#Mods should maybe have access to post announcements of some level.

1 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)

sick copper
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I think the current situation around moderation -- which has now spread to my LinkedIn -- could have been handled better if the moderation team was empowered to post messaging of some sort. The lack of announcement and the closing of the reddit thread on /r/Unity3D has led to this blowing up more than I think it had to.

(For those not aware, moderation teams -- almost always volunteers -- don't have as much power in the server because the admins are usually official staff. Moderators are not equipped to handle all issues in a server, and that's when admins are needed)

A big issue here was Unity staff seemingly not being available (let's be fair people, we're days from Christmas) in a decision-making capacity, whereas the mod team reasonably feels this issue is out of their range.

I'll be honest, I'm not really active in this discord community (you'll see me more in some other game-dev discords), so I feel a bit odd making a full post about this in a place that doesn't feel like home-turf. That said, it was suggested in the thread about the recent topic (by one of the active members of this community) that I make a post about it.

I think if the moderation team were able to make a lower-level but public statement of some sort, the top comment on Reddit might have quickly become, "Hey the moderation team put out a statement saying they're not ignoring it. They just need to wait on the admin team to review the situation cause it's not really their thing to handle"

Instead, that information was not readily available to everyone visiting from reddit, and as a result, at the time it closed, the top comment on the reddit thread mentions this discord seeming like a toxic place.

Would everyone have gone and found the announcement? No. People aren't finding the current thread. But then, it's at the bottom of the channels. If there was an easy-to-see #mod-announcements or something, I think that information would have made it to the reddit post.

feral iris
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I saw it on my news feed, if I weren't on vacation I'd have seen this sooner. Hasn't Unity's public image suffered enough? The last thing we need is another news article making this community look bad.

sick copper
# feral iris I saw it on my news feed, if I weren't on vacation I'd have seen this sooner. Ha...

Well, to be clear, while I certainly see areas for improvement, I don't see the handling of this reddit influx as really being something the team here could have avoided.

The way the threads popped up on reddit, were shut down at their peak, and the timing of it all, seems to me to just be a series of unfortunate events. I do think what I'm suggesting could help field things like this in the future, though. It is 2024 and this kind of thing is known to happen.

feral iris
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I didn't see anything about a reddit thread. The article I read was exclusively about the Discord and Unity's response to it.

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The media's been out for blood ever since the runtime license fiasco. I've seen multiple problems regarding Unity that would be a literal non-issue on other platforms blown up into entire articles that land on my feed. At a certain point, moderation should probably realize that treating this like any other space to moderate is not an option.

sick copper
feral iris
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I'm reading through the reddit post now... so many missed opportunities to deescalate the situation. I'm really not sure what to say.

sick copper
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Well again, it seems like the moderation team didn't feel like it was their place, and the admins weren't around. It's not the kind of thing you hope to need a solution for, and I think it was a small blindspot between roles. It's hard for me to in any way claim I would have seen this coming ahead of time to be honest with you.

But, I do think that if we could have gotten "Hey the mods said they can't handle this one, they're gonna let the admins handle it when they're back" would have made a lot of people just... disinterested.

Instead there's no easy-to-find official response and the person is still a moderator, so people are wondering what's going on and the response is anger. That's why I think that -- not the biggest issue here -- but the most solvable one, is that if mods are going to be left in charge of the server without direct admin oversight, they should be left with enough permission and protocol to inform the server of what's going on during those times.