Remote View

1y ago

Abusive mods with no recourse for the users.

This dude posts a wildly racist meme of Michelle Obama. I report the post. Funnily enough, the racist post is posted by the mod of dankmemes, dankchristianmemes and some other shit hole.

Said mod then starts sending abusive transphobic messages to me. Try to report the user. Nothing happens when I hit the button.

Shit like this is why Lemmy isn't a viable alternative yet. We need to do better and be better.

102 comments

Hello everyone. This is Michelle, one of the Lemmy.world Admins/Moderators.
I want to let you know that if you are reporting a post/comment from a community moderator, please message me and let me know your concern. Especially if it relates to the violation of server rules for hate speech, racism, threats, or calls to violence.
If it’s a Lemmy.world community, they can resolve the report before we have a chance to see it. So please let me know if no action is being taken.
If the community is on another instance, we can see the reports you submit. We can ban and remove the posts/comments from our side.
We have zero tolerance for homophobia, racism, hate speech, bullying, child pornography, and many others that are listed under our server rules.
The moderation tools we currently have are not very robust, but I hope this helps clarify what can be done to escalate issues.
- Can we please defederate from exploding-heads.com? Nothing good comes from there.
  
  Wow, that instance looks like a cesspool.
  
  Noob question: can we, at the individual user-level, block entire instances?
  
  A post on that goofball server says:
  Exploding-Heads.com will go offline August 31st 2023.
  So we won't have to deal with their whiny racist sexist bullshit for long.
  If you're curious an accurate tl;dr of the post that's from is "waah we can't be total shitheads with impunity while also telling everyone else what to do, so we're going to ~~voat~~ nostr where other insufferable brats also go."
- 👏 Amazing 👏, please ban this fisuxcel bigot
- Soooo... I don't see any way to report abusive mod behavior at all here on lemmy - there doesn't even seem to be a way to let the other mods of a given community know about the behavior of one of their mods. I've just been suspended from World News because one of the mods there decided that the term white supremacist counts as a perjorative.

Lemmy and Kbin have both seen a huge influx of people in the past few weeks, so admins of each instance are struggling to keep up. For the most part, the admins are working for free, in addition to whatever their day jobs are.
Having said that, I'd report those magazines / communities to the admin of the instance for action, understanding that right now, they're buried in requests, questions, and complaints. If the issue is an entire instance, well, defederation is an option.
FWIW, I was threatened on Reddit more than once with actual murder... people threatening to come to my house and kill me. Reddit's general response was to... delete the chat message in question as a "resolution" to my complaint. AFAIK, that was the extent of their action. I at least have the impression that abusive users will be removed, though it might take a bit given the incredible influx of new users.
I am sorry that they're harassing you though. Noting to block those magazines / communities.
- A homophobe told me that he'd rather die than respect everyone's right to be safe and unabused in public. I told him I didn't believe him, why doesn't he show us. I got permabanned, he's still spreading hate.
  
  Yeah unfortunately social media thrieves on spreading hate
  
  Lovely 😐
- @isimp4tedcruz
  Yeah, as @melpone says it will just take time for admins to respond if you message them directly. I know Lemmy.world doesn’t tolerate people like this. This is from the lemmy/mastodon.world Code of Conduct:
  Provide a friendly, safe, and welcoming environment for everyone regardless of gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, disability, personal appearance, body size, race, ethnicity, age, religion, nationality, political affiliation, or other similar characteristic.
  
  Instances generally need more moderators but I understand the need to screen for good / bad candidates too. We also need a way to communicate bad actors across instances easily, which does not yet seem to be a thing. Maybe I'm wrong though; I'm not moderating anything.
  
  Talking about you @Fisuxcel
- FWIW, I was threatened on Reddit more than once with actual murder... people threatening to come to my house and kill me. Reddit's general response was to... delete the chat message in question as a "resolution" to my complaint. AFAIK, that was the extent of their action. I at least have the impression that abusive users will be removed, though it might take a bit given the incredible influx of new users.
  This is horrible, why do people think they can say this shit? I hope you reported this to the police? I'm pretty much most places this behaviour is illegal. It's not a good look for Reddit to be complacent with illegal activity on their site.
  Edit: massive typos
  
  It's all good! Not that the guy would have had an easy time finding me; I'm not inclined to share my "real life" info online and I rarely use the same username / contact info on more than one site. Heck, as I note... I'm probably just an incredibly advanced AI anyway. Bleep bloop.
  
  They think they can say this shit because they obviously can. There are no consequences.
  
