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15 hours agoIts pretty bleak job listings, yeah. I have been lucky to work on some global audience feel-good projects in my life. The power structures and how harmful they are aren’t so different from the other jobs though. Workplace harrassment, stagnating wages, office politics… its been there for decades.
The orgs in question have also fully embraced AI and seeing how much its tearing apart my lifes work, the cumulative good we’ve done… with garbage results, that harm people, is heart-breaking.
This is a way for white people to abuse power dynamics and harm marginalized people.
Moderation is a skill and requires experience, more than most moderators have. It’s ideally a paid role that people have to compensate them for the difficult work they do.
The mentality that its free or non-skilled work is due to tech companies being terrible role models for morality, worker equity, and justice. You cannot imitate these systems to succeed, they are based in bottomless pits of money that they use to squash human rights violations.
Judges in court systems are ideally well trained and experienced in the law. Its a paid gig and prone to being terribly abused.
When some instance that wants mutual aid posts to disappear gets a “judge” to do this would you tell the disabled person on your instance that they cannot ask their community for help? Where would you tell them to go when the people who make the most impact are cut off? Would they be banned for that? What choices to people harmed by “judges” have when they are targeted unfairly?
The amount of overhead managing moderation on one instance can be difficult, but sifting through decisions made by a bunch of anonymous “judges” sounds like an utterly depraved torture chamber. In the end the choice would be whether the instance agrees with the (unqualified, unvetted, unpaid) “judge’s decision” which ultimately brings this back to where we are now.