This comes up surprisingly often, but this comment chain in the recent AMA prompted me to start a general discussion to maybe put this discussion to rest.
The only other place I’m aware that this has been discussed in detail is this pull request from 2023, which the creator ultimately closed.
What I’m ultimately in favour of, and what actually gets requested (one, two, three), is letting mods edit the metadata around a post. Things like the NSFW toggle, or post tags in 1.0.
But I’m throwing this out to the floor. What, if anything, do you think mods should be able to change about a user’s content?
No, why? That is an utterly stupid idea. No-one should be able to edit some else’s posts. Even more: posts should be audit-proof.
If a post contains content that is not allowed, the post should be deleted, that’s it.
OK, but what about content that is allowed, but has certain restrictions, like needs to be tagged NSFW. The current workflow to get this changed is: A mod comments under a pot telling the creator to tag it NSFW -> Remove the post -> wait for the creator to edit the post -> restore the post. This seems needlessly complicated and labour intensive, no?
It does seem like something that could be fixed with better automated tooling, but should it be?
For tagging it isn’t the post data that needs to be changed, but it’s metadata, which seems more reasonable for mods to be able to change. I’m not familiar enough with Lemmy to know if that distinction exists under the hood.