It feels like the amount of both, divisive posts and ghoulish comments is rising again.
One could argue that the world has a lot of divisive stuff going on and lemmy just talks about it. But the way people post about stuff seems more oot and hateful than it has been in the past.
Not saying it is that but if I wanted to bring the Fediverse down or at least keep my customers from going there, I would sow this stuff as much as I can.
I’m blocking ghouls left right and center atm but if I ever asked a friend to join lemmy, I’d hate to think of what they would see that I dont anymore.
Do we need stronger moderation?
- Maybe ban politics from c/memes?
- Become a little more stringent on “dont be a jerk” rules in communities?
One thing that really bothers me is the collapsing “discourse”. Trying to mend fences and keep the conversation between sides going ime leads to nothing but downvotes and shitstorm.
I feel like a little more interaction (instead of intervention, at first) of the moderators would do wonders there.
Thanks for reading this rant. Have a nice day.
Politics is banned from c/memes@lemmy.world
And speaking as a mod, report things. The vast majority of things I’ve dealt with as a mod were ones I saw myself or things friends sent on discord. People need to utilize the report function more often if they want moderation on things. We’re not psychic.
As for being more stringent on the not being a dick rule, no. There’s a base level of civility we expect but if we start getting super stringent on what constitutes being a dick, that’s imposing moderator will on community and its what most of us left reddit to get away from.
Lastly, it’s the Internet. Assholes exist everywhere. You are not going to escape it, ever, if you’re using public servers. It’s pretty much required to accept that fact just to use the Internet. Moderators do not exist to prune and preen social media to make it more comfortable for people. We remind people to follow the rules and act upon those who do not. If you’re not breaking the rules then we’re not going to “interact” because we have our own lives and our own posts we are interested in.
imposing moderator will on community
Rich, coming from the mod that banned me because I called him out on a shitty joke.
Stamets is the worst kind of power user. Spams garbage everywhere, argues with everyone. Fragile as glass.
Ok honestly thank you for that. I kind of gathered that from his pretty much only shitposting and attitude in his comments. Idk why but being banned because of him really bugged me.
I don’t remember you but the modlog says you were banned for homophobic comments. So I’m gonna go ahead and say that nah, you weren’t banned for calling someone out on a joke 👍
You posted a misogynistic meme, I said “i thought we left that in 2023,” and apparently you didn’t like that so you called me a bigot and banned me. None of what I said was homophobic or bigoted. I just didn’t like your meme because it seemed like the millionth time one of us has made an “ew women” joke and it’s tired and shitty to women. So you said I’m homophobic and banned me then told me to fuck off basically.👎 Which cut me off from participating in the largest LGBTQ+ safe space on Lemmy. So yeah.
Are there any app notifications or email options to let yo know about reports? I modestly mod a couple subs and I have never found a way to reliably get report notifications unless I log in through a browser based front end.
that’s imposing moderator will on community and its what most of us left reddit to get away from.
Now I’m curious how common this is, because it’s not at all why I left. I left to get away from Reddit the company. If anything I think Reddit subs tend to be moderated too leniently (which is good for Reddit, because hate is engagement)
That’s fair. It depends on the communities. Places like Tumblr and Pics had effectively no moderation which left the entire place just a shithole. But then you had places like WorldNews and StarTrek where the mods became specifically known for stirring shit and causing a boatload of problems. Hell, one particular moderator of StarTrek is the reason that so many other communities splintered off.
For me it was a lot of heavy handed moderation. The lack of moderation was frustrating too, don’t get me wrong, but I guess the communities I was most active in were ones where people were constantly pointing out how the moderators were terrible people.
Thanks for elaborating. I didnt know the report button is not used often. Good advice. Will do just that.
As for moderation:
I‘m a mod myself (both here and on reddit) and I don‘t necessarily agree that its imposing to ask people for civility if a discussion gets heated and kneejerk reactions start popping up. But I‘m thankful for every mod that does the good work and even more so for you openly commenting about it. You’re doing important work.
