OK peeps, I am seeing a lot of flamewars lately which go off-topic of this comm. I am also getting dozens of reports about people reporting each other for “rudeness” or “trolling”. I don’t want this comm to start becoming a drama haven, so I want to try and prevent people getting worked up like this.
What do you think about me starting to deploy strategic 1-day bans for people who I notice are getting into flamewars? If not, what else do you suggest to help people remain civil?
Don’t just upvote/downvote. I won’t take these into account, I want actual comments about this to better make a decision.
Well, this is drama heaven because it’s for users who aren’t legible to post in fedidrama (because they’re involved themselves) and then they end up here. And IMO the posts kind of set the tone. You often start out with a negative impression after reading the post, and then you’re likely to be negative. And it doesn’t help that other comments are negative or low quality as well… Then it’s super easy to drop what’s left and just shitpost.
I’m not sure if I want to continue reading anyways. It’s several posts a day of people whining about something they brought upon themselves. Often something completely insignificant like one removed post/comment or a one day time-out from shitposting. And half the people don’t listen or get anything, neither does OP, and the commenters just flame about arbitrary things, or attack each other for their strongly held opinions… I’d say a bit more moderation would be worth a try. But don’t listen to me, I’m probably not the target audience of this community.
People love a good circle jerk, this is a genuine fedi content source, and it serves transparency purposes which other social don’t even have…
People who don’t like can just block it.
So unless bad faith behavior like reporting people endlessly is happening why shut down engagement albeit sometimes low quality
It is rather ironic that sub about mod abuse is getting abused
Hmmm
I think you got it down to the exact issue at hand: Do we want moderated communities, or do we want a free speech platform without limits. I would prefer the former, and I think you’re arguing for the latter. That’s kind of fundamentally incompatible. At least on some levels I can’t see how we’d reach an agreement here. There is one way, and you brought it up, and that’s technical means. Have the software separate us into distinct spaces so I don’t have to read low quality posts, hear people whining about stupid things, and I get just tech-related stuff in a tech community, and all other spam and off-topic ramblings get removed.
I’m not really for unmoderated platforms. We’ve seen several attempts at that fail miserably. And we kind of have 4chan for circle-jerks, you could as well just go there. But I’m liberal. I’d like to just peacfully co-exist with people holding different opinions. If that’s possible.
You can have moderated communities without every community having to cater every user. Personally, I think that’s part of the beauty of federation. Some comms & instances can be locked down and heavily moderated to create “safe spaces”, others can encourage open discussion with minimal moderation.
It’s just very hard to agree on the exact amount of moderation, because that’s individual preference. And we’d need to agree on which community has which policy and make it more obvious to the user. I think that’s another issue which gets obvious when browsing this community. A lot of people complain about something getting removed, while the community has clearly stated the rules. So I’d say if we go with that, most posts here are automatically invalid complaints…
My point is just, this is really hard to impossible to implement this. Due to the way things work (as of now), and human nature.
Short bans are like spritzing a cat in the face. It’s Skinnerian conditioning. It works.
Just make sure the behavior you’re conditioning for is the behavior you want. Trolling doesn’t mean “harsh language.” Trolling is the infuriating nonsense that makes reasonable people reach for harsh language. Sometimes, a rude response is entirely deserved.
Trolling doesn’t mean “harsh language.”
… right. that’s incivility.
Trolling is the infuriating nonsense that makes reasonable people reach for harsh language.
what is the criteria when clear incivility is justified?
Fuck civility. “Be nice or die” is a gift to cautious bastards. It’s a formula for bait.
People need the ability to bluntly call horseshit, when faced with horseshit. Polite phrasing of said horseshit makes it worse. It creates the dynamic of bullying, where an honest response to abuse is treated as justification for that abuse.
Demanding that every response should take ten times more effort, all of which will be ignored, is a rule crafted for trolls. If someone can keep going ‘oh so you mean [not what you said]? wow that’s ridiculous and awful and pushes me further right,’ and any sane reply like ‘shut up, troll’ is what gets banned, then the rules favor and protect fffucking obvious trolling. And yet: that’s what too many moderators choose. Spotting rude language is easier. A forum free of blunt responses feels like you’re helping.
But it’s fundamentally not rewarding honesty, accuracy, or actual constructive conversation. It’s pretending that bad faith doesn’t exist.
oh so you mean [not what you said]
this is the definition of bad faith. just report it.
