Mods can see followers?

Help me understand this. What moderation reason is there for mods to be able to see followers?

To be clear, I'm very happy with the follow button removal. But why isn't it for everyone? Shouldn't it be?

github.com/ornicar/lila/commit/5b5a712f40044d234d0c76738c172dc14822efa6

@Yeltcki said in #2:
> I think we are not able to see followers anymore because many people are begging for them or doing "follow for follow", but mods don't do this kind of stuff. Why remove it if we know mods are not going to do that? It could be for that reason maybe

Will they?

@Yeltcki said in #2:
> I think we are not able to see followers anymore because many people are begging for them or doing "follow for follow", but mods don't do this kind of stuff. Why remove it if we know mods are not going to do that? It could be for that reason maybe

That makes no sense, and you missed the point completely. Reading comprehension is important for, well, comprehension.

Mods aren't (or rather won't) be able to see followers of somebody with that. They'll only be seeing who somebody is following, the same as everybody can still see for themselves. Though I guess that's a fairly irrelevant difference for moderation. But it means they basically won't be able to see any more information about their own followers than everybody else. This certainly wasn't changed because mods still wanted this feature for themselves or something like that. It's also only for admins, not for all mods.

Not sure about the exact moderation use cases but I can definitely see a few scenarios where it may be useful, for example to get more context for certain DM reports or maybe find related accounts. I guess also finding remaining follow for follow or similar things. Surely not something that's useful all the time but I also don't see why mods shouldn't be able to see it when it's useful sometimes.

@ErinYu said in #1:
But why isn't it for everyone? Shouldn't it be?
>
> github.com/ornicar/lila/commit/5b5a712f40044d234d0c76738c172dc14822efa6

@ErinYu said in #1:
> Help me understand this. What moderation reason is there for mods to be able to see followers?
>
> To be clear, I'm very happy with the follow button removal. But why isn't it for everyone? Shouldn't it be?

If you as a person who thinks they shouldn't have permission can't think of a single reason that you're able to put into words to justify your point-of-view then maybe the programmer was the same as you, and couldn't think of any reason to limit what moderators can do.

@benwerner said in #5:
> Mods aren't (or rather won't) be able to see followers of somebody with that. They'll only be seeing who somebody is following, the same as everybody can still see for themselves. Though I guess that's a fairly irrelevant difference for moderation. But it means they basically won't be able to see any more information about their own followers than everybody else. This certainly wasn't changed because mods still wanted this feature for themselves or something like that. It's also only for admins, not for all mods.
>
> Not sure about the exact moderation use cases but I can definitely see a few scenarios where it may be useful, for example to get more context for DM reports or maybe find related accounts. I guess also finding remaining follow for follow or similar things. Surely not something that's useful all the time but I also don't see why mods shouldn't be able to see it when it's useful sometimes.

Thanks for clarifying the scope of the follow button - my partial misunderstanding, but still concerning to me.

I'm curious what you mean by "mods still wanted this feature for themselves." That would be for moderation and not for personal reasons, right? Not being sure about the exact moderation use cases for the follow button doesn't sound like wanting the button for moderation reasons. Having been an admin for 18 months, I've never used follows for identifying context in reports, and it'd be seriously alarming if admins are using follows to find related accounts.

My guess is that the decision to take down the follow button was made by a small group of devs, or even one person. Then mods didn't like it, complained, and got it back for only themselves. In my own experience there are virtually zero moderation reasons for looking at follows, and if there are reasons, the usefulness would be minimal and even controversial. It looks so much like mods were looking after themselves instead of being community representatives.

I mean, I'm not the person to ask for ways in which features would be used during moderation but I think the fact that it's only the "following" page and only for Admins should make it pretty obvious that it's not "mods looking after themselves". But if you want a specific use case, I think you should know better whom to ask.

Though personally, I do think that hiding the public follower count would have been enough and I guess it's fair to say that there is some ongoing discussion about this. But I probably don't care enough that I'll actually miss it personally.

@ErinYu said in #7:
> Having been an admin for 18 months, I've never used follows for identifying context in reports, and it'd be seriously alarming if admins are using follows to find related accounts.

You not using it doesn't mean it cannot be used to infer context in various cases. Even being an admin, you might have zoned in only some specific types of cases where you didn't find it useful. And why exactly it suddenly becomes "seriously alarming" over all other identifying methods you might have used while being an admin to find related accounts?