@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.
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> 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.