Yeah, I remember when “Plant ID And Discussion” was formed, it was pretty much because people wanted to talk more about the plants posted on Plant ID and the mods wouldn’t let them. The Plant ID group was so massive that the only way to ensure everyone got their IDs was to limit comments to a single comment per ID, with others using the “like” button to agree, and then close the comments when a consensus seemed to be reached. It works really well, and you don’t have endless discussion on “popular” posts constantly kicking them back to the top and burying the new ID requests. But of course when some people have their comments deleted, they take it personally and start yelling about censorship and authoritarianism and invoking Godwin’s Law, and eventually it was decided to make a second less-efficient but more discussion-focused group to send people to who wanted to have discussions about the plants.
To anyone who hasn’t been a mod on one of these groups, it can seem that rules like these are needlessly harsh and strict, but honestly trying to keep 10k+ users on-topic and following guidelines can be like herding cats. For every nicely-curated discussion of ID features in a big FB group, there are probably a half dozen off-topic or guideline-violating comments that have been removed. I’ve found that if the commentors just shrug it off and move on when they get a comment removed, they’re usually not banned, but if they make a big deal out of it and keep arguing with the mods, they just ban them because the mods don’t have time to repeat the same argument over and over again with everyone who feels slighted.
I have no idea about the specific interaction or group that inspired this post, but if it was as simple as one single post saying “iNat suggests that…” * INSTA-BAN *, that seems harsh. But you never know what’s been going on in the group behind the scenes. I remember for a while so many people were commenting in one of the bug ID groups with “I know what that is; it’s a POKEMON! :D :D” that it was clogging up everyone’s workflow. We got so sick of deleting the useless Pokemon comments that we invoked a “mention Pokemon, get insta-kicked” rule. Same with people trying to be funny by IDing everything creepy-looking as a “NOPE” for a while or commenting “kill it with fire” on every single wasp post. It didn’t look like a major problem, because we kept up with the deletions, but if there hadn’t been such aggressive mod-ing, the groups would have been buried in these comments. I can imagine if I were still a mod on there, the number of guideline-violating “I uploaded it to an app that told me it’s this” comments might have reached such a critical mass that we’d just be mass-deleting them and banning anyone that complained in an attempt to maintain our sanity. Not saying it’s necessarily the a good solution, but it’s sometimes the best that can be done when a tiny group of mods are trying to keep a large number of people within a narrow set of guidelines.
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