This was originally written as a reply for this thread: https://lemmy.world/post/19238577
I’m copying it here because I don’t trust a LW admin to just not delete it right away since that seems to be something they love doing.
tl;dr - a user calls out the LW mods for rapid fire banning a bunch of users today, I investigate
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Let’s review some of these bans, as called out by ChomskyWasRight@slrpunk.net:
https://lemm.ee/post/40926293/14446156
From the top:
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LagrangePoint@lemmy.world https://imgur.com/4XsXuOC
Quote: "LW admin/mod team seem to have this overbearing and weird belief that they need to tell everyone else what to think and how to think it. How about… you all just fuck off and don’t?
Result: Permaban
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aniki@lemmings.world https://imgur.com/LIye27F
Quote: “All rights are won through violence, child. Bans on here means less than the nothing platitudes you utter”
Result: 15 day ban
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catloaf@lemm.ee https://imgur.com/ONGdgNo
Quote: [the quote is really long, pls dont make me type it and just look at the link lol]
Result: 15 day ban
Note: the comment precedes the ban by 26 days, but catloaf’s recent comment history contains opinions critical of the LW News mod team
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DoctorButts@kbin.melroy.org https://imgur.com/q2kktNQ
Quote: “Damn what a shame, guy almost stopped being a moderator on an internet forum, would have been a grave tragedy”
Result: Permaban
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stormesp@lemm.ee https://imgur.com/ZCRtuJe
Stormesp’s profile at lemm.ee: https://lemm.ee/u/stormesp
Quote: [there were no comments removed in the modlog, but stormesp’s recent comment history contains opinions critical of the LW News mod team, read them yourself]
Result: 15 day ban
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MindTraveller@lemmy.ca https://imgur.com/YwIMSOq
Quotes: [multiple quotes, there are a lot, check out the link]
Result: 15 day ban
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Summary
Most interestingly here is that the two users who got permabanned didn’t use slurs and didn’t call for violence, they merely insulted the moderator team. I guess in the LW News mod team’s eyes, that’s a horrible, terrible, awful, unforgivable offense, so… PERMABAN.
Aniki literally is saying “words are useless, let’s resort to violence” but that’s a 15 day ban only, OK, makes sense, right???
Catloaf and Stormesp were actively leaving comments sparring with the moderator team in that thread. To be honest, none of what I’m seeing in these comment seems worthy of a ban. Unless of course, you’re a LW mod and you go “this guy is disagreeing with me, therefore they deserve a ban.”
Edit: I forgot to write about MindTraveller since that guy douchecanoe was a last minute addition. But look at those aggressive comments, guy douchecanoe deserves a ban for sure.
Edit 2: fixed pronouns for MindTraveller
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Conclusion
Not a good look. Does LW want to grow into a good Reddit alternative or do they just want to turn it into Reddit for themselves only?
LW can at least come clean about this and say “yes, the rest of you can get fucked” or maybe they will have a moment of realization at some point “oh my god, are we the baddies?”
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LW is where so many ex-Redditors start off so there’s bound to be users among them who were/wanted to be mods and just aren’t good at it.
I blocked one of that communitys mods off my feed because they made it obvious that they think being a mod makes them special.
Only one?
So far
In my opinion it was a mistake for Lemmy to copy the same failed moderation model as Reddit.
In offline politics, we’ve learned from history that non-democratic governance always leads to the abuse of power. But somehow we imagined that in the online world this same dynamic would not play out. However, I don’t have a fully formed alternative in mind right now. It’s a thorny issue.
And I’m not trying to shit on LW admins here. I generally think they’re doing their best. But they’re only human, and it’s hard not to respond to people being shitty to you without being shitty to them. If you have an issue with what they’re doing, I would highly recommend you approach it in a polite way. Not just because it’s likely to have a better outcome. It’s also just the right thing to do.
However, I don’t have a fully formed alternative in mind right now.
The fediverse is already the alternative. The fediverse is democratic, you’re just not thinking about it that way.
It’s not democratic in the sense that you vote for your instance’s admins and your communities’ mods (though that is an option too). It is democratic in the sense that any user chooses their own instance and communities. So if you don’t like your current instance, go to a different one. You vote by choosing your instance and your communities.
Of course if you would like an instance that democratically elects their admins and mods, you are free to go to such an instance (or start your own). But anyone who “loses” the election are also free to simply start their own instance and be an admin anyway, even though they lost. The users who voted for the losing candidate could then just go to that instance. And then we’re kinda back to the same situation: you vote by choosing an instance and that’s a good thing.
I’ve seen one instance elect their admins with a vote. Seems like a small improvement on that regard
Which instance is that?
Jlai.lu. It’s in french, the vote was on !meta@jlai.lu
I personally don’t think that’s the right mindset of how you “vote” on the fediverse, see my comment here: https://feddit.dk/comment/10129007
The potential new admins wanted it to have trust from the users. I can understand.
