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Lemmy Moderators @lemmy.world
Ace T'Ken @lemmy.ca

Banning Spree?

I tend to browse /All and by New on Lemmy. I went to respond on a thread on [email protected] to thank someone for a recipe that looked good, and found out I had been banned.

Odd, considering I hadn't posted to that sub at any point in the past. I checked the modlog to find that "Mod" had banned a bunch of people citing "Rule 5."

Their Rule 5 states: Bad-faith carnist rhetoric & anti-veganism are not allowed, as this is not a space to debate the merits of veganism. Anyone is welcome here, however, and so good-faith efforts to ask questions about veganism may be given their own weekly stickied post in the future (see current stickied discussion).

I (and hundreds of others) seemingly broke rule 5 of this community without ever posting there. What is going on?

And my apologies if this isn't the place for this, but I had no idea where else to post the question.

155 comments

  • I've never posted in that sub either, but I was banned today, and the only possible explanation is that it was for downvoting. A lot of their posts are self-righteous and needlessly confrontational, so I've downvoted a lot of their memes when they wind up in my feed, but I've never commented on any of them.

    This moderator isn't trying to remove hostile comments or stop rule violations; they're trying to artificially lower the number of downvotes their content gets to make the community look less unpopular. You can actually sort posts by recent and see how the percentage of downvotes suddenly dropped off after the ban spree. This is a blatant attempt to manufacture consent for their community by gaming the system.

  • For a community that just tries to exist peacefully and gets brigaded by “jerks” all the time, they sure are weirdly fixated on becoming the centre of attention every single week.

    You should not feed the troll, but it’s too fascinating not to look at it. Like a pack of chimpanzees flinging their doodoo at the glass walls.

    • They could make the community private. They could keep rabbits as pets. They have made veganism their entire identity, a pseude-religion, and they have a pathological need for validation. Anyone who questions their absolute moral superiority challenges that identity so they seal themselves up in a hermetically sealed, idea tight echo bunker where only supportive ideas are allowed and only validating up votes are tolerated.

      They, of course, feel quite free to spread their extremism to discussions outside of the echo bunker, they just don't tolerate other ideas in the echo bunker.

      • You can tell this is a good faith criticism by how it simultaneously criticizes them for not making the community private and for being an "echo bunker."

  • This post may be relevant: https://slrpnk.net/post/11069853, i.e. perhaps one of those mods is using this same bot. So yeah, you seriously and literally might have been banned bc of a couple of downvotes in some totally unrelated community!?!? As that post says:

    even a single downvoted comment could result in a ban.

    e.g. I just found out that I've been banned from a community that I've literally never heard about, on an instance I rarely visit, as a result of this bot. Though I never got a message about it, nor does the modlog give a length of time for it? (Nor can I even see the ban in several different modlogs on instances other than Lemmy.World - so there may be issues with federating this action? The community seems to be new, created in the last month, and filled with a deluge of posts from the same few people - so very likely nobody from my instances has subscribed to it yet, and perhaps that caused the ban for it to also not be propagated? I dunno. It's odd to not see a length of time for it though - does it look different to someone who has an account on Lemmy.World, like with an expiration that somehow wouldn't show for someone not logged in?)

    And even there, aside from how that post calls us "jerks", and the community too (thereby exposing hypocrisy - bc everyone that they don't like are labeled as "jerks", while they rise above us all, by their own way of thinking...bc they are never downvoted?) it seems to be malfunctioning, bc I most definitely don't have more downvotes than upvotes, either overall or it mentions over the past month - not that we are even allowed to see those? Perhaps it is counting per-community somehow? I do have this comment in [email protected] that people seemed to dislike greatly. Probably I was too serious, in a community dedicated to shitposting? :-P And now therefore I banned from this community that I, and probably mostly all of us, have never so much as heard of?

    Summary: some children are attempting to play around with what they seem to think is AI, and are now weaponizing downvoting in an attempt to cheap out on modding effort. Not only that, but they are using my data without my consent, or apparently much thought into it at all. And to top it all off, they call anyone they want to as "jerks" - bc obviously anyone who ever receives downvotes, even once, even on a single comment, in an entirely unrelated community, qualifies for that label, don't you agree? /s I think you should form your own opinion though, as to who may be acting like jerks here:-).

    Edit: the bot post has a spoiler tag at at the end, but with nothing inside except a horizontal line? i.e., they don't seem very experienced with markup, and presumably therefore with actual coding as well?

    Edit 2: omg reading through those comments - it just keeps getting better and better! Especially how readily they take to criticism, but this comment also caught my eye:

    Some people were getting banned just because of a single downvote from one of the admins, applied to a reasonable comment, outweighed the whole community’s consensus.

    Wow, just wow. The author also did not seem to care about the load this will put onto the instance servers, to be federating hundreds or thousands of community bans, and then lifting them, and then reapplying them again later, however often this bot will be ran. More to the point, modlogs seem like they will become no longer human-readable? (unless perhaps you could filter out all actions taken by these bot accounts - which I can't see how to do) As such, I wonder if this will be treated by other instance admins as an attack against the Fediverse? What would the limit be, I can only guess - 100 community bans per account per day? 1k? 10k? We might soon find out, whether we want to or not!?

    • If they're indeed using this bot or something similar the amount of idiocy goes up the roof.

