To be clear, not talking about this community, obviously 😛.
What’s the point of writing down rules, if mods just do what they want? But I suppose that’s the risk you take when you call someone a liar in a small community; they might be a mod.
Edit: I’m not trying to say that mods suck, they perform a useful and often thankless job. Just that it can be difficult for small communities to get a healthy number of good mods, which can become a problem.
There are potentially 3 different groups of people that may ban you for a comment. If you break a community rule, a moderator may ban you as you would expect from reddit. However, since reports also notify the admins of the community instance and the admins of the instance of the reporter, you may end up banned by an admin if they believe you are breaking an instance rule.
The modlog is great for transparency, but lemmy should also make it clear what group has banned you and why. I haven’t been banned before so I’m not sure what that process looks like currently though.
This is my first time. I’m not even sure where to find the modlog in jebora.
And yeah, notifying me that an action has been taken against me and the reason for that action would help me understand that I’ve done something wrong, what it was, and how to modify my behavior.
A ttrpg called .dungeon got a remaster recently and I keep coming back to one of the screenshots on the store page, because I’m such a big fan of the rules for community moderation it enumerated:
#5 is the worst rule there. I’ve been called that for the most milquetoast of statements. You really have to be more specific. This community sounds like an annoying pain to be a part of tbh, I don’t have time to feel like I’m stepping on glass every day
If you have to step on glass to not side with genocide and oppression then that sounds like a you issue.
A prime example of the vitriol he’s talking about!
A lot of moderated instances with vague rules like that have quite a bit of nuance. The mods usually arent jerks looking to ban everyone who doesnt agree with them, and if they are then they did you a favor good riddance. One of the issues with the classic “but mah free speech” sea lioning that occurs on reddit is it makes it hard to actually keep things moderated and civil. People get outraged and start going “the rule says that Im not allowed to be an asshole, but I was specifically being a asshat and I think if you really wanted no asshats you should make a rule about it”
Which does lead to granular rules that actually do remove nuance and discretion from enforcement.
It’s true, I have zero chill.
Clearly you have no sense for nuance. Not everything anyone disagrees with is siding with genocide and oppression just because they disagree. It’s concerning that that’s immediately what you assumed.
Nuance nonces on their way to defend nazi war criminals.
I really need to make that a bot.
Stop lickin boots then
Nothing says “well-moderated community” quite like vague, easy-to-bend rules!
Nothing says bootlicking by applying the same bad-faith thinking you accuse others of having without caring about the fact that humanity has had to operate on good faith the entire time it’s existed.
Define “bootlicking” please.
Antidisestablishmentarianism. That’s functionally what it is.
That should be in the rules instead of “bootlicking,” then. Well-defined rules make it harder to enforce them unfairly. The fewer questions the community has to ask about guidelines, the easier it is to follow them.
Thank you for answering in good faith, by the way.
I probably should’ve clarified its the last few that I felt were relevant to this post. I understand it sucks when you feel like anything you say may get you banned due to someone else’s interpretations, but in practice I don’t think it really becomes an issue.
Perhaps be a bit more careful when first joining a community as you learn how the community tends to act and behave, and where the lines tend to be drawn, but then after that you should have a general sense of what’s allowed, and if you do go over the line the mods are much more likely to just give a warning instead of a ban if you’re a regular.
You must absorb and commit to full integration of the hive mind before you can commit!
I mean hey, by all means if you think a community is too hive mind-y or echo chamber-y then by all means don’t join. That’s the beauty of small highly customized communities - it can be moderated in a way all the members agree with, and anyone who doesn’t like it can find or found a different one.
I don’t know what exactly you’re imagining such a community would disallow, but I feel like whatever it is, I’d agree with it being disallowed. Disagreeing with someone is typically fine in most communities I’ve seen, it’s just hate speech or any -ism or -phobes that aren’t. And that’s fine.
I like that! For more minor infractions that aren’t a perma-ban, I hope that they explain to the person THAT they got banned, and WHY.
It also helps that they said upfront that they’re liberal with bans, rather than saying that all bans are forewarned and then simply not giving the warning.
Yay! The whole Reddit experience, but without warning…
meh if you’re being a shit starting nazi fuckwit I’m all for just banning and moving on.
Reddit bans you for calling out the shit starting nazi fuckwits.
yup. another good reason to never visit that filthy spezpool
First they came for…
the nazis and we were cool with that cause fuck nazi’s
The Nazis? That’s fine, I don’t mind them coming for the Nazis, because then the Nazis can’t come for everyone else.