Doesn’t work.
Unsurprisingly, the moderators who basically just Ctrl+F “fuck you” are reliably useless at removing polite abuse. In practice they protect and encourage it. I have been told numerous times, on this site and others, to just use my words and continue arguing with what must surely be a completely reasonable… sneering goblin. Some of those same moderators have chided me for continuing an argument. They don’t know what they want and it’s gonna be your fault. Especially if you say something unforgivable, like: “I’m out.”
we are taking about the moderation of this community, and there is only one mod
I’m talking about moderation in general.
Yup. 100% a perfect tool for the situation.
And I say that as someone that has likely deserved a few of them here and there.
It won’t stop report abuse, but it will reduce the in-thread drama.
Hell, it might reduce drama in general since the serious drama queens are going to get butthurt and not come back.
PTB. I should be allowed to be as mean as I want to whoever I want. But make sure you permanently ban everyone who is mean to me because that’s bad.
My suggestion is to warn the user first, and then if they don’t comply a 3d ban. Because:
- Cooperative users are quick to comply, even without punishment.
- It helps to show other users the limit of what’s considered acceptable in the community.
- When people get really worked up, a single day is not enough.
Trolls are a different can of worms. I think that users who are blatantly trolling should be removed = permabanned; there’s no place for those.
[Replying to myself to avoid editing the above again.]
Ah, I propose an explicit rule for this comm: “off-topic is only tolerated if non-divisive, non-derailing, and in the comments”. That gives people some room to chitchat, but would do a quick work of “ackshyually u don’t have rules against flamewars right”.
Happy cake day!
Thanks!
banning people for reporting seems like a way to discourage reporting.
but banning for flaming and trolling sounds reasonable, especially if it’s a short ban. even a 6 or 12 hour ban might send the right message.
Eh, you’d be amazed how many people use reports to say “I don’t like this, and it’s your problem” instead of it actually being a community rule violation. I don’t moderate any busy lemmy C/s, but I did some high traffic reddit subs, and I’d even say that half of reports were just trying to get a mod to shut down the other person in a slap fight. Then they’re amazed when you shut both parties down lol.
I definitely think that anything more than a one day ban for single reports is way over the line. And I’d prefer warnings with an explanation be the default.
Do it. But please be self-aware and remember that absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Lets not get bogged down in analysis paralysis. Do it, gauge the feedback, adjust, iterate (the beatings will continue until morale improves).
Great feedback! I need to remember this for my communities as well.
Does Lemmy provide a council/consensus type voting system on bans? How do you arbitrate it by yourself on what is or isn’t “rudeness” or “trolling”?
Imo let downvotes and reports sort it out, instead of being proactive, until there is a multi-headed arbitration system in place.
Didn’t know about this community, just read the description to understand its title, and I immediately thought that it was going to be a trolling mess. So my first thinking is that you created a banquet for trolls, and now you’re dealing with the consequences. Do you have the magic mental power to deal with this?
If yes, then I would make it very clear from the beginning in the rules that uncivil discussion will be moderated, that continuous incivility will lead to a 1-day ban and that attempts to bypass the temporary ban will lead to a permanent ban.
Get ready for motivated trolls spending days creating new accounts to harass your authority, or you, after they have been banned.We don’t have a huge troll problem tbh. Mostly people taking things too personally and seriously
deleted by creator
Didn’t know about this community,
How did you find it, All feed?
Yeah, isn’t that the usual way?
It is, just curious why today, this community has been active for a while, and got pretty popular a few months ago with the first vegan drama
I guess this post went higher in my feed that the others at my checking time.
Tiny one-day bans are barely a slap on the wrist, which some people need to help them cool off. The usual caveats apply like perhaps driver a warning first and all of that, but obviously depending on severity you may not want to wait for that to develop further, at which point a quick ban along with explanation should at least, again, allow them the time they need to cool down.
You’d be surprised how seriously people take even a 1-day ban. There’s a lot of ND people in these comms who feel passionately about their position, and you can easily hit someone with RSD or with ASD and get a bad reaction. I try to tread lightly because I know how these peeps can be affected but it cannot always be helped unless people have already internalized you’re not trying to power-tip but to maintain civility.
