Quadruple moderation is killing Lemmy. It’s a gift to Reddit

There’s a rule about online communities I want people here to understand: the 90-9-1 rule.

Roughly 90% lurk, 9% comment, and 1% create.

When I first got to Lemmy, I had trouble finding enough content I was interested in even commenting on. So I figured: why complain about the lack of content when I can start posting it myself?

That’s why I post so much.

If people don’t post, most Lemmy communities simply don’t have enough creators to sustain themselves. You need posts before lurkers can lurk, commenters can comment, and some of those people eventually become creators themselves.

I’m not posting just to flood Lemmy. I’m trying to help solve one of Lemmy’s biggest problems: not enough content creators.

And frankly, doing that has been a nightmare.

Lemmy has a quadruple-moderation problem

Every active content creator has to survive four layers:

1. Community moderators can remove your posts or ban you from the community.
2. Your home-instance admins can ban your entire account.
3. Receiving-instance admins can block/ban you for everyone on their instance, even though you don’t belong to it.
4. Public moderation history means those decisions follow you. One moderator’s decision can influence another and snowball into more moderation.

For prolific content creators, that’s brutal.

I’ve had multiple accounts banned over one or two posts that somebody didn’t like. Months of posting, comments, engagement and contributions can effectively disappear from a community because of a couple of moderation decisions.

And the more you contribute, the worse the odds become. If you make hundreds or thousands of posts, eventually you’re going to post something that one moderator somewhere doesn’t like.

You don’t need one moderation team to tolerate you. You need multiple independent moderators and admins, across multiple servers, to remain aligned indefinitely.

There’s almost no cost to deleting a creator

This is another major difference from Reddit.

There is generally no financial investment in a Lemmy community’s content. A volunteer moderator can ban someone who contributed months of posts and comments and lose all of that person’s future contributions without losing revenue, salary or investment.

The creator paid the cost in time.

The community loses the content.

The users lose something to read and discuss.

And the moderator who pushed the button may personally lose essentially nothing.

So who benefits from making prolific content creation this difficult?

Because it certainly isn’t Lemmy.

And this creates an enormous attack surface

I genuinely have trouble believing that everyone complaining about prolific posters simply doesn’t understand this dynamic. At some point I have to question whether some of it is deliberate.

If I were Reddit and wanted to undermine a federated competitor, this is exactly where I’d attack it: its content creators.

You don’t need to hack Lemmy. You don’t need to DDoS instances. You don’t need to take anything offline.

Lemmy already provides the mechanism.

Report prolific contributors. Call their posting “spam.” accuse them of being bots. Point moderators toward their public moderation histories. Get one account banned somewhere, then let that decision influence moderators elsewhere.

Eventually the creator gets tired of fighting and leaves.

I’m not claiming I have proof Reddit is doing this. I’m saying Lemmy’s architecture makes this kind of subversion ridiculously easy, and Reddit would be an obvious beneficiary.

Reddit doesn’t have this same federated quadruple-jeopardy problem. You’re primarily dealing with the moderation of the subreddit you’re contributing to.

Lemmy desperately needs more people creating content, yet its moderation structure makes life progressively harder for the people who create the most of it.

At some point we should be asking:

Who actually benefits from that?