They in this case being the fucking nazis, who first came for the trans people, and then the communists, the socialists, the trade unionists, Jewish people, etc
My main account got a temp ban for 14 days, the first 3 days I just thought Lemmy is broken, again. My feed was lost, but “all” worked.
A notice or a simple warning would be nice the next time.
Yup, I got a 30 day ban & still don’t know why. Someone must’ve just gotten butthurt lol. I’m probably gonna make the same mistake again ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Simply browse to your instance, go to moderations-log search your username and you find the reason.
I get the feeling you’re speaking from experience
Lol perhaps 😅
It was a small community dedicated to shit talking another community, neither of which I was part of. A few posts showed up in my feed and one had a take I thought was kinda unreasonable, so I commented. I had a nice discussion with one community member, but OP came in hot. After a half-hearted effort to try to defuse, and being blatantly lied to in a few replies, I just told him he was a conniving liar.
A few days later I tried to comment on a different post, but I was banned.
Not a big deal, I’m not invested in either community, but it made me think of the struggles growing Lenny from these small nascent communities, into more more mature communities.
Your honor, the prosecution is sullying the defendant’s reputation
Your honor, the prosecution just hit me with a whip
It happens on Lemmy all the time. I’ve been shadowbanned at least three times, all on the bigger instances.
I really, really suspect that the big Lemmy instances are being run by Reddit admins or spooks or some-such. They’re moderating their instances in the exact same way Reddit did minus the profiteering. The censorship is the exact same.
Also, the fact that it’s possible to shadowban people and the software itself doesn’t circumvent that by auto-messaging you or putting a banner on the top of your screen when you are banned from an instance or community is reason #589238923 why Lemmy fucking sucks ass.
It’s because the most insufferable people from reddit all came over to Lemmy/kbin when they got banned for being exceptionally insufferable.
It really does feel like the more popular instances are nazi bars run by the same kinds of people who made reddit shitty.
I really, really suspect that the big Lemmy instances are being run by Reddit admins or spooks or some-such. They’re moderating their instances in the exact same way Reddit did minus the profiteering. The censorship is the exact same.
It’s just the reality of online content moderation. The good mods/admins are people who are passionate about a topic and want to provide a space for discussion and community building. When it comes to the “power mods” or whatever, like those we saw on reddit who moderated 100+ subs, they’re just in it to stroke their own egos.
Lol it literally just happened again now to another account. Site ban with no explanation. Clearly the way link aggregator sites are structured is just authoritarian and we need to create democratic social media.
Why? Because internet.
A lot of communities dedicated to politics arent dedicated to political discourse.
They mostly are enforced echo chambers. At best.
I’m a real debate lord and it really annoys me when the person I’m being bickering with gets banned. Ruins all the fun.
That is why you have to message them being like “Hey idiot you got banned, anyway let me finish explaining why you’re an idiot”
Being in favor of free speech means allowing the people you hate to talk and say what they want to say too.
Being against free speech is authoritarian.
Eh sometimes. Paradox of tolerance is a real danger.
But it’s good to allow people a chance to grow.
The worst thing you can do is burn bridges with people you disagree with.
The best way to make a bigot not be a bigot anymore is for the people they hate to be friendly to them.
There’s this one black musician that has gotten quite a few grand wizards of the KKK to leave the clan, just by having friendly conversations with them.
Doing that makes them realize that they’re going through the same shit as the people they hate, which then makes them realize that the people they really should be directing their hate toward are billionaires.
Because we’re all getting a lower wage that we should be, we’re all paying a higher interest on debt than we should be, we’re all paying higher rent than we should be. We’re all paying more for our necessities than we should be. And the billionaires’ unbridled narcissistic avarice is why we’re all suffering.
That’s why every media outlet always twists narratives to make people hate each other. If we’re fighting each other, we won’t focus on the real evil that’s looming over all of us.
while I absolutely agree with you in a private setting, in a public setting I believe it does more harm than good to provide a platform for people to preach hate.
Censoring anyone will eventually mean censoring you too.
Being tolerant of the intolerant will eventually mean destroying the tolerant.
You’re not being tolerant by letting people say mean things. You can say different mean things right back to them.
Free speech works both ways.
I disagree. Saying certain things are hate crimes, and shouldn’t be allowed. Like burning crosses, etc.
Deciding where to draw the line is difficult and subjective, but that doesn’t mean that it’s best to have no line.
