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.
You must log in or # to comment.
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.
Hello again Mr. Stamets! ❤️
<3
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.
I heard that someone was developing a tool to enable this
Personally not familiar with any but I can ask around. I’m just always on PC.
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.
imposing moderator will on community
Rich, coming from the mod that banned me because I called him out on a shitty joke.
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.
…riiiiiight. Or, and this is way more likely, you were banned for saying homophobic shit. Which is why it says banned for homophobic content. I’m going to go with the modlog reason 👍 I’ve yet to see someone on Lemmy who had something like “homophobic comments” added to their modlog ban be for no reason whatsoever.
You were cut out of that safe space because you inherently made it less safe. Of course you’re not allowed in if you’re going to go ahead and make it worse for everyone else. What insane arrogance.
I’m going to go ahead and go back to forgetting you exist now.
Edit: oh wait no I do remember you. You kept insisting the meme was misogynistic and then started making generalizations. The meme in question? A dude gagging with the text “When the gay porn shows an ad of a woman masturbating”. Yeah. Not even remotely misogynistic, which other people pointed out to you and why you were downvoted. You then doubled down and made homophobic generalizations. That’s why you were banned. Because you were actively stirring shit and making a safe place inherently less safe by slinging generalizations at the entire community.
Wouldn’t have remembered if you didn’t double down on that misogyny accusation.
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.
Yeah you’re not crazy. He is provocative and cries transphobia when called out for it. Then deletes the comments that make him look bad.
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
Trying my hardest not to make others regret opening the app. Both for my answer and stuff that I could have moderated.
deleted by creator
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.
Oh wow. Thats a bleak but very convincing outlook you have painted. Lets pray this doesnt come to pass.
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.
Give it a rest.
This is the kind of commitment the post is taking about.
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.
Yeah, it’d be real fucked up if Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis, all allied and interconnected Iran-backed terrorist groups, had direct calls for jihad and genocide in their charters and mottos, or founder and leader quotes saying they are glad Israel exists because it saves them the trouble of hunting the Jewish diaspora
OH WAIT
THEY DO
If you want to talk about violence, any level of violence, as a legitimate response to colonialism, especially when it enters the ethnic cleansing stage, fair enough, but don’t pretend they’re not genocidal fuckwits themselves with plenty of proof for their intentions.
If you want to know why Lemmy is full of pissed off people fighting in the comments it’s because half the people who comment on Lemmy have the fact checking ability of a mentally incapable squirrel and they’ll repeat any damn thing they hear.
- Hamas affirms that its conflict is with the Zionist project not with the Jews because of their religion. Hamas does not wage a struggle against the Jews because they are Jewish but wages a struggle against the Zionists who occupy Palestine. Yet, it is the Zionists who constantly identify Judaism and the Jews with their own colonial project and illegal entity.
The leadership explicitly refuses to repudiate the old charter that called for genocide, and has directly said they can’t do that politically, or even call it a replacement.
It shouldn’t be too hard to figure out why, you sure as hell wouldn’t be pretending you don’t understand why MAGA leaders won’t criticize the Confederacy or the KKK.
Why are they atacking Jordan then?
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. :)
Thanks, and you too. :)
Out of curiosity, can you specify the topics or give specific examples of this shitty behavior you speak of? Without examples it is impossible to determine if you are discussing behavior that is straight-up pathological (e.g. name-calling) or people having a different opinion.
Okay, I did mention it in another comment but I didnt do so in the main post. Thanks for pointing it out.
I‘m talking about name calling, ad hominem attacks, ridicule, twisting words, bad faith arguments. So, mostly abusive language/rhetoric, not disagreement or different opinions.
how do you differentiate what you perceive as bad faith vs disagreement and differing opinions?
i frequently see simple disagreement here being painted as bad faith when its just… disagreement.
Wikipedia:
Bad faith (Latin: mala fides) is a sustained form of deception which consists of entertaining or pretending to entertain one set of feelings while acting as if influenced by another. It is associated with hypocrisy, breach of contract, affectation, and lip service.
Here are some nice examples. I can’t come up with a perfect example rn. https://www.grammarly.com/blog/bad-faith-good-faith/
It boils down to essentially playing devils advocate just to shut someone up.
i know what it is, i was asking for more specifics about what you see on lemmy.
I‘m not sure I understand your question. Do you want me to come up with examples from lemmy?