Yeah that’s a good counterpoint to consider. I think one of the issues is that the only way to implement such is a “ban”, which is kind of a scary word. If it were called a “time-out”, to “cool off”, it could be taken differently, while to call it a “ban” seems so much more serious.
Perhaps a message delivered to them directly, e.g. as a reply, could allow them to see that first rather than just stumble upon the modlog entry later. But I’m not certain how those work: can the recipient still access the community in read-only mode to see that, and is the button to reply greyed out or could they type a long reply but then not be able to deliver it, thereby generating frustration?
And ultimately it’s a juggling act: how to handle the needs of individual new (or old) contributors who want to be free to speak, while also showing consideration for those who may not enjoy what the community becomes whenever the former crowd are allowed free reign to do so.
In Reddit we had similar issues of a community trying to be all things to all people. Post flairs helped a bit, like people could literally filter out those that they did not want (e.g., “yet another Lemmy.ml site-wide ban”). Perhaps you could go the route of offering a megathread, allowing people to post such as comments rather than making full posts? Though it was always an eternal struggle to get people to pay attention to such - like just about every single new post to r/Android was always “which phone should I buy”, even despite the two other posts within the last hour asking the identical question (perhaps mods removed those, in which case the problem was even more intense as those were simply the ones that made it through the cracks).
But whatever you do, please make it clear in the sidebar what the desires are for the community so that people are aware prior to posting. Like right now it reads to me as being receptive to all instances of potential power tripping mods, similar to AITAH.
You have a keen mind. I trust you to find a vision for the community that you are comfortable with, that will be compatible with what can be implemented in Lemmy:-).
Being mean to someone else because of what they said is fine, unless someone threatens someone or is mean because they’re discriminating
I generally allows some of level of hostility, but when it gets to the point of the just trolling and insults I think it’s time to pause
If its just insults, let the community deal with it with downvotes. No need to get ban happy for something like this.
I disagree. Downvotes don’t have any effect and I don’t follow a complete hands off approach
Downvotes affect the algorithm of comments that are displayed. They do have an effect.
I’m not saying to be hands off. Definitely you should ban accounts who post misinformation or racism, for example. But bans for “being mean” is an overstep of your privileges.
My privileges are what I say they are. There’s no natural law on how to run a comm. 😅
It kind of reads like you posted this as a question then accepted no feedback and pushed back on anyone with a different view. Not saying that’s what’s actually happening, it’s only been a few hours, but you’ve responded exclusively negatively in these comments.
The fact is that I haven’t responded to most comments because they make good points. There’s nothing to argue against good points. I’m not going to go around saying “good point” to everyone
I dont like the idea of banning people for speach that isnt calling for actionable violence.
U could just delete the whole comment thread (from point of off topic onward) for reason “off topic” and that would solve almost everything.
Im not sure how reporting works never done it and nobody has reported anything on the community i mod. But i can see that people would abuse it it an attempt to silence their opposition. I think bans for clearly bad faith reports is fair.
U think people should at least be warned prior to being sent to the sinbin.
Moderator reports are currently not federated with remote Lemmy instances - so with your account being on Lemm.ee and the !news_summary@lemmy.dbzer0.com being on a different instance, whatever reports are being made you are not able to see them. This is only one of the many ways in which moderator tools for Lemmy suck ass atm. Another way is how that list of reports cannot be sorted or filtered in any way, besides resolved yet or not.
I’d rather mod reports not be federated. A lot of mods are power tripping and who the hell wants to earn a reputation as being a problem from some dick head mod across the entire federation?
I know it has downsides but I’d rather things stay decentralized.
The power tripping mod is the one who will be earning a bad rep across the fediverse. Why should they get away with it.
And you don’t think as someone who isn’t a mod, but also isn’t a liberal, won’t end up getting auto blocked from instances just because they have a backbone and threaten capital?
You’re just asking for a new Reddit. Block stupid mods and don’t go to their communities.
Well thats incredibly annoying. I suspect its not federated cos the devs dont want that much moderation transparency hence modlog doesnt tell u which nod did what (it shoukd default to transparent and if people have issues change the settings)
That is intentional - the modlog used to say who, but then it changed and now it just says “mod”.
Though the lack of federation of reports is planned to be fixed, somewhere in like 0.19.20 iirc (the current version is 0.19.18).
