Hello Admins! I’ve been recently banned because I broke down and called someone who had 70 downvotes and was already acting like a troll a “dipshit”. As punishment, I’ve been banned for 7 days from the site, and permabanned from the politics community. I feel like this was a little harsh, given the content that stays up on that community, but it felt especially weird because I was banned by a mod who was losing an argument on why voters voted for a specific law. This to me felt like someone was annoyed with me, so they looked at what comments I made in other communities they moderate and banned me accordingly.
I tried to find a moderator code of conduct for this site but there wasn’t one created - only mention of one being created and a link to a boilerplate legal document which doesn’t mentio a code of conduct for mods.
Another moderator didn’t like a take I had on some topic so he decided to troll me for 3 days, trying to bait me with emojis.
If this is what trolling truly is (caling someone a dipshit) then I need to recalibrate my reports and there’s LOADS more people on this site that troll. I didn’t think simply calling someone a name would constitute trolling but if it does, whoa boy: be prepared for many more reports.
If instead, these moderators are abusing their powers, how can I report this?
Moderators make this site work, and they need to exist. Abusive moderation wlll only make people angry and cause the site to be even more difficult to moderate (not a threat by me, just understanding how people operate when they are upset at forums online). FWIW, I’m not a troll, but boy do trolls find me.
edit: Also, I’m not being mean-spirited here. If the mods I referred to earlier wanted to reverse their actions because they made a mistake, that’s fine. No harm, no fowl. I can and did survive 7 days without access to this site, I can do it again but I do try to avoid bad behavior. I’m also not asking for special treatment, so if the actions these mods took weren’t mistakes, I just ask that they enforce the code of conduct of their communities accordingly. Nothing wrong with making rules for a space and enforcing them. If I’ve still managed to upset folks, sorry? I would love to know what for so that I could make a real apology, but I recognize that it might be outing you. If you want to create a burning account and DM me, DMs are always open. As a human, I do want to be decent. I have some strong opinions (and can be an ass at times) but I strive to be good.
Whaaat. Mods abusing their power on the fediverse and nothing you can do about that? Unheard of!
It’s going to happen. I’m just hoping there’s a mechanism to keep tabs on which mods do this over time so admins can determine if action needs to be taken.
Like, what I’m learning is that I could moderate a community right now and when i argue with someone and I don’t like what they have to say, I can ban that person from my community. And, ok this is fair to an extent to create safe spaces online. I guess it gets challenging (maybe for admins) when the community is a larger one like politics and the speech is not really unsafe but more unwanted.
Something a code of conduct would help clear up.
I think this is one of the detriments of decentralized social media.
A return of the power mods of the forums of yore.
Is it annoying? Yeah. But just make another account or make one on another instance. It’s part of the cost of the benefits of the federated systems.
I think it’s actually a strength of the fediverse. If you believe a mod is acting out, you can escalate to the admins of that instance, and if they disagree, you can set up shop somewhere else and still engage with fediverse content as much as you’d like.
It’s better than say, Reddit, where if you disagree with the admins, you have to determine whether you want to leave the entire site. This is why I don’t sweat it when there are similar communities across different instances - I think it’s healthy for Lemmy.
On the whole, I agree with you, but I also see how dipshit here (sorry, couldn’t resist) would be upset by this kind of interaction.
Is it perfect? Naw. Is it preferable? Personally, I believe so.
No worries. I make the distinction between people referring to me and people agreeing with my self-deprecation in the context of me making a good-faith comment or argument. The former is fine. The later is, well apparently it’s trolling, I’m learning.
Oh absolutely. Not to mention that if we want to get pedantic and legal, at least for reddit circumventing bans breaks ToS and you can’t accept the terms of the site if you’ve already been banned from it. Can you technically do it? Yes absolutely. Will your new account be shadowbanned? Probably, but that’s not to say you couldn’t circumvent that as well when creating the account.
