never had to delete anyone’s posts because we aren’t trying to artificially steer conversations or ban people for having the wrong opinion. If someone posted a couple of times a day, strongly disagreeing with us and calling us names, we wouldn’t even bother to ban them. Maybe block on our individual accounts but we can still click to read their posts even if we’re blocking them. Surprisingly, our group is public but we don’t need to moderate it. Not with humans or automation. After the CEO of Gab banned “third world” IP addresses from the website, it pretty much stopped spam. Reddit uses all of this tracking technology to give people a social credit score but Gab just bans third world countries and has people who can take a joke.

The image of the hard-working, burnt-out reddit moderator is a joke to me. If there’s too much moderation needed, it’s probably a control-freak issue or maybe they need to ban certain countries where a significant amount of spam comes from.

Are moderators this lazy?