      The bot author outright says that the bot is experimental. Automatic bans are stupid and silly. Using votes as grounds for banning is something that should be done only to address vote manipulation, or something damn serious. And it should never be done based on a single vote, but on voting patterns.

      And they're showing the exact same lack of transparency as a certain instance, except that instead of "rule 1 and 2" it's "rule 5".

      • They don't even see the contradiction: that in an attempt to fight the fascists (as they say in the post I linked), they have become ones themselves.

        Also, I don't mind if they user block me using such a bot - that is simply curating their own feed (I may not think highly of their choice, but at least I agree that it would be their choice) - but to ban me from some place, and more importantly make a note in my modlog to that effect, is something else entirely. It's the difference between choosing not to have an abortion for oneSELF, vs. making that determination for someone ELSE to not be allowed to have an abortion.

        And then telling that person what you think about the situation, at whatever frequency that bot is run, essentially spamming the Fediverse with your own speech, in an attempt to silence someone else's (in your community... except that unless you are an instance admin - in which case you don't need to resort to this type of implementation - you don't "own" any community, even if you started it, i.e. there are still instance rules that need to be followed, and anyway you certainly don't own the modlogs of every person across the entire Fediverse!?!!?!).

        If I were the author of this bot, setting aside how I never would have made such in the first place, the best solution now would be to throw it away entirely, as it is far too broken to be fixed with mere tweaking, like minimum of five comments rather than one. Even then, that account might end up being banned from several instances, for "vote manipulation", and it even puts the instances that allow users to run it at risk of being defederated as well, eventually if that becomes a pattern and the admins are unresponsive to deal with it, for violation of the rules of the Fediverse, especially spamming. These are like constant advertisements of "I don't like this other person, and want them to only have access to separate but equal communities away from me", which is... not ideal but basically their private thoughts, not something that needs to fill up the modlogs of a large fraction of people across the entire Fediverse, especially mostly innocent people getting caught up in too wide of a net, and making the modlogs of those thus affected no longer human readable.

    • This is such a bad idea. Voting already achieves what they are doing - increasing the visibility of "good" content and minimizing the visibility of "bad" content through crowd sourcing. 1) Banning people for using that system is seriously off base, and 2) turning that system into outright bans from interacting at all is way too far.

      This is an automatic system to rigidly create and maintain echo chambers. Really hoping this doesn't spread.

      *Also also - administering bans based on how and where people interact with content, even as mild as up or down voting, is a dangerous choice. Utilizing a purity test of who's allowed to interact where isn't going to make Lemmy a better place.

      • The author of the bot has already been challenged. It looks like (although I'm no admin so I cannot confirm) they simply downvoted that dissenting opinion, responding with derision (this we all of us can read since it's public, note no /s tag either, though sarcasm heavily layered on), and proceeded to do whatever they wanted regardless of consent, by anyone.

        i.e. they aren't simply turning away applications to join a community, that's 100% within their rights, although even that would be more than a little weird to scrape through every single downvote from every community across the entire Fediverse in order to make that determination. But even so, at least the applicant would be asking for it (hopefully with appropriate informed consent). Instead, they seem to be proactively judging the entire population present across the entire Fediverse, regardless of whether we've ever so much as even heard of their own community, and then filling up our modlogs with the manifestation of their disapproval. Like okay Karen, I don't need you spamming my (public!) inbox with every thought that crosses your mind, that my post history happens to remind you of! :-P

        I noted elsewhere that this is exactly what Trump supporters have talked about wanting to do, both online but also even irl as in Project 2025. However, the cat is out of the bag - we are not offered the choice to avoid this occurrence altogether, our only choice now is how we will respond to these attacks on the principles of freedom of expression, and also the ability to preserve the modlogs to be human-readable rather than continually polluted with bot actions, taken by every community that we have zero interest in to begin with, until they wormed their way to becoming the center of attention (Karen) with their expressions (Karen) of what they (Karen) seem to think of us, at every given moment that they decide is right for them to divulge that "information".

  • How utterly bizarre and yet entirely predictable based on recent events.

  • The bad: simply downvoting a meme gets you banned

    The good: You didn't have to open your apps filter settings to stop seeing the absurd shit they post

    Funnily enough, their ban spree is self censoring and will end up creating an echo chamber nobody will see.

    I say, tofu and let tofuck it up.

  • I'm moderately offended that I haven't been banned yet. It's giving "the last one picked for kickball" vibes. I want to speak to the fucking manager of c/vegan immediately!

  • Their own irrationality means their feelings on what is "bad-faith carnist rhetoric" depend entirely on their subjective feelings for the day.

    I'm a flexitarian who's morality can actually be defended logically, unlike with vegans.

    But their community, moderate as they see fit, I can't complain.

  • When you're not a vegan and argue against veganism online and the vegans don't want to let you into a vegan space

    • The last time I spoke about veganism whatsoever was over 7 months ago.

      Not to mention that it was specifically in a debate thread dedicated to discussing veganism, nor was I overly negative.

      Was this intended to be a strawman of some kind?

      • So, to be clear, you're saying that you are not a vegan and you did argue against veganism, and are upset that you got kicked from a vegan space, but at the same time, saying that you're not a vegan and argued against veganism and are upset that you got kicked from a vegan space is a "strawman," somehow.

        Are you strawmanning yourself? Wtf are you talking about?

155 comments