Mods here, I hope this is cool, I too am a refugee from startrek.website. I don't even care if I get banned from there anymore.

This is nuts, over the last few days there has been a huge uptick in bans, post removals, and god I hate using the term because of the connotation, but censorship.

I picked it up yesterday with a post about how a person had an opinion that Alexander was a better child on the Enterprise than Wesley. Mods removed it in seconds because

That prompted someone else posting a meta thread asking why it was removed, that they were in the process of writing a comment and liked the discussion, but then it was removed out of the blue. That was removed in the mod log because of a "Rule 6 violation". Rule 6 is Keep on topic. Apparently on-topic isn't discussing the community you're in.

This prompted me to ask today in the Quarks channel, (fine, that's their off topic channel) with a post asking what's happening with moderation? Nothing accuasatory, just guys what's happening, why are these things getting removed. Specifically things like these sort of mod removals

Specifically, isn't that what downvoting is for, if comments are bad then why remove the comments, they could just be downvoted.

Then of course Value Subtracted removed my post (without addressing anything of course, it reached 23 upvotes before it was removed) with the super helpful comments

and to top it off a comment before they removed the post

Which, I thought I was actually, by posting a meta post on their subreddit, getting their attention was kind of the point. Other people shared their stories too. Personally, I think they're afraid of knowing that they're not as popular as they think they are.

This is just so disconnected. I've never encounter mods on this much of a powertrip, either here on Lemmy or in my 13 years on Reddit. (Maybe I'm lucky in that). I've never had mods just remove constructive criticism from the feed with snarky comments, and these comments are obviously not just my own, a huge chunk of people are getting annoyed with them.

I've been a mod, I've had a decent following. These mods are not doing that, I think moderation's first rule is that you nurture and listen to your community. Mods absolutely are necessary for things like hate speech, spam, NSFW, and those things, but if you find yourself removing honest content, the problem isn't the users, it's how you built your community. If people want to talk about X even if it's against the rules, then provide them a space to talk about X.

If they want to talk about how they don't like Discovery, well maybe you should let them even if it hurts your feelings.

Thanks for letting me rant all of this, getting this out was cathartic. Value Subtracted, if you stumble on this, go ahead and ban me. Mods are not juvenile, they are not spiteful, they welcome criticism, not have such low self esteem that they have to remove posts about it.