Banning Spree?
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.
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.
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.
That would violate lemmy.world's terms of service, specially 3. (system disruption) and 5.1 (community manipulation).
Perhaps you guys could/should elevate this issue to the lemmy.world admin team.
That + this is exactly why I just blocked them. They don’t want downvotes? Fine, I don’t want to see their posts. Win win.
I mean, the flipside could be just as true. I would be surprised, if there's not some right-wing twats, who felt attacked in their manliness by the concept of veganism, and then started gaming the system by deploying tons of downvote bots. If you regularly downvoted posts without commenting, you might've looked like such a bot.
It could be, but it's really not. This community posts shit insulting, "carnists," all the time, then suddenly claims they're getting attacked or brigaded when these posts get negative responses. I get not wanting to have to debate random assholes every time you share an article about veganism; I even get banning people for being hostile to your insulting memes; but banning people for downvoting a meme is messed up, which is why the other mods on /c/Vegan just removed Mod the responsible for this..
Indeed
I honestly thought the vegans had moved to a different instance since the drama. I thought the .world comm would be killed but looks like their sticking around and doing some sus modding of their own. I mean, one good turn and all that. 🤷♂️
There's a vegan community on vegantheoryclub, they spat the dummy and defederated from .world. Maybe that's what you're thinking of.
Ok, I tend to think I'm a decent human being but I don't understand your logic and I can only see your comments as negative. Please help me understand the differences in our thought train.
- People are downvoting content (abusing the intended purpose of a downvote) they're seeing without even being involved in a community
- Mod of that community bans users (common with vote brigading) who aren't real active users, users can no longer see the content satisfying your dismay of seeing it in your feed (instead of blocking the community)
- You then accuse the mod of stopping people downvoting who don't like the community who aren't a part of that community?
You're actually acknowledging you've "downvoted a lot of their memes" because of previous un-related content, continuing to abuse the downvote and even pointed out the mod was effective at stopping the vote brigading from people outside the community. I have no clue about the Vegan situation myself, but I thought a mod had completely autonomy to run their community the way they want and the point of decentralization was the ability to move into another space when needed.
You're actually acknowledging you've "downvoted a lot of their memes" because of previous un-related content
No I'm not. I could see how you could choose to misinterpret what I said like that, but I didn't say that, and I'll rephrase it so that there is no question as to what I'm saying; they share self-righteous, antagonistic memes, and when those memes wind up in my feed, I downvote them. There are also plenty of neutral posts (articles, etc.) from that community that I don't downvote, but when shit like this, and this, and this ends up in my feed, I downvote it.
I could block the instance, but I see absolutely no reason to silence myself and allow their shitty opinions to go unchallenged. Why should I hide from their content and allow their community to insult me freely? I'm using the downvote button, the most passive way to express displeasure online, to respond to someone who is insulting me for my lifestyle. Why the fuck is the appropriate answer supposedly, "well, you should instead just hide from the people insulting you." Why isn't the response to the community, "Yeah, if you insult a lot of people, you get a lot of downvotes, maybe stop posting such hostile shit."
Holy hell! It's over 19 pages long, and that's over the past day. They even went as far as trying to ban admins.
Edit: it looks like they only tried to ban one admin. I thought I had saw more, but I guess not. But damn, talk about sour grapes.
It's all also done by a one single moderator, a same one that was complaining about the "carnists brigading" in the community. There was a handful of comments deleted along with more than 300 users banned.
I wonder if it's the same user who has almost exclusively dominated the front page of the sub with memes in the last day or so. Going back a couple pages, there was a lot more variety and nuance in the content. Subject matter notwithstanding, it looks like someone terminally online going on a power trip.
"the first amendment holds" lol, I wasn't aware Lemmy was part of the US government
It's doubly stupid because LW is construed and governed by Dutch, German, and Finnish laws. Not United-Statian ones.
There's a lot more to the story on Rooki.
From what I’ve been told there is a rift between mods of the community.
I had the same issue as you and contacted the mod team no understand how I violated rule 5. One of the mods confirmed I hadn’t violated rule 5 and unbanned me. I was then immediately rebanned again by the original mod.
There was another conversation about it on /c/unpopularopinion and it looks like people were getting banned simply for downvoting one of the mods.
I'm kinda dumbfounded. I've only posted (or commented) once in the past nine days. The one that happened to be at a similar time was this comedy one on a completely different Community on a different instance for a goofy anime question. Did... did I really just get banned from talking to vegans for... not liking anime?
This might be peak stupid internet if so.
I hope this is not in poor taste, but it seemed to fit? :-P
My only comment in the community was a suggestion that someone reformat their post to make it more legible ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I totally get what you’re feeling.
One can only hope that mismanaged communities will be outgrown by better ones when enough people simply get together somewhere else.
Banning your good faith readers is a fast path to irrelevancy.
Ah yes, fair and balanced
I’m sure there’s more to it. I’m just sharing what I know.
Pretty sure i heard they are banning people based on the downvotes/ upvotes. If you downvote a vegan or upvote a non- vegan then you get banhammered.
That community is a joke though and i refuse to participate (as a vegan).
That's the most fragile thing I have ever heard of.
Why the fuck is Lemmy making votes visable to moderators? This is RIPE for corruption and abuse. Secret ballot is the only way voting works!
Lemmy is an open, federated platform. You cannot realistically hide who voted, because there is no trusted server that would secretly count up votes and provide a total.
Pretty sure votes are public. It's just that most (all?) the front ends only show the number.