Ik its an instance setting u can change. Why should mods not be accountable to their actions im yet to hear a valid justification.
Welp will be good once reports federate at least.
I think I am not a fan of that “feature” either, though tbh I don’t really care. It’s not like you can have a conversation with any of the mods to find out why something happened, if they ban you or lock the thread - even Reddit had modmail, but here we have… uh… ah… well, this <gestures around>.
If we want something different, then we need to build it. As PieFed, Sublinks, and K/Mbin have all been doing, but they haven’t even approached reaching feature parity with the likes of Lemmy yet, much less Reddit. It would take a lot more contributors to the code to make that happen. Fortunately PieFed is in Python and Sublinks Java, or something like that, whereas Lemmy is in Rust that so few are willing to learn.
Right now the best thing that someone can do to help contribute, other than writing code, is to create & mod a community that is better than sucky alternatives, and/or contribute to existing communities to offer actual content that would make this Threadiverse worth visiting.
e.g. there was !fediverselore@lemmy.ca and !meanwhileongrad@sh.itjust.works, but OP created this community to be a bit different from those. And we who come here often appreciate that :-).
I didnt realise piefed was python. Does it federate with lemmy and have lemmy style votes? Also does it use flask?
I am posting to you from it now, so yes:-). It also has a ton of other features not in Lemmy - Categories of Communities, hashtags, the ability to block all users from an instance without needing admin approval, YouTube embedding, and so much more.
On the other hand, it’s not really ready for people without the early adopter mindset bc some of the foundationals are missing - searching is primitive, notifications are often wonky, the ability to tag a person with @ is non-existent, etc. I use it as my daily driver, but I also revert back to Lemmy alts daily as well to use those features missing on PieFed, i.e. I wouldn’t yet recommend it to someone who has never tried Lemmy.
Unlike Mbin it does not connect to Mastodon or have an alternative voting scheme. PieFed connects to Lemmy using the same ActivityPub protocol - the same communities, posts, votes, users, etc. It does have an option in testing for fully anonymous voting using faked server names but I always thought it was an odd concept and so never opted into it.
I did not personally know what Flask is until you asked and I looked it up, but anyway the codebase says yes.:-)
Here’s a test for a PieFed community link: !piefed_meta@piefed.social. This is where options for the upcoming roadmap for 2025 are currently being discussed. I’ve already voted and commented but you can test to see voting working first-hand from Lemmy if you like:-). Edit: oops, I meant to link to !piefed_2025@piefed.social. Ofc just like any community on a Lemmy instance, since surely nobody from your instance has joined this new community yet, it won’t have any posts - but that still shows how the behavior is identical to that of Lemmy!:-) I did subscribe to it from Discuss.Online in case you want to see how it looks from Lemmy in the meantime.:-)
None of these already as clear but as you suspects. Neither will simply deleting comments pass uncontested (there’s a post in ytpb right now about me doing exactly that) nor is “bad faith reports” obvious to those making them
(there’s a post in ytpb right now anoint me doing exactly that)
LOL
U could just delete the whole comment thread (from point of off topic onward) for reason “off topic” and that would solve almost everything.
If gotta to be done, that’s how it should be done
I dont like the idea of banning people for speach that isnt calling for actionable violence. // U could just delete the whole comment thread (from point of off topic onward) for reason “off topic” and that would solve almost everything.
Then the flame war continues in another comment chain.
Maybe, but it does serve as a warning to knock it off, so if that happens then a stronger response is warranted next time.
Using it as a warning is fine, but you can’t do it if you’re against banning people, like the other user is.
The other user (at least, the one you responded to) was just trying to define where they would draw the line, saying both:
I dont like the idea of banning people for speach that isnt calling for actionable violence.
But also:
I think bans for clearly bad faith reports is fair.
U think people should at least be warned prior to being sent to the sinbin.
So they aren’t fully against banning people.
Fair.
I am also getting dozens of reports about people reporting each other for “rudeness” or “trolling”
Ohh the irony haha… Germany dindu nuffin mate
Also, people over using report, should be the ones “modded”, not the discussion.
Bad faith behavior should be banned tho.
How about a automated system if someone downvotes a comment and then responds to that comment (or reverse), then they get tar-pitted and banned from the community for 1-hour
It would slow down people being nasty to each other and egging on a fight.
That would be nice
