Talking to spammy users about not being so spammy anymore? Believe it or not, straight to ban.

Yeah, I started thinking I should talk with them or ban them or something because they would make me look bad. I actually did send them some DMs recommending that they tone it down, without much result. They solved the problem for me though before I had to decide what to do.

Honestly? I think you're right.

With the exception of MBFC bot, every one of these weird disconnects that has arisen between the lemmy.world moderators and the overwhelming majority of the users of lemmy.world, has followed the pattern of "someone is posting propaganda and bullshit, everyone hates it, and the LW moderators are lecturing everyone about how they really need to accept that it's here to stay, because it is allowed, and people who are vocal about having a problem with it are going to get banned." You can see the official mod explanations down below for why this particular (pretty minor TBH) decision was the way it was. The explanations are objectively not true. So what is the actual explanation for the decision?

I've observed on Reddit what happens when clearly bad-faith moderators take over a space to clear the way for it to become a little propaganda home. I think we're observing here the beginnings of that process, where at least some of the mod team is actively working to make a safe space for the propaganda, and they've become ensconced enough to be able to mandate a certain amount of propaganda be part of the space. I actually didn't see Cat's postings as being all that propaganda-y, but there certainly was some amount of it in among the general spam and clutter.

Honestly I think the root of the issue is the whole design where the space is "in the control" of some particular person to do whatever they want with it, and that person has to be a volunteer and so there's always a crushing shortage of people to do it, so it's going to work 100% of the time for someone who wants to put effort into controlling the space to be allowed to have free rein, after a while.

A lot of it seems to be one particular moderator.

Most of the big-name lemmy.world communities have moderation that in my opinion is just kind of clueless, but that might be just a product of having to deal with a neverending flood of hundreds of different issues (not being able to devote any amount of attention to each one of them beyond the most basic possible glance at it.) There is one specific moderator who seems to be consistently at the root of these totally backwards-land decisions though. What the reason for that is, I have no idea.

Lemmy.world has always been the most Reddit-like in terms of operation. Most others are reasonable about spam management.

Lemmy is reddit. Always have been. Including the false superiority complex that somehow comes with both platforms.

How much do I have to bribe the devs to make every lemmy instance refuse any signups named gallowboob?

Quite amusing that Cat deleted their account though. Exactly the sort of behavior you’d expect from someone just innocently posting content, right?

Because an admin threatening to ban you for being too active is surely something that makes you feel warm and welcome there. /s
This is the kind of reductive, uncharitable take you see on the VAC forums on Steam, I'm surprised you're expressing such a baseless bad-faith claim here about said person, not a good look for you.

I'm not surprised they deleted their account upon threatening to be banned for being too active, I would probably do the same thing. Especially with my past experiences with @PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat, he seems like a pompous uptight control freak. Not the kind of person I want having access to my email address and my last known IP logins.

If you don't like me saying any of this about you @PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat you know exactly what to do about it 🔨

I will admit that I was aggressive in calling them out

Dude, you're fine. Full stop.

Lemmy.world is the only instance that does this super-weird moderation philosophy of actively refusing to take action against people who are obviously objectively pissing off the vast majority of people, but then taking action against users who get understandably pissed and react in any way that's "uncivil." It's bizarre and unnatural. They also like to send condescending messages about how we're the weird ones, if we have a problem with it, and they've figured it all out from their higher perspective, and everything they did was right.

Don't let them gaslight you into thinking that it was wrong to be irritated about it. It is better if people speak up about people causing problems. Since the mods are committed to not doing anything about it for some ridiculous reason. IDK, I've ceased trying to understand what's behind it and just don't much participate in lemmy.world anymore. I only even became aware of this situation because I saw reports about spam that was coming from one of my users.

I can be a cockhead sometimes, but neither you or I was being in any way unreasonable anywhere in that thread. You're allowed to have human emotions, including irritation. If you want my conflicted-of-interest opinion.

2. I have seen accounts like this one cycle through instances, and I expect we’ll see a new account begin the same behavior from somewhere else soon enough.