I’m only talking about the rules of one instance here, not the fediverse as a whole. I don’t think we should prevent people from creating instances, and I know we don’t have the power to do so. Lemmy is open source, so someone could try to sneak in code that would prevent certain instances from being setup, but it probably won’t get accepted and those people could still use an earlier veresion. These are all good, healthy things.
That’s exactly what I don’t want to do, as it furthers the problem. For instance, a fan of mine created lemm.ee/dipshit without my consent, to try to frame me as the type of person who does this sort of thing.
I am understanding that this is difficult and that maybe “power mods” are what we need to do here, but… do we want to radicalize folks who otherwise wouldn’t be?
I was banned on reddit and I obeyed. Half of it was because reddit sucks, the other half was because I do respect the work of admins and mods. Honestly, I’m more interested in creating tools to prevent people from circumventing bans than circumventing them myself.
I think that’s admirable, but I also think you may be making a mountain out of a molehill, sorry.
You’re not betraying your principles by circumventing bans handed out inappropriately.
While it would be nice to avoid arbitrary decisions in moderation, I think that would require a different system of handling such moderation or a vast restructuring of human culture to make such things anathema.
Edit: In a way, I think I prefer Jonas in Minnesota banning me from posting in c!coffee because he thinks my opinion on Godzilla 2000 is bad than a team of corporate employees deciding I can’t post about alternative services to their product. Jonas has to sleep. I can get my licks in if I’m patient 😌
My motivations my be strange, but they are bigger than just this one account. If it helps, I’ll say that I ran a “social network” prior to facebook existing (if you want to call about 20 users a social network, still it had basic forum features). I got hooked on digg, then went to reddit and now on lemmy. Part of this is time wasting that I’d like to redirect elsewhere, and part of this is genuine interest in trying to fix the ails of social media. I’ve been thinking deeply on this for years and I haven’t come up with anything useful for a fix yet.
I try to behave online and try to challenge people’s ideas intelligently, but I’m a monkey-brained human like everyone else and sometimes the most appropriate reaction truly is to just call someone a name. Or, at least it feels that way.
I’m not sure I agree that it’s a good idea to circumvent bans handled out inappropriately at least for me because it asserts that I know better than the (multiple) people who agreed “naw, ban this guy”. Maybe if I were trying to get the word out about atrocities, sure. But, in my case, I was responding to a guy who was basically saying “yeah trump is old but biden is old so i don’t know hard to say” so this wasn’t the hill I was willing to die on. I mean, I guess it was the hill I got a 7 day ban on, but that was a bit unexpected. I don’t like that I can’t speak my mind in politics, but hey if I broke existing rules, that’s the rules.
Moderation on digg, reddit and lemmy has interested me because it almost doesn’t need moderation - the community moderates itself, yet the power of the community is weak in doing so. Downvotes have little effect, simply showing a lower score on a post. Visibly hiding a post that’s massively downvoted until a threshold is met which basically makes the comment invisible unless someone clicks a button to view it would make it less likely for people to pile onto people and might reduce trolling to a small degree. Even if people do dogpile, the upvotes to responses by other users in that thread could be used to further minimize the visibility of a comment. If a user gets more downvotes than they do upvotes over time, that user may find themselves only allowed to make a few comments a day until their “community reputation” perks up. Or, take the existing system and when a report comes in, consider the amount of downvotes a person receives vs upvotes they receive in what communities (which may have their own admin reputation depending on if the admins want the community around or not, instead of outright banning them, give them a warning system) in the decision to ban / appeal a ban.
Some sites have experimented with some of these features. I’m halfway curious to implement ActivityPub myself and try to make something like this for lemmy, but I’ve got a lot of research to do before I get anywhere close to doing that.
A mod unfairly banned my post on selfhosted and never replies to any message I send to him.
If anyone’s interested, I made a post about PCIe over IP (talking about RDMA). It got deleted without any reasoning and there have been no replies from the moderator.
This is tricky too… I haven’t looked at your comment history so I’m willing to accept that maybe you did something somewhere to upset this mod. This may not be the case but if it was and that was the reason you were banned, that presents a few problems:
- you’re seemingly contributing value to that community. that should, in a perfect world, remain in that community.