I got into an argument in the main Technology community a couple weeks or so back and while I admit that it got too heated so that both of us broke the “be excellent to each other” rule, I still feel that an immediate 3-day ban with no warning or notification (I had to check the modlog to find out why I suddenly couldn’t comment there) in a group where I’d never broken the rules before was ridiculous.
Didn’t help any that the mod almost immediately unbanned the other guy who had been equally unexcellent during the exchange and initially got the same ban and left mine in place…
Lemmy world’s admins silently banned me from the entire instance after I said that anticommunism is equivalent to pronazism.
The only reason I knew is because the amount of weird harassing comments I was getting from there suddenly dropped off.
Your opinion is braindead, however, I’ll defend to the death your right to say and have it. Shouldn’t have been banned for that. Shame on them.
Your opinion is braindead
Justify.
Often the mods are arbitrary and inconsistent. Moderation can really suck sometimes
Arbitrary is fine - there’s a reason we have humans do this. But any enforcement of bad rules will always suck.
“Be nice” is a bad rule.
“Be nice” is a recipe for failure, and it always winds up protecting mildly cautious assholes. If you see someone reply ‘so you think [insane garbage unrelated to parent comment]?’ and the accused shoot back ‘shut up,’ and you only remove the person brushing off that troll, your forum is for trolls. That is who you’ve protected. That is what you’ve encouraged. That is how things will go.
If you think the right answer is to always expend great effort peeling apart that disinformation, you do not know what trolling is.
It’s outright insane, in communities about serious topics. If your forum’s about knitting - yeah, you can expect and demand televisable language. The vibe is properly casual. But if you deal with politics then you’re going to get people being called subhuman, and if you don’t come down ten times harder on sneering bigots than their pissed-off victims, you’re not preventing abuse, you’re enabling abuse.
Trying to enumerate all the ways someone could deserve a time-out is a fool’s errand. You can be mercilessly rude with nothing but a thumbs-up emoji. Or “Great Save!” More importantly - some vitriol is justified. Be human, god dammit, and spend thirty seconds figuring out if someone’s being a crank or merely dealing with cranks. If you think there’s never any reason for one user to tell another where to shove it, then you are wrong and you should quit.
Being able to call someone a fucking asshole when they are being one is a valuable thing, especially when they dodge filters in doing so.
I’ve never seen “be respectable” rules that haven’t been in service of protecting nazis, so I always go out of my way to be as thorny as possible.
EVERY single ban i’ve caught so far has always been the result of going against the mods/admins (usually calling them out on their contradictions) or, more often, for being openly antifascist. They’re going to look for an excuse to ban me anyway and if they don’t find one they’ll just make something up, so why bother being nice?
I don’t expend effort trying to be rude, but I rarely bend over backwards to reign in my default blunt tone. Not that gentle honesty seems to matter. I will argue the ethics and efficacy of well-meaning censorship with randos and moderators alike. Some of them are definitely Nazis in disguise. Some of them are not in disguise.
But most simply do not know what trolling is.
It’s like the Twitter generation thinks it means harassment, or vulgarity, or just being mean to people. No: trolling is fucking with people to get an emotional reaction. Sometimes that emotional reaction is extremely justified. Think of any “just a prank, bro” bullshit. That is trolling. That is violating the social contract to laugh at people for having sane responses to your inexcusable behavior. It is being an asshole, as bait, so you can pretend to be shocked, shocked!, and then play the victim while continuing to be an infuriating asshole.
Any moderator who expects polite discourse, and does not create an environment where words matter, is actively making the internet worse. You want an easy time pruning a worthwhile forum? Aim for a cocktail-party atmosphere. Screaming rants no, casual banter yes, tell people to take five if they’re starting shit. But if someone lays out why another user is completely full of shit - you had damn well better come down against being full of shit.
Yes! I didn’t wanna say mods suck. It is an important and often thankless job.
Just that small communities without many mods are at risk of getting a bad apple.
I’ve been shadow-banned from a few subreddits when I was still on the site.
Not. One. Warning.
on r/images or r/gifs or something, I 'and my ax’ed on some random thread. Banned. Thread context? All deleted. No warning, no explanation, and when I asked for feedback I got something like “the ban holds” or something.
Honestly, I’m a dick a lot of the time, but I simply can’t reconcile a ban for “and my ax”. Ban me for the actual stuff I do, sure. A warning would be excellent. But that one bugs me the most as I can’t learn from it.
Public warnings are bullshit, anyway. They post a reply, warning you for saying something you didn’t say, often /u/ mentioning you, then delete the original comment to cover their tracks.
Does Lemmy need political news? This is big shit and news like this is usually just upsetting.