Yeah. Being able to make new anonymous accounts and be as much of a cock as you want until someone's motivated to fix you individually after a long time of you getting the benefit of the doubt, which only solves the problem for a few minutes until you make a new account, is a problem. What the solution is I have no idea.

It was actually removed a short time ago so I guess another mod got a look at things.

I mean this is how it's all supposed to work. I don't think anyone needs to get 100% of the calls correct. They're all volunteers, they're doing an important job, it's not fair to jump down anyone's throat if they make a misjudgement through lack of information or not wanting to spend an hour getting up to speed, or anything.

Most of the reason I sound pissed off about it, above and beyond just a "hey I think someone should take another look at this", is the overall condescending tone of "we never did anything wrong, we know more than you" that accompanies every dogshit moderation decision like a little dollop of frosting on the turd. It seems guaranteed to ensure that they won't learn anything from any given instance where someone did mess up, because they already decided they're a special type of people who are empowered to come down and need to educate all the rest of us.

You're 100% correct that a 15-day ban was too much. For some reason I had thought that wasn't your first ban in news. Vegan and news have similar icons (based on colors and a quick glance). I apologize for that, and unbanned you a day ago.

This fails to at all explain why the block button would not have solved your problem with zero drama.

You’re not a leader in that community? Petition the community and become one. Don’t want to be an agent of change? Join another community. There are so many outlets to getting this user out of your feed that don’t involve you posting comments of negative sentiment like you are some kind of guerilla police force.

Especially with a community as tended toward toxicity and slapfights as this one, I absolutely understand the motivation to preemptively remove threads that veer into the off topic than let them fester, especially if it’s happening a lot.

YDI sorry :( next time I would make a meta thread or just block the offensive user.

The sheer volume of it (again, 58 posts per day) and the sort of indiscriminate nature. I could make a bot that would repost random stuff out of the RSS feeds into other people's communities, that doesn't mean that it's "more content" and good for those communities.

There were also some propaganda sources in there, RT.com among them.

I didn’t tell them to touch grass, that was one of the users that was sort of arguing with them in the comments. My first involvement was the long and serious comment that I quoted last. I’ve been trying to be less of an asshole online, and that message keeping the sarcasm out of it and just being straight with them about what was going on, was a good example.

It wasn’t just that they post a lot, it’s a very spammy collection of articles including some from open propaganda sources like RT.com. My main concern with them was the volume but also the low quality of the posts, but I left it alone as not my business until there was widespread complaining from users coupled with total disregard on their part for what the users were saying about it.

You and The_Picard_Maneuver are completely fine. Usually I like when people post a lot. The only exception is what it’s all low quality or just-to-full-space stuff, which certainly isn’t you.

To give a frame of reference, you and The_Picard_Maneuver both make about 5 posts a day it looks like. This person made over 10 times that many (58 per day average) and people were actively asking them to cool it, and they were sort of snarking back at the people who were making the request. Y’all are fine.

There’s nothing wrong with posting as much as you want, as long as the moderators are willing to accept your posts and don’t reject them.

This is a super weird and authoritarian philosophy.

I get where you're coming from, but imagine "There's nothing wrong with posting Nazi content, as long the moderators are willing to accept your posts et cetera."

See how insane that sounds? The moderators can be wrong. The users can be wrong. Everyone has their judgements, but the idea that it's appropriate for people to become totally passive in the face of whatever the moderators decide, even if it is irritating them or seems wrong, because the space "belongs" to the moderators to do what they want with it, and the users need to leave if they don't like that, is some bullshit.

IDK how this type of thinking crept into the internet. It didn't used to be here.

It might be true, as a practical matter, that the moderators have control over their spaces. That doesn't mean that by definition there is "nothing wrong" with what they are doing with it. That's the whole point of this community here.

Yeah some communities choose different moderation styles (often because of a tendency to fraughtness or sensitivity) and at some point users with different personal preferences in a community just have to deal with it. It’s a temp ban preemptively removing off topic comments, lol, like it’s going to be fine.

If the banned comment had been in an on-topic meta or petition thread, my tune would change immediately.

The reality is it is trivial for me to block one user whose volume of posting I dislike. I cannot trivially block dozens of people who dogpile and start campaigns against that user, swelling threads to become fully off topic and often toxic.