It's kinda how the fedi spec works. Nothing is private.
I know kbin/mbin showed who voted.people really need to stop confusing an upvote/downvote to basic democratic voting. There is no ticker above the ballot box letting you know how everyone voted before you, there is no "policy" or "elected position" being voted on. This is more akin to an open conference debate where people are booing or yaying when someone speaks up about a topic. Your privacy on a public forum discussion never existed to begin with, people in a public setting know their anonymity isn't guaranteed.
Afaik, votes are visible to server admins (because admins hold the keys to the DB) and server admins can proliferate information however they want. With anyone being able to be a server admin, there isn't much you can do about it.
Votes are not specifically visible to moderators. Instance admins can see them through the database and everyone can see them through other federated platforms besides Lemmy.
They're visible to anyone with a lemmy instance, or any activitypub compatible platform. It's likely that she set one up to monitor the votes on the community and ban anyone she saw down-voting her, and yes that is very much a thing that power-hungry losers do.
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.
Mods abusing power, is just a normal day on social media. Power always corrupts.
I'm also banned because I believe cats cannot be healthy vegans.
The Vegan Community Mod vs Admin drama aside they're probably in the process of transferring to an instance where animal cruelty is explicitly allowed, so I wouldn't expect them to be very welcoming on the current instance.
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".
I love the irony of a vegan community eating themselves
How utterly bizarre and yet entirely predictable based on recent events.
I think they're trying to damage the vegan brand by being as excluding as possible.
I don't mind vegans, I really dislike this type of treachery giving any group a bad name.
I would definitely agree with that conclusion, and unfortunately it does work, many people think of the angry vegan stereotype when someone talks about veganism, and that's because of assholes like her. She would say that it's because of the meat industry and alt-right think tanks, which is true but they also do feed off the bad examples people like her give and go "see we're not lying".
If she wanted to be helpful or benefit that community she wouldn't intentionally behave in the exact way that people criticize the community for acting, she should shun that behavior and banish people who do it. That's the only way to bring about positive change.
I'm so tired of hearing about this community. They should change their name to ShittyAntiCarnivoreMemes and move to .ml.
I think I must've been banned as well, I saw a post in my All feed that I tried to upvote but received an error when doing so, just for that one community.
“Rule 5” like most:
https://lemmy.world/modlog?page=1&userId=670823Thought as much, thanks for the context!
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.
They ban anyone that doesn’t agree with their ideology. Regardless how respectful you are about it.
On the instance lemmy.world
The knickers of an admin had curled.
Suggestions of a vegan cat:
Red faced with ears of steam
He banned their moderation team.
Over something dramatic like that.An admin decree was made:
A repeat was forbade.
"But that wasn't enough,"
Some moderators said with a huff.
Not wanting to be persecuted,
By plebians with vegan-hate rooted
They would make the place tamer
By turning it into an echo chamberI don't think I have been banned there but now that I am posting this.... I wonder how many of the people chatting here are going to get banned?
Probably all.
Only if you get downvoted, even if only once (no, I'm seriously not kidding - the post I linked in my other comment admits that is how that particular bot works).
Do you want to build an echo chamber? This is how you build an echo chamber.
(I find this entirely unsurprising. I think they do want to build an echo chamber.)
Yeah.
I left beehaw because they seem determined to build a echo chamber too
A minority literally accused of me of wanting to kill all of them simply because I only half agreed with a post.
And then a admin overlooked that, and accused me of causing a fight in a "safe space" which seems to be just another term for echo chamber
I have friends from that minority 😂
Bro's unironically saying "I'm not a racist, I have minority friends" and wondering why Beehaw doesn't want him around.
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!
I don't understand why most people even care. They would have never know this community existed except for for this post.
B/c this is just the tip of the iceberg, and b/c a stitch in time saves nine and all that jazz. And b/c some find it entertaining to discuss about:-). And b/c it's not fair, e.g. how would you feel if I told you that because you commented here, you automatically receive a...
Yeah, I don't care about that community either!:-P
Your equivalency is not great. If you told me I was banned on [email protected] (saw in the trending communities) I wouldn't even spend the time to find of if it was true.
B/c this is just the tip of the iceberg, What?
b/c a stitch in time saves nine and all that jazz What's the bigger problem?
Personally, I think it justifies their choices. Not that I would have made the same choices in their shoes. They are just getting shit on left and right by random people that would never take the time to even honestly engage, but just believe they are terrible for personal choices.
Quick question. How do you know if you been banned? Let's say that I was banned, do I see posts, can I see the comments or nothing at all?
It just means you can't post. You aren't directly notified but can check the modlog.
Good to know. Thanks for the quick response
You do not seem to be banned from anything that I can see: https://discuss.online/modlog?page=1&userId=3001113.
Honestly this mod appears to be having a mental health crisis and it'd be more productive to try to reach out and have a conversation. I might be naive but if I was involved it'd be my first action.
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.
A big portion of the Vegan posting appears to just be memes complaining about having the same old argument with non-vegans every time they step outside the community. And, tbh, it does seem like every non-vegan sub wants to have these exact same tired arguments with people ad nauseam.
So, idk. Maybe that's why there's a bannnig spree going on. They're just picking out people who are known trolls and tagging them preemptively.
So like Minority Report, but for veganism.
Less being a precog and more just noticing all the crimes you're committing in other subs.
I saw one vegan person call it meatsplaining. Funniest and dumbest new word I've heard in a long time
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?