  I had a similar experience, but their response was better. I had been talking on a certain sub for months (an illness support sub...) and there was one user who was prominently abrasive. Actually an odd mixture of acting tough mixed with seeming very sensitive, so I suppose basically a bully. We didn't get along great. He liked giving factually incorrect advice mixed with telling us all we were "weak pussies" for being concerned about illness. I don't remember all the details, but at some point he started blatantly using alternate accounts to support his viewpoints and harass people. I called him out on that and he was angry about it, and started saying things like "I'll be in Portland next week, maybe I'll come pay you a little visit" and "you'd better watch for me, I'll be seeing you soon". Reddit admins did remove his main account along with the 2-3 others he was using.

That guy is on exploding-heads.com which is full of alt right chuds so I'm not surprised.
- Lemmy and Kbin sites need to implement basic block lists... the terrible mastodon/akoma/pleroma/friendica sites all need to be banned here too or they will make your day bad.
  
  And here-in lies the downfall of Lemmy. Federation can't be an automatic thing. Communities need to be vetted before their content becomes visible on other instances. The Federation concept will work, but not the way it's currently designed.
- That instance seems to be a breeding ground of nutters.

We can't pretend this is just a Lemmy issue. But I agree with your sentiment.
- Isn't the recourse to ask the instance admin to intervene?
  
  Yup. Except the report button goes nowhere.
- I agree. Discord has been dealing with these for a long time while the servers have to have entire free or paid mod teams to deal with these trolls from under the bridges... taking tolls...

Things you can do in increasing order of broadness (and difficulty):
Block the user.
Block the communities.
Report the PMs if they are against the rules of the user's instance. The admin of the instance should see the report and take action.
Contact the admins of the communities' instance(s) if this is against those instances' rules/moderation policies. (As far as I know there is no way to report a whole community yet). The admin of the instance(s) should see your messages and take action.
Contact the admins of your instance if this is against your instance's federation or remote content policy. They may ban the community and user at an instance level, or even defederate from that instance that allows the abuse.
Move to a different instance. If you want admins that will take action on these issues you likely want to be on some other instance that is more proactive when it comes to moderation. Some people give beehaw shit for being aggressively moderated and defederated, but this is exactly the sort of thing they are fighting against.
Run your own instance and block that user/community/instance from an instance level. If all else fails you can have full control and would be able to take all of the "admin" actions I mention above.
In my opinion the ability to do all of these actions is why Lemmy is the most viable alternative I've seen. You are more in-control of your destiny and experience on this platform than anywhere else I've seen.
If you need help with doing any of what I mentioned don't hesitate to ask.
- I did the first 3 steps and the deafening silence told me all I needed to know. The admin of the community is the harasser. Instance admin did not act of the report(s). Lemmy is too new and I have no real affection for it, so moving to another instance in the hopes that new admins will finally do something is not even on the table. Running my own instance sounds as appealing as running my own email server for all of the same reasons.
  I appreciate your attempt at help, but very few users are going to jump through that many hoops for something that should just happen.
  
  But even having the ability to do these things speaks volumes. With lemmy you actually have the option do to do all these things, and yeah they take effort for the amount of control you want. Limiting yourself like that is limiting your own freedoms yourself in exchange for convenience. Im actually considering running my own instance just for fun.

The racist transphobes can now be seen from Lemmy. Nature is healing.
PS: They aren't welcome.
- How does seeing racists and transphobes equal nature is healing?

What you'd want to do now is reach out directly to the admin of the instance.
- Have you taken a peek into that cesspit? Good luck
  
  I'm actually looking at the user right now and it looks like he's been banned. I understand you may be a bit raw right now but hating on lemmy as a whole and instances because of one person is not a very good look. We're all going through change right now

I got arrased by both users and moderators in reddit, at r/Europe, nada all I got from Reddit admins was autoresponses of "Reported content doesn't constitute a violation of Reddit Rules".
I see Lemmy.world working much better than reddit seeing this post.

That's not cool. You come to my subs. I'll treat your reports right. Bring you a hot towel with a mint and the morning paper.
- Thank you for doing mod work and keeping spaces nice for us. Your hospitality is priceless.
  
  We're not being paid so yeah, priceless is a good description. lol

Try PMing the admin. This is a smaller scale, non profit network, you can't expect moderation to be as fast as in a major platform (yet).
But I'm sure they'll be willing to deal with it.
I think db0 is working on some sort of collective rating for instances, maybe that could be extended to users, but I'm no sure how much good it would do, and if it wouldn't be abused.