From the outside looking in… Stop posting on Lemmy.World communities then. I’m not sure why that’s such a difficult concept for some people.
Seconded.
There is !globalnews@lemmy.zip , it’s quite active and the instance is well managed
I’m not sure why that’s such a difficult concept for some people.
Point taken, but come on, you should know why it is difficult.
This is a pie chart of the community distribution:
https://lemmy.ca/post/26878531
Notice which ones have the biggest shares? World, .ml, and Hexbear - three of possibly the shittest instances on Fedi at the moment.
Unfortunately until communities outside of LW become more lively, if most people are looking for drive-by discussion, they will find it at LW. For now.
In order to change that, we can all chip in to start livening up communities outside LW, like Blaze seems to be doing.
World, .ml, and Hexbear
I would focus more on the second listing which has 57 for LW, 10 for lemmy.ml and 5 for SJW
Hexbear only has 1
I’m kind of impressed lemm.ee has even 3 top 100 communities due to the predominance of LW.
Also, I just had a look again. The 100th monthly community is starwars memes, and I count at least 2 sopuli communities above, !memes@sopuli.xyz and !ukraine@sopuli.xyz
we can all chip in to start livening up communities outside LW
Indeed, as always, feel free to join us on !fedigrow@lemm.ee
Unfortunately until communities outside of LW become more lively, if most people are looking for drive-by discussion, they will find it at LW. For now.
Be the change you want to be. Building communities is hard work!
Building communities is hard work!
Tell me about it.
Also, as you are on Beehaw, do you think there is any chance that you guys would refederate with LW and SJW?
🤷 Word is we’re eventually moving to Sublinks, not sure if that’ll change anything
Not sure either, Beehaw could move to Mbin tomorrow, the point would still stand: do you consider refederating 😄
At the moment it’s a bit frustrating because while Beehaw communities are nice (hu hu), knowing that posting there will prevent LW and SJW people from seeing your post can demotivate potential posters.
I agree! I have a guest account for lw in Voyager, but I still mostly browse here.
It does seem heavy handed, but given how incredibly insufferable and annoying vegans on Lemmy have been recently, I can’t say I blame the admins for deciding they’ve had enough.
Lemmy.world admins made it very clear they considered the statements being made as animal abuse, and that it wasn’t welcome on their platform, and the community mods actually banned an admin in response, and reinstated a bunch of deleted comments.
I think the vegans will probably move communities, and it’s probably the best option at this point.
If the LW admins feel justified in permabanning people for what they perceive as animal abuse, then surely the vegans are equally justified in being mean to people for what they also perceive as animal abuse. Your comment seems to indicate a double standard.
Also the LW admins decided to reinstate the c/vegan mods because they correctly identified that the admin who went rogue was overstepping.
Small clarification, @MindTraveller participated in that thread, but was banned while a comment of theirs was removed in a separate post. That’s why they’re not included in the list.
Thank you for using my preferred pronouns and not calling me a “guy”
I don’t identify as a guy, I’m nonbinary. Please edit your insults to respect my gender identity.
EDIT: Thank you. In my defence, when I called vegans annoying it was only to troll a carnist.
That’s why I’m a proponent of a a truly federated system where for any community you would be able to choose which are the people in charge of moderating/curating your feed.
You need to be able to criticize moderators, and moderators need to be able to accept criticism, both good and bad. Some of those bans really speak towards really insecure moderation. I’m also not a fan of them being able to get complete anonymity while doing so. What usually happens is the problems is a bad apple within the mod team but the rest will still get defensive regardless when the only one you can blame is the entire group, it’s group psychology 101.
Even “ACAB” cops all have an ID number that can identify them, and on lemmy it’s even easier to create an alt. Heck, if you go over to their Matrix chat and talk to lemmy heads, they don’t consider unfair abusive lemmy bans a big deal because “its ok if people are forced to create a new alt, if they aren’t culpable they won’t get banned again”. Literally fucking shit logic, specially considering if a ban was actually justified you would not want to lose track of who that person is masquerading as.
The same reddit double standard is here, and I see that the modlog doesn’t even seem to be displaying who the particular admin or mod who performed the action was anymore while still providing only the most minimal explanation with no chance for individual users to contest it. Seriously, all it took was for mods to create a mod alias, but even that was too much?
People left Reddit because of the API problem, but the problem was there long before. Subreddits like modsbeingdicks and others got banned even though their moderation did a top notch job at making sure personally identifiable information was removed from posts and comments in comparison to other subreddits that still remain. The future of Lemmy may very well be limited to becoming a poor man’s Reddit. The Stanford prison experiment, read up on it, and if you find it too uncomfortable, jump on the bandwagon of trying to find something to nitpick about the study as it has become customary to do so, doesn’t change how relatable it is.
