We receive a lot of reports from this community, and we get the impression that the current rules and moderation capabilities aren’t sufficient for a community like this. While things are quieter right now, during periods of activity this community tends to cause unnecessary strain on the lemmy.ca admin team.
Having additional moderators could help with this, as well as having a more comprehensive set of rules. That way, the community’s mod team can go through the queue more quickly and also take action on users that abuse the reports.
For the sake of a productive discussion, please limit comments in this thread to discussions on how to improve this community, without directly pointing to specific users or situations. Ideally, this will also help to develop better rules (think ‘veil of ignorance’).
Sorry beforehand for the wall of text.
My two cents: enforce rationality.
Due to the nature of their content, drama communities tend to attract people who are addicted to feeling outraged, and who feel emotional fulfilment when others validate with their outrage. I’ll call them “outrage addicts”.
They will often get completely irrational, and screech at anyone who dares to highlight the “target” of the outrage (a situation or a person) is not so bad - because they interpret it as “someone is trying to deny my emotional fulfilment, why are they attacking my feelings?”
This exerts selective pressure in the community: outrage addicts will stay, no matter if they get bad interactions or downvotes, since the comm fulfils their emotional need. Everyone else ends leaving, because people hate dumb fucks who screech at you when you highlight cat shit is not as bad of a problem as elephant shit.
In the process, as outrage addicts interact more and more with each other, fuelling each other’s outrage, the comm develops a strong and extreme hivemind, that sounds a lot like “Don’t you dare to condone that piece of shit, by disagreeing with Us”.
(For example, if you highlight that “euthanising a 12yo dog with terminal cancer” is not the same as “killing puppies”, people in a comm like this will screech at you “WHY ARE YOU DEFENDING PUPPY KILLERS?”)
I do not think this community reached this point yet, but the large amount of reports hints this process is underway. And if it is underway, it’ll become worse over time.
Those outrage addicts need to be detected and removed early. And IMO the best way to do so is by their irrationality - because, while “this deserves the hate” is subjective, “this is irrational” is not.
Focus specially on people who are eager to:
This will likely require active monitoring, so you’ll need new moderators consistently checking comments, regardless of reports. Make sure they’re all in the same page, and they personally avoid moderating discussions they’re emotionally invested into.