Do mods see who report what? Because that means I won't report anything. I stopped reporting on Facebook groups because of that. I stopped reporting on Reddit when Reddit started sending me feedback on my reports.
- Yes and I find it very strange. The few reports I've seen on my communities show who reported, what was reported, and the reason given
  Edit: also as a mod I feel that knowing who reported something isn't necessary? The only thing I can truly think of is so mods can do something about report spam or false reporting, but to me a better solution would be having it hidden to mods, and visible to admins if it needs to be investigated for report abuse/spam/etc.?
  
  Mods are moderating, they should know who reports what. Anonymous reports don't work and lead to abuse.
- Had my first report appear today and it shows who sent it in. It was related to another community though so it was ignored. At least it worked.

Disappointing, I would really like an option to report moderators/people to the instance. As there are people who have broken the rules of the instance and whilst I want to remove them from my community I wouldn't mind being able to forward complaints of a user to the instance admins so they can ban them from the entire instance should they need too. There have been a few that break the rules of Lemmy.World and deserve an instance wide ban.

This is kinda tangential, but this is what happens when you don't have dedicated mods with robust tools.
As much as reddit hated mods, and despite there being shitty mods, without moderation, things fall apart because people suck.
When mods suck too, you have to hope admins don't. When admins suck, you're screwed.
- And when the mods suck, and the admins suck along with the CEO, you have Reddit.

We have had one report from our community on a pride post and the admin Michelle got to it before I could within 20 minutes and banned the user from the instance. They are doing things about the reports.

He’s been banned

I can't tell which instance they're on, but if you report something to admins, it's reported to your local server admin. If they're on a different server, the absolute best your admin can do is contact the other user's admin to forward the report and block the instance. The more likely outcome is that they block the other user from your server.
I don't know how responsive the admin of LW is, but it seems to be a site that's prioritizing growth and "openness", but, as far as I'm concerned, the real value of this space is in smaller servers and smaller communities, with federation just giving access to occasional trips to "big city" sites. Smaller sites usually have more responsive admins and are quicker to cut off bad actors because they care more about community health than unlimited growth and access.

Thank you for letting us know who and what spaces to avoid/block but sorry you were left without help.. Although I see an admin answered to you. I hope action has been taken, on any shape or form.

I got banned from all of reddit for 3 days because i reported a post that broke a rule, few hours later that post was removed for braking such rule, so i got banned for helping
- Ayyyyyy me too!
  "We agree that this post broke the rules, but could you STOP MAKING US DO OUR DAMN JOB FOR ONE GDAMN WEEK"

This is why huge instances are not a good idea, the shitstain will likely be booted out when the overworked admins get to the complaint but will take time, if the instance was smaller it would have been done already but big instances need lots of work
- Just need more moderators and admins, takes time to build that infrastructure.
  In the mean time every non-insane person creating content will help drown that garbage out until the infrastructure is in place.

Aaron Swartz died for this.

This is disgusting

This is a recourse. You start your own node and block the offending node. Aren't there features that let you block individual users?
- Should I set up my own smtp server too? What about dns?
  
  This is the biggest problem the fediverse has. Because it was set up by people who live/are good at IT it’s just assumed that everyone is. It’s open source; don’t like something, just code your own version! Unfortunately, that will lock out around 98% of all users and we (Lemmy/kbin) will just be some backwater circkejerk of interests which overlap with programming as a hobby.
  I think the mods are currently drinking from a firehose and, if we want to be part of the solution, the best thing we as users can do is be patient and thick skinned until the assholes are brought under control. That really could mean just abandoning a big server like Lemmy.world for something quieter like sopuli.xyz or a defederated instance like beehaw.
  There is no karma here, moving to a new server and deleting the old server account should be viewed as a tactical win. If you want to get in the mud and pursue the troll in their own instance, make an account there and plug in your angry keyboard. If you just want to find a place to be comfortable, find it and stonewall that asshole. You’re not really losing any reputation or, one will presume, friend base since you’ll probably subscribe to the nicer communities using the same public username when you move instances.
  I wish you all the best.

Calm down first of all. This isn't reddit where you can assume 100 devs are working on the code. It's a few poor sods who do this in their free time and suddenly became popular.
Do you think your side project (if you have one) is ready for 100k people to use or critique? Settle down, grab a tea, report the bug or upvote the existing one, and move on to happier things. Then grab a pint and let it all blow over.
- It's been a week. I let them have their opportunity to deal with this user.

Lemmy isn’t a viable alternative
To what?
You went to a website owned by racists, and after you wrote to them complaining, they refuse to take the racist content off their website. You could be talking about CNN right now.

102 comments