Beehaw Support

I just joined, so I can't really speak too much about all of this from a point of experience on beehaw itself. It does seem like a lot of though has been put in this document which I do very much appreciate. In fact, it is one of the things that drove me to sign up for beehaw out of many other instances.

I do have plenty of experience moderating on "that other platform people are plenty mad at these days". And I would like to share a few things for your consideration, if that is alright? To be clear, nothing in my comment below is intended as judgment on your current approach and philosophy. These are mostly (tangibly) related things I wrote down or bookmarked over the years that might be useful or relevant for your consideration.

As far as hate speech goes, there are indeed roughly the two approaches you outlined. Although I do think it often falls in between. I'd like to caution against the most egregious types of hate speech. I very much don't think you'd leave those up, but I do like to share this story from a bartender [nsfw warning due to Spanish civil war poster with dead child] about this sort of thing.

On Community-Based Moderation I do want to caution for something called the "the fluff principle"

"The Fluff Principle: on a user-voted news site, the links that are easiest to judge will take over unless you take specific measures to prevent it." Source: Article by Paul Graham

What this means is basically the following, say you have two submissions:

1. An article - takes a few minutes to judge.
2. An image - takes a few seconds to judge.

So in the time that it takes person A to read and judge he article person B, C, D, E and F already saw the image and made their judgement. So basically images will rise to the top not because they are more popular, but simply because it takes less time to vote on them so they gather votes faster.

This unfortunately also applies to various types of unsavory/bigoted speech. In fact, I believe I remember reading that beehaw did de-federate from some other instances due to problems coming from them. So it seems you are aware of the principle, if only due to experience.

tl;dr Some waffling about moderation and me generally appreciating that thought is being put into it on this platform :)