Then there is „the internet“ which I think is like the world. If we were in a postapocalyptic hellscape, we‘d have no rules, no communities. Only fight to survive. But we aren’t and we do have communities and rules. Therefore, I‘d say we‘re still responsible for the stuff that happens in our tavern (for lack of a better analogy). Are we to keep the guy in the corner from saying things we dont like? No we shouldn’t, but we definitely should keep him from starting a bar fight.
This is just my opinion. Feel free to debate me on it. :)
I’d love to debate you on it, but you’re not giving me much to work with.
Generally, a mod willing to debate me is a mod I want around
We remind people to follow the rules and act upon those who do not.
You personally also invent rules when you decide you want to ban and publicly smear someone you dont like
If anyone is wondering why there are so many deleted comments from Stamets its because he posts insults then deletes the comment he also harasses via dm where it cant be seen. Its always claiming hes fighting homophobia or transphobia but it almost never is.
Election year in the US and EU while Russia is invading a neighbor and China possibly preparing to do the same. There couldn‘t have been a worse time for LLMs to be so accessible, capable and fairly unregulated. The perfect conditions to make this year the worst for internet content we‘ve ever seen. By a landslide. We will look at the last 10 years and feel nostalgic on how good these years were with their little bot armies, cute clickbait and adorable fake news.
The cheaper and easier it gets to produce and distribute content online, the more I am convinced that we will need to start requiring people to put something of actual value at stake to let them join a social network. The sad thing is that, aside from simply charging money for access, there is nothing that I see that could be used but not abused by governments or corporations.
Election year in the US and EU while Russia is invading a neighbor and China possibly preparing to do the same.
Interesting you don’t mention Israel doing a fucking GENOCIDE and the USA supporting it.
They event, while deplorable, doesn’t really generate new bot flow. The same conservative and Russian style bots are already up and running.
You don’t think the US and Israel have an online presence pushing propaganda? I’ve noticed some odd voting patterns on some posts relating to the genocide and recent bombings.
No, the US is not supporting genocide.
When the Jewish people took the motto NEVER AGAIN what, exactly, did you think that meant? Did you think it would mean “oh please, Sir, don’t hurt us please?”
Hamas, seeking the elimination of the Jews of Israel decided to find out, and used their own population as shields.
You reap what you sow.
Hamas seeks no such thing and your blind acceptance of what is inherently a racist perspective based on Islamophobia is extremely telling.
A lot of it depends on the instance. I think there’s a little bit of a smartest bears type of problem going on, with a lot of the bad-faith content coming from just ignorant and abrasive people being sincerely ignorant and abrasive, not anything that’s a bot or a deliberate troll.
Personally, I’ve done some rounds of unsubscribing from tech and politics subs on lemmy.ml and lemmy.world, and when I’ve done that my amount of toxic content and interactions went way down. I think the prevalence of the exact same thing on the tech subs points to it probably being just a bad-person problem in large proportion, although I’m sure deliberate malfeasance is at the root of some of it also.
I agree that some people just are original jerks. But those still cant roam free in a community. Its like making a bar and knowing that people are getting mugged in the restroom. The bar owner or personnel (even if its a coop) need to intervene.
Well… that’s why I used the smartest bears analogy. I’ve noticed the mods are usually pretty on top of removing content that’s genuinely personally insulting or racist or what have you. But there’s a wide, wide grey area of someone whose post is discussing “the issue” in a technical sense, but just comes at it from a perspective of “here’s why I am right and you are wrong and not only that you’re clearly not smart enough to see my side and I can’t believe I need to explain it to someone again” with 0 interest in learning anything on their side. IDK if it’s reasonable to try to remove comments or ban people for that behavior, but it definitely doesn’t lend itself to a good discussion, and it’s common (probably majority) particularly on lemmy.world and lemmy.ml.
Thats pretty much how I view it as well.
