The original post: /r/usenet by /u/stufff on 2024-12-05 02:36:30.

Hey everyone,

Right off the bat, I want to apologize for everything that has happened over the last week or so. I accept personal responsibility for letting things get to the point they did, and I want to talk about what needs to be done to make sure this doesn’t happen again.

How did we get here?

Recent events are the result of an ongoing problem with the moderation of this subreddit, which is that for years there has been one mod taking on the vast majority of responsibilities. For a long time it was /u/brickfrog2 . He did an incredible job, but he quit along with the rest of the mod team over the API changes. I stayed on rather than close the sub or hand it off to some rando, but my reddit use has drastically decreased since the API changes because I do not find it usable on my phone without my old reader (RIP reddit is fun).

For the last year or so since /u/brickfrog2 and everyone else left, /u/flickfreak was the one doing all the work. I would have preferred to hand the head mod position over to him, but he didn’t seem interested and recently quit himself, I assume because the stress and abuse got to be too much.

Most recently, u/AQ97 had the burden dumped on him. As many of you know, u/AQ97 had already taken up the task of handling /r/UsenetInvites , which /u/brickfrog2 also used to handle all by himself, and which neither myself nor /u/flickfreak wanted to deal with. No offense to those who find /r/UsenetInvites to be a valuable resource, but from my PoV it is a toxic cesspool with the one redeeming quality that it keeps most of the sewage from spilling over to here. Moderating that sub means constantly having to deal with entitled assholes who don’t read the rules, and then harass the mod team with insults, threats, illiterate rants, etc. u/AQ97 was a hero for taking it on for as long as he did, and so is u/Toxicity225 for handling it right now (and I encourage him to seek out all the help he needs).

I don’t agree with many of the actions /u/AQ97 took over the past week, and I understand why people are upset, but I would also ask you to look at it from his perspective. He was essentially handed an active dumpster fire, that he didn’t start, and told to handle it on his own, around Black Friday, which is by far the most drama-ridden and contentious time for moderating this subreddit.

From what I’ve been able to piece together, he and some others had a personal conflict on a Discord server he was running (and to be absolutely clear, this subreddit does NOT have an “official” Discord server, and if it is up to me, it never will). If any of you want to run or congregate on a Discord server and talk about Usenet, no one is going to stop you, but please know that anything off-site is a completely separate thing.

I don’t know who was in the right or wrong with the Discord drama, but it apparently put u/AQ97 in a position where he had a conflict of interest as it relates to this sub. What should happen in a situation like that, is a neutral, unbiased, unconflicted mod should step in to handle the issue. There was no one to do that. I want to be perfectly candid here, u/AQ97 tried to reach out to me several times for help before things blew up, and didn’t get a response. The only ways he knew to contact me were through reddit channels that I was not checking due to work and personal life. By the time I saw all of his messages asking for me to step in and help, everything had already gone to shit and he deleted his account.

This was an unfair situation for him to be put in, it was an unfair situation for u/Flickfreak to be in for the last year, and it was an unfair situation for /u/brickfrog2 before him.

It’s also unfair for all of you, who deserve to have:

  • active and fair moderation;
  • some reasonable level of transparency on who your mods are;
  • a clear policy for handling conflicts of interest; and
  • a large enough team to moderate by consensus rather than decree.

The solution is to add more mods

If that sounds familiar to you, it’s because one year ago some unreliable asshole promised to do that, and then didn’t follow through. Every time I tried to add a new mod, I’d get a dozen people telling me that person was a shill for a provider or indexer, or a sockpuppet account of someone else, or a hijacked account that had been purchased from a shady ring of account thieves (this turned out to be true at least once). With /u/flickfreak handling everything himself, it was easier to just let it be and stop trying, which was a “good enough” solution, until it wasn’t. I did encourage him to use his discretion and add more mods, but I assume he faced the same problem I did, it’s hard to know who won’t abuse the position.

So we’re going to add more mods. Some of them might not work out, but I think dealing with that as it comes up is a better solution than doing nothing.

We are still discussing what a reasonable level of vetting/disclosure for a mod position should be. In an ideal world, I would like complete disclosure of real identity and conflicts (among the mod team itself, not the general public). Realistically, I understand some people have serious privacy concerns. I have 17 years worth of embarrassing personal stuff posted on this account, and I wouldn’t really love if some nut printed out the highlights and mailed it to my friends and neighbors. So we are going to work out a reasonable compromise that can filter for shills and conflicts of interest, set some standards for dealing with conflicts of interests that do arise, and we will see what happens.

With that said, I am happy to announce that the newest member of the mod team will be u/Anal_Full_Nelson!