- to the extent that you are the baddie, should your well-behaved valuable posts still be considered valuable?
Or to pose the question another (hypothetical, not referring to you) way: should we let a nazi/far-right/facist remain a contributor to a leftist tech support community so long as they are not antagonistic to other users / abide by the rules of that community? I don’t have a clear answer here. I think most people would agree that it’s fair to allow this if the person is truly not antagonistic and is adding value. Other people might say that that person doesn’t deserve to exist in polite society no matter what “value” they might add.
That’s an extreme example, but I’m trying to strongman the mod’s possible reason for banning you.
Another thing for a moderator code of conduct might be to provide adequate ban reasons, possibly generalizing some only in cases of safety / legal reasons. I mean, mods / admins shouldn’t need to write a novel, but it also wouldn’t be technically too difficult to create a page that would link to the specific posts which were removed or which lead to the banning. I realize I’m butting up against outing reporters, so it would be important to maintain that aspect of privacy. I’m just saying when someone says something like “repeated” in a mod report, it would be handy to see the multiple instances. Otherwise, a mod might just look at someone’s moderation history, see mod reports (which may be unfair) and determine those reports constitute “repeated” behavior.
Could you take a look at my comment history? You’ll find my comments in the post I mention (but the post no longer exists for me).
I do not engage in politics, and the only lightly offensive thing I can think of that I might have done a couple of times is probably engage in some tomfoolery around Linux. Things like “system admins swear by Slackware” and “You’re not a real Linux user if you don’t know how to exit from Vim /s”. Needless to say, such expressions were accepted with due mirth as one would expect. If the mod doesn’t like this then he should say that.
I can but as a user and not a moderator or admin it won’t make much difference. I also don’t expect mods (volunteers with a stack of work to do in front of them) to take the time to understand every user before reporting them, though it would be nice if there were a system that facilitated that!
For example, if users (not just comments) were able to be upvoted/downvoted, they could gain or lose “standing” in a community or on an instance. Depending on how much standing they have, their posts / comment would have a visibility in line with their standing. Good standing posts might be promoted slight more than regular posts. Poor standing posts might be shown to users half as much as regular posts. The scope of this would be per community, based on the users’s interaction with that community and the community’s opinion of the user.
That way, less of the moderation is placed on the human moderators. Those moderators will still be needed because no automated or crowd-sourced system is perfect but the goal would be to lean on moderators less and less.
So far as I know, there ain’t squat you can do about abusive mods, but I’ll say this for what little it’s worth:
I’ve been following 𝕯𝖎𝖕𝖘𝖍𝖎𝖙 for months, one of about twenty Lemmy contributors I seriously appreciate. Always smart, sometimes funny, sometimes pissed off but in a good way. Said WTF out loud when I saw you’d been banned, and I’m glad you’re back, 𝕯𝖎𝖕𝖘𝖍𝖎𝖙.
_
Very common on lemmy overall, and will turn it into a worst echo chamber than it already is.
Problem has been raised before, has been met with deafening silence every time, and is partly why I participate less and less in commenting.
That’s unfortunate. I mean, let’s acknowledge that admins to an extent need to protect mods, and again that mods do labor for free. Lots of mods do the work they do because they want the communities they cherish to flourish.
But let’s also acknowledge that there is such a thing as user churn and that will ultimately be the downfall of any site. With enough money you can burn through the churn indefinately. Volunteer sites will just disconnect and users will go to the for-profit sites like reddit, causing more users to be tracked, the internet to be more centralized, etc…
I think it’s also worth mentioning that mods can create their own burner accounts and use those to troll users. Mods are also humans and if they want to speak their minds they should be able to do so. But, speaking their minds from a position of power puts them in a different power dynamic from users, which reflects not only on them, but on the community and the instance as a whole.
And then users get to see literal scat porn on the front page from a username like “admins are assholes” because a mod wanted troll on main. (edit: this was an actual bit of content I reported not too long ago. maybe it was “mods are assholes” I’m not sure, but it was long that vien.)
