> I have no doubt you have been tricked by a multibillion dollar company to moderate their site in your free time for 0 compensation.
Wrong. Haven't in years. Gave it up because it's thankless work.
> And it doesn't surprise anyone here than you don't work with the community, you just enforce the rules as strictly as you possibly can.
You don't know a thing about where I worked or the rules I enforced. You're swinging blindly in an attempt to bruise my ego. It will not work.
> I'm sorry your life has divulged into trying to flex the insignificant "power" you unknowingly sacrificed your free time for on any mere user who dare break an online community rule around THE FussyZeus.
I don't regret a thing. It wasn't about being above other people, it was about making sure the community at large had the best experience possible because every dingle who came along and thought the rules didn't apply to them harmed that experience.
I enjoyed the communities I moderated. I still do, though I don't moderate anymore. This attitude is precisely why I quit after decades of doing it. Everyone wants moderation but nobody wants moderators. Everybody wants content policed, controlled, and curated but everybody hates the people who do it. Everyone wants the community rules enforced but not against them, their friends, or the people they like in the community.
I did it for a long time, and if my feedback is to believed, I did a damn good job. But I never once got a thank you until I announced I was leaving. Every day I worked through an inbox full of abuse, insults, mud slinging, questioning of my masculinity, my sexual orientation, my race, my gender, much like what you've done right here: dismissing me as some loser who has nothing better to do, who is powerless and so sought out a role that gave me power.
I think people are a little frustrated with your replies in this thread because it seems like you're pushing back hard against even relatively mild criticisms of Apple's behavior like "they should at least be clear about the reasons for the suspension." Assuming Rambo's describing what's happened here correctly, Apple isn't even being clear about whether the account is suspended at all, they're just saying "we'll look into it and get back to you," and then failing to do so.
When you had to take a moderation action against someone, you didn't just lock them out of their account with no explanation as to why and ignore any request for clarification, right?
> When you had to take a moderation action against someone, you didn't just lock them out of their account with no explanation as to why and ignore any request for clarification, right?
We did that all the time, for the reasons I've outlined above. If I consider all the years I spent working on this sort of stuff, I could count on two hands the number of people who, when confronted with clear and unambiguous proof that they had broken rules, simply owned it and left it at that. And I was never policing something even remotely approaching something the size of the Apple developer community.
Yes, I could've explained it to each other person. I could've exchanged a number of emails back and forth, trying to make them understand. But I come back to the simple problem that 99% of people will never interact with moderation staff of any kind, because they follow rules. They don't bend them, they don't look for loopholes, they don't push envelopes. They're fine. We'll never talk. That 1% however, we talk all the time because they're constantly pushing buttons, trying wording, looking for exceptions, looking for ways to get around things.
Why? I don't know. It seems to be just a thing humans like doing. And after you've entered your roughly 500th conversation with someone who knows they got busted and doesn't want to own up to it, or wants it excused, or wants to plead ignorance or whatever, it just all starts to sound the same. The same excuses, the same pleas, the same insults.
I was always open to check something out that another mod had done. Review is never a bad thing, and sure, we reversed a few. And other mods I'm sure reviewed me all the time, too. But again, the vast, vast majority of situations were just people who broke rules they disagreed with. And once we verify that, you go in the bin. Further discussion is not warranted.
I didn't suggest you had to "exchange a number of emails back and forth"; I suppose I've never been in any community that I'm aware of where users were banned without even a simple "You were banned because [fill in reason]" message. I haven't moderated any community like that before, either, and I've been a moderator in several communities over the past few years. (To clarify, by "few years" I mean "about twenty.")
In any case, we're not talking about a community forum, we're talking about an account that's necessary for Rambo's business. I suppose you may sincerely believe that it would be absolutely fine if your employer or your bank or the sole source of a component that you need for a business suddenly stopped doing business with you and didn't bother to ever explain why. But I hope you understand why a lot of us think that's maybe not the best possible approach.
Sure, maybe everyone is an ungrateful SOB who doesn't appreciate you. Or, maybe you personally are a very unpleasant person to have in any position of power, and that's why moderation was so very unpleasant for you that you quit. I don't need to know much about you to know which alternative is more likely.
