So, I saw a report from one of my users. They reported:
https://ponder.cat/post/1594852/1813842
For the reason:
Unreasonable fighting with everyone in every simple post
I think that’s ridiculous, so I talked with them about it. Posting private communications is frowned upon I guess, but long story short, they weren’t receptive. I’ve decided to ban the account.
IMO the general culture on Lemmy is that users are entitled to their free account and everyone needs to be careful and circumspect about limiting that entitlement in any way, but I don’t see it that way. I don’t think it’s a requirement for me to provide hosting space for anyone who wants to use my stuff as a jumping-off point for abuse of Lemmy’s systems, and isn’t apologetic or receptive when I talk with them about not doing that. The fact that it’s in service of harassing FlyingSquid in particular is just icing on the cake, since my perception is that people like to harass him apparently for no legitimate reason at all (with this as an example).
AITA?
Yeah. The combination of near-total anonymity, and a culture of “everyone’s entitled to their free account which takes two seconds to make, and anyone who wants to remove them has to clear every conceivable hurdle of due process and benefit of the doubt” has laid some obvious groundwork for a pretty toxic environment. Then, add to that organized political fuckery and trolling, home-grown organic trolling, genuine sincere political views which are totally insane, and a moderation model which encourages the creation of little fiefdoms of unlimited power, and it’s a wonder that anything good ever happens here.
Personally, I think almost everyone had good intentions, and that’s why it generally works despite all of that. But the question should not be “why is Lemmy so toxic sometimes?” It should be “why is Lemmy ever not toxic given how its systems are constructed? How can we set things up so that the nontoxic majority can hang out with each other without having this bullshit impinge on them quite so frequently?”
I would guess a large part of the answer would be the Rexodus, which gave many of us a sense of a shared purpose and goal. We also were FAR more willing than usual to overlook a great deal of pain, since we knew that what we were coming from had even more in store from us back there, plus we were more hopeful back then that the tools would grow to make things even better. Which to some extent they have, while in other ways we’ve actively gotten worse.
For example Reddit mods are extremely often PTB, yet there is a modlog, and people can continue to post an already-started comment reply to someone, and even make new ones, which allows people to “finish” conversations that were already started, even if the post is no longer visible on the subreddit feed.
In contrast, Lemmy has the modlog, but people do not receive notifications for events, nor is there a way to ask why or advocate - the only realistic option would be a DM, except how do you do that when the modlog simply says “DM”, and often many mods disappear for months (to years) at a time, so really is someone supposed to simply DM all of the entire mod team at once? And then continue that conversation individually, rather than as a team?
This btw is one of the strengths of Discord iirc, where you can see who removed something, and again Reddit might not do that but instead offers far better in the form of the modmail. Our tools here really suck in that regard. Especially bc removed posts don’t say “removed”, but rather “check back later”. I’m not kidding btw - go and look at one, and you’ll see that text!
I’ve heard it said that among people of conscience, rules are hardly necessary. Think: Star Trek TNG or some such. The mere thought that one’s own actions could impact others negatively would generally be sufficient to halt the vast majority of negative behaviors. In contrast, among people lacking that, no set of rules will ever be sufficient. They simply won’t follow them, or will even find ways to abuse them to harm others, remaining just inside the protective barriers themselves while using the rules as a weapon against their opponents to “win” arguments at any cost.
Honestly, I think moderation + modlog + YPTB is a pretty good approximation of justice. It’s okay to hand people a good amount of power, as long as it’s aboveboard what they are doing with it, and people can raise the alarm and in extreme cases avoid the domain where they’re overstepping what they should be doing, if they’re overstepping what they should be doing.
I’ve actually noticed a substantial reduction in how much PTB there is, since this community came into being and became the default place to raise the issue and discuss it publicly if one of the moderators was out of line.
Overall yeah. I mean, even here the reports continue to flood in unabated about the admin practices of e.g. Lemmy.ml, to the point where db0 brought in a second mod to help deal with the drudgery of handling all the drama and mod reports. And people still don’t seem to know about Midwest.social. But this community does still help a lot:-).
Yeah. I feel like people are hip to lemmy.ml at this point, or every so often new people have to learn about it, but it’s fine. People can do weird stuff, as long as it’s generally understood that it’s weird and those are the people doing the weird stuff, and people can form their own reactions to it appropriately as they see fit.
To me, a lot more alarming is the little proliferation of communities on main instances “under the radar” with some of the propaganda accounts as moderators. I haven’t paid enough attention to know if it’s universal, but I know some of them have lemmy.ml-style “ban you for nice things about the Democrats” policies, but they are masquerading as normal politics communities, and getting quite a bit of traction since the last time I checked.
They’re all pretty near the overall front page of all communities on Lemmy. IDK what the answer is to that, but “let them have control of the conversation” doesn’t sound like it.
Weren’t you the one who just said “moderation + modlog + YPTB is a pretty good approximation of justice”? :-) I suppose here you mean that the admins should step in if they wanted to help control that? The first two, on LW, I doubt that they would.
I think it’s impossible to control the entire world. I don’t know what the best solution would be to control only part of it, though I do aim to do as well as I can in my particular corner of it.
Yeah. That’s why I was saying I have no idea what the right answer is. All the possible responses seem bad. I’m just commenting on the situation, my read on it, and my wish that some kind of good solution existed.