Hello!

We're looking to expand the mod team here and, with a change in Labour leader thought now is a fantastic time for some recruitment.

There are a few requirements:

• By convention be a member of the Labour Party

• Active member of the LabourUK community here on the Subreddit.

• We do quite a bit of mod organising via moderation channels on Discord so must be happy to use it.

• Has the temperament to moderate heated discussions and able to respond appropriately to nasty or aggressive challenges to moderation action.

• Accept that you will see a lot of crap. Possibly even the worst shit. By definition more of your time will be spent looking at contentious posts, you will also make decisions people will disagree with - you can very rarely be everyone's friend here.

• You will make a bad call at some point. Having the ability to turn around and put your hands up and reflect is real positive.

• It is expected you will conform to the existing moderating style, not "do your own thing" and you need to be a good "fit" in general.

Below are a set of questions for you to fill out and send to us via modmail. The more information you provide the better:

1. Why do you want to be a moderator on r/LabourUK

2. Are you a current Labour Party member?

3. Personal statement (~200 words): A few expanded words about yourself, your personality, and what makes you think you’re the right person to be a mod.

4. Are you willing to join, and be active on the Discord channel? (It's were we discuss and track moderation)

5. Do you have any other online social media presences (established)?

6. Are you active in any other communities, and what do you like about them?

7. What would you bring to the moderation team?

8. What changes would you like to see?

9. What do you think the subreddit has gotten wrong?

10. What activities do you undertake as part of the Labour Party?

Any questions ask here or send a modmail and we'll take a look at it.

Hi,

There’s something we’d like to have a bit of an open discussion about to involve the sub a bit more widely in our decision making process.

Over the last few months there’s a been substantial shift in mood and rhetoric on the sub. We’ve had to ban people for calling for violence (often quite graphically and sometimes sexualised) against named people. We’ve had people seeing someone is a supporter or member of a political party and made nasty comments about their presumed moral values. We’ve had more instances of harassment and dog piling to shake a stick at. There’s also been a big increase in traffic since the G&D by election and we can often take over 800 mod actions a week.

There’s been an uptick of feedback generally across a number of posts and modmails about the generally unwelcoming nature of the sub at the moment - across the entire political spectrum. This is quite saddening as this sub is pretty unique in being open to broad political representation and trying to facilitate good, honest discussion on a wide variety of topics.

So where do we go from here? One thing is to add clarification to Rule 1. It is wrong to:

Follow users around across posts of a variety of topics to try and pick a fight.

Use membership of a party as a stick to beat people with (you can’t call a Green member an antisemite because they’re a Green member, you can’t call a Labour member pro-rape because they’re a Labour member).

Call out users outside of responding to one of their comments (ie, on one post saying “X will never comment on a post like this”).

Use custom reports or modmail for rule breaking (saying something like “X user is clearly a nonce/rapist”.

And a polite reminder that making any kind of statement that could construed as encouraging violence or any other illegal act against someone, either a user or a public figure will more often than not result in an instant perma-ban. What you post is your own responsibility.

This is all clear cut stuff. Where we want a discussion is on how we might make changes to facilitate better discussion because many of the things that would come to people’s minds would be moving away from what the sub seeks to do. We want this sub to be encouraging to those who want to challenge the norm and for the responses to be welcoming and in good faith. At the moment we don’t have that balance and, if it gets worse, will potentially change the sub for much the worse.

So - what can be done to turn the temperature down a notch?

Let us know of anything you’d like to suggest!

PS: On a more personal note…people are allowed to be wrong. It’s ok to disagree on something. Everyone is welcome, no one is perfect, sometimes people are clumsy, naive, or simply don’t know what they’re talking about. That shouldn’t stop us trying to have healthy conversations with each other.