Being a jerk can have many faces and there are a lot of people right on the edge of getting in trouble but not quite. Those are also the worst people to work with IRL. They fall up the ladder and are usually pretty incompetent.
If they are repeat offenders, I confront them in the places I mod since I dont want them hollowing out the community by this constant low key abrasion.
Others who just have a hot temper I leave mostly alone until they really go overboard.
Thats how I do it and thats what I think is best. Obviously not everyones opinion though.
People here are blaming politics. I don’t think that’s it. The quality of comments and discussion here has taken a massive nosedive for the past four months or so, no matter what the topic is.
I think it’s pretty simple, the terrible won. Everyone who wants good quality discussion left quickly when people started to act terrible. They didn’t come back. So now we’ve created the toxic enabling environment that is enabling it hard today.
You can fix it with moderation, but that’s a lot of work, and people get really angry.
I’m pretty close to just cutting my losses on lemmy. It’s heading in the same direction as reddit but with less moderation, and simply because it’s smaller, the awfulness is more visible.
Everyone who wants good quality discussion left quickly when people started to act terrible.
That, and the fact that simply there isn’t enough good discussion to begin with. This community kind of has movement because it’s a meta-topic, but for everything else it’s mostly "let’s pretend we are superior than redditors because we found our way here and “let’s pretend we are not in Reddit for all the other niche communities that we are still interested.”
I think the biggest mistake in the execution of the protests is the effort was spread around “going dark” for as many subreddits as possible. It would be a lot more effective if we got one big-ish niche and told them “let’s focus all our efforts to get you out of Reddit and migrate completely to any other alternative.” Go for something completely random but with commercial interest, like /r/sneakers, and if a moderate success of getting 15% of the user base to Lemmy would translate into 500k signups.
That, and the fact that simply there isn’t enough good discussion to begin with. This community kind of has movement because it’s a meta-topic, but for everything else it’s mostly "let’s pretend we are superior than redditors because we found our way here and “let’s pretend we are not in Reddit for all the other niche communities that we are still interested.”
That’s a real issue. Hopefully it will get better over time, but sometimes at the moment it feels like shouting into the void.
I can see that. I will probably just start blocking communities and instances that have one of the extreme stances (either freeze peach absolutism or why you not outraged?!)
I‘m not going to leave lemmy or the fedi since there literally is nothing else, and especially not something with this much potential.
Being a jerk is extremely subjective - someone could brand you much worse than that just from a polite disagreement from your side, that they don’t want to deal with. Aside from anything else, this is a highly “techie-y” space with a ton of strongly held opinions and ideals, and misunderstandings when communicating/discussing them happen. A lot. It will keep happening. People will look like asses without necessarily doing so intentionally.
Now, outright trolling, spamming, shitting on discussions with obvious bad faith participation, consistently derailing unrelated threads with one’s hobby horse, obvious flamebaiting and so on… great. Reporting and removing more of that should be a priority everywhere.
Banning politics from any non-political community that can be persuaded to do so also sounds like a great idea on general principle. Politics is poison (particularly what passes for it in the US), and it would be polite to not shove it down the entire fediverse’s throat. Every geographical sub is politics, every news sub is politics, there are dedicated politics and politicalmemes communities, and still it’s fucking everywhere else also. Asklemmy and NoStupidQuestions are full of thinly veiled soapboxing (which leads to a lot of awfully stupid questions). People who want to JAQ off to politics can easily make their own community for that (that way, the rest of us can block it, as intended), or else keeping it in their pants would’ve been kinda polite, idk. Seems odd to insist on posting political stuff everywhere.
Your post is one hell of a ride. It starts very lenient and then says exactly what I was trying to say but worded much better. Thank you very much. That is both a very good explanation and one I happen to agree with fully.
Because I‘m an admin IRL, autistic and sometimes rude myself. But namecalling, trolling and shitting on peeps is too much even for me. I feel like saying that using certain brand is a stupid idea is rude but no big deal while going on about people and groups makes me squirm.
Have a good one. :)
