LOGIC💣

It’s a fundamental flaw in first-come-first-served moderation that also gets to reserve a unique name.

For me, the important thing is that this is a vibrant community.

That means that from the mods’ perspectives, they don’t get too loaded down with moderation work, or need to defend themselves and create friction with the community.

It also means that when people want to contribute to the community, they’re not afraid of what the mods will say. If they post without reading the rules, like probably most people do, it’s really the poster’s fault. But if they are afraid to post even after reading the rules, then I think that has a freezing effect on the community.

As for people who are looking for loopholes, I think they’re trying to make the mods’ lives harder, and so I don’t really think they’re worth worrying too much about. They’ll probably get banned sooner or later because that is the attitude of a troll.

Just my opinion. I’ve never been a mod, and I don’t think I could handle that responsibility. I just try to be empathetic with everybody involved.

You’re right. One problem is, even though mods already have the power, specifically saying in the rules that the criteria is subjective sounds like something that a mod would make when they are tired of having to explain their moderation choices.

They can just say that it was low-effort, and problem solved. They don’t need to explain themselves, right?

But when the rules are vague, I think they’ll end up with more complaints from people who have different criteria of low-effort from the mods. This sort of interaction leads to accusations of mods power-tripping.

If the mods can nail down exactly what is low-effort, like, “X will always get removed. Z will never get removed unless it violates other rules. Y may be at risk of the moderator’s mood. You have been warned.” If they nail things down a bit more, then they will probably make things easier for themselves in the long-run than just keeping things vague.

Plus, if the rules are not vague, then people can discuss them safely when the rules are changed. When rules are vague, people will simply be upset that moderation was sprung on them, and everything will be discussed while people are upset. My belief is that people best discuss things while calm, and not while experiencing one person having power over another.

How many ban reversals end up with the return of an active user? My guess is, “very few.”

As the number of users goes up, it becomes more difficult to enforce that way. Even if many people switch communities, when new ones search for the community by name, the one with the most users will pop up first. And it becomes more and more difficult to justify defederating an instance over a couple of communities if the instance has a ton of big communities.

We need to be careful on Lemmy. Only the fact that the moderators and admins have goodwill are keeping Lemmy from becoming like Reddit. If Lemmy gets big and starts attracting people who want to pay to take over communities, that will stretch the moderator goodwill to the limits.

Lemmy is a federated clone of Reddit, and Reddit has more users, so most likely, everyone here has either rejected Reddit, or been banned by Reddit, or they are using both platforms at once to reach a bigger audience.

I am here because I was very dissatisfied with Reddit’s administration and moderation and with the way they screwed app devs.

I’m concerned that Lemmy uses the same basic moderation techniques as Reddit, and so it could fall into the same ruin as Reddit. But for now, the moderators I’ve interacted with here have been straight up legit good people. So I stick around.

My problem with Rogan is that he gave bad uninformed advice during the pandemic, all because he’s too insecure about how other people perceive him. His insecurities almost certainly caused many people to die.

And I don’t think his show is even worth one person’s life, so he can’t really ever redeem himself.

I actually made the same point in the part that you quoted. I said that I only use downvotes for things that I think mods should remove. You stated it more clearly, though.

And I think your other point about removing downvotes leading to increased trolling would need to be investigated with better controls. You even said that the forums you’re talking about are “lesser-moderated”, so my mind immediately latches onto that as the reason for more trolls, while you see the differences in voting as the problem. I think moderation is the vehicle to decrease visibility, while votes are the vehicle to increase visibility.

It could also be related to something like the number of users and traffic. Likely trolling is encouraged by many of these factors combined.

That part you quoted is the least important part of the comment. I put it in because I think it’s important that everyone knows votes are public, but it doesn’t really have anything to do with my point. But I’ll just remove that paragraph so that it doesn’t confuse people who only read the bare minimum.

Downvotes are inherently broken. They are a bad idea and they cannot be easily fixed.

Why are they broken? Because users with good intentions don’t use them as much as people with bad intentions, yet the system actually rewards users for downvoting.

How are people rewarded for downvoting? Well, their votes count more. If I upvote a comment I agree with, it becomes more visible. But if I downvote all of the other comments, the one I agree with becomes even more visible. It’s like giving downvoters double votes. And since votes are private on Reddit, it’s impossible to know for sure what is happening. People may even have extra accounts just to get more ability to downvote.

If you reward people for acting in bad faith, then they will keep acting worse and worse.

Moderators cannot understand context, sarcasm or satire

or subtlety. I was once banned by admins for explaining how criticizing a religion’s official dogma is different from hate speech against individuals who practice the religion.

Hahaha what a fucking waste of money. For the amount of money that they’re wasting on using LLMs to analyze content, they could fix the actual root problems that makes their platform suck ass.

what would you do with an old dell server?

I thought this post was going to be a sea shanty.

Also I once received a message from a Reddit admin, and I thought their grasp on the English language was… tenuous. It wouldn’t surprise me if they offshore people to do this work, and if they don’t speak English very well, then there’s no chance for them to make great decisions about violations.

It’s not just a matter of time, but a matter of mental fortitude.

I’m sure anyone could find tons of content to get conservatives banned, but that requires reading conservative content.

You know, this might actually be a good use case for everyone’s least favorite tech… AI. You could find bannable content without having to wade through all of the surrounding mind numbing garbage.

The same thing will happen here if we’re not vigilant. Here’s the problem:

Conservatives love trolling, and they don’t care if they break every rule to push their agenda. Progressives do not love trolling as much.

A troll is out to start a fight and to cause problems. This means that conservatives are out there in every subreddit/community trolling. One way to troll is to become an expert at reporting things. Read all comments trying to find anything that could get them banned. If trolls don’t find something that can get their targets banned, then they can join the conversation. Either trolls can pretend like they agree with them, and see if you can’t get them to say something that’s technically against the rules, or they can argue with them, and troll them just within the bounds of the rules, in the hopes that they’ll retaliate outside of the rules, so they can be reported.

Meanwhile, progressives are less likely to troll. They’re not looking for reasons to report. They’re trying to discuss the issues, not abuse the system.

And conservative moderators are going to ban people for reporting things if they detect that there is political disagreement, making it more difficult to bother reading and participating. Meanwhile normal moderators will judge based on the actual reports.

It’s sometimes called red fascism.

empathy? Like I should try and understand a Nazis POV… have a civilized dicussion with him/her?

At some point you need to just look the other person in the face and tell them to get fucked.

I’m rapidly approaching that point with you.

Yes, telling the other person to “get fucked” is a guaranteed way to ensure that you aren’t having a civilized discussion.

And yes, MangioneDontMiss@lemmy.ca, empathy is necessary, not just to have a civilized discussion, but simply to be a human. Like, for example, I am empathizing with you here, despite your escalating rhetoric. Suddenly, it’s not about us having a discussion, it’s about having a discussion with a Nazi. These are the sorts of things people say when they just want to win, and they don’t care how they do it. Ironically, a tactic pretty closely associated with Nazis.

The reason humans bait mouse traps with food is they have empathy for the mouse. Maybe you shouldn’t throw away such a useful tool out of a desperate need to feel like you’ve won an argument.

There is a difference between delusion and steelmanning. I would argue that if you don’t know how to steelman, then you’re not really capable of having a civilized discussion. Civilized discussions require empathy.