Yes
And to the contrary, I’ve seen people claiming blatant bad-faith behavior as “just disagreement”.
Yeah I’ve encountered a few accounts lately who either have mental health issues or are bots designs to stir discord. Their entire posting history is divisive shit stirring.
Funny how every 4 years the internet gets markedly nastier. I wonder why???
Yes. Exactly what I‘ve seen as well. The election year thing might be the reason though. I know a couple people with mh issues. They’re no problem. These accounts either belong to severely deranged individuals or bots.
Yep I remember this pattern of behavior distinctly from last time.
One of the big ones that sticks out is you start seeing a lot of people claiming to be democrats or left aligned showing up all of a sudden and being big time concern trolls and talking about sitting out the election and/or claiming that there’s no difference between voting democrat or republican, which is demonstrably absolute horse shit.
And just a lot of added vitriol. It seems like even politically unrelated discussions get meaner and more argumentative. I expect it’s just gonna get worse as we get closer to November. It’s only the beginning February. Ugh.
Yeah, I‘ll just block communities now instead of people, until morale improves. :)
Thanks for elaborating. I enjoyed reading it.
One thing that makes me sad about lemmy is that if you find people with „based“ opinions, longer/more regular discussions with them seem impossible. I used to talk to folks in reddit pms a lot when i was at my worst. Helped me immensely.
Well, have a good one.
Not discrediting mental health issues, but being “severely deranged” is a mental health issue
I had to check because I used the word meaning something else. You are correct. It is described as losing grip with reality, turning mad or insane. That would by definition be a mh issue.
What I meant was hurting others on purpose, e.g. for fun or other means. I dont know a good word for that. Maybe evil, abusive?
To be clear: I dont discriminate based on mental health issues, only on intent.
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.
Some people do actively looking for fights instead of having meaningful discussions. I noticed them less and less now though, so either the mods got them, or they blocked me because I often call them out, or maybe they stopped frequenting smaller communities.
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.
Agreed, except I don’t think people starting to act terrible was the main problem. I think it’s mostly bots.
Strongly recommend using the block more. Be your own mod
that works for me, but I want to have good conversations with others, that’s kind of the point. Blocking terrible people doesn’t get that to happen
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.
I have a dream of creating a community where people can argue about factual questions and give citations, with an AI moderator that will award points for things that are demonstrated based on solidly factual citations and no points for things that are someone yelling with increasing firm confidence that their opinion is the right one. My dream is (a) the AI moderator could be made to work and (b) it would cause people to lose the “me and my agreeing-people are right about everything by definition” mentality that’s pretty easy to develop in a forum where you can literally say anything at all without getting any feedback aside from other people telling you they agree or disagree.
Probably my dream on counts (a) and (b) both is incorrect, but it is my dream. In my dream it works.
I find that an insanely good idea. Let me know if it works out. I‘d join.
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.
Maybe that’s a recommendation we should make to everyone
deleted by creator
I completely agree. Thats why I like the fediverse so much.
But if your favorite radio station started to host lets say very divisive content more often, wouldnt you be a little upset since they had been a stable installation in your life? Would you not call at the station and feedback them? Would they not want to hear if something they did was a very bad move from their audiences perspective? I know I‘d want to know if my customers/audience was very upset with me, ideally before I‘m alone, screaming into the void.
Just my take ok this :)
A shitty Duran Duran song? You take that back!
Unless you’re talking about modern Duran Duran, in which case please continue.
That analogy doesn’t work for malicious state-managed LLMs.
Try to find an instance that bans trolls?
I am on my own instance and I ban them but if someone joins world, they’re f*cked. I feel like the communities are very lenient which is fine in normal situations but when peeps start shitting on others (be it religion, ideology or others) they should act. Just my two cents though.
Yeah.
I guess we can’t just direct friends to “Lemmy” in general and instead should direct them to beehaw.org, or your instance, or wherever there is the kind of moderation we agree with. From there our friends can see a filtered view of the communities on lemmy.world.
If the biggest instance has a libertarian mod policy that does mean “more selective” instances need to put in more work but on the positive side it does provide a more diverse pool of people and content to sift through.
Makes sense! Thanks for pointing this out. TIL :)
Interesting view, thanks
Half of the traffic everywhere is bots:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1264226/human-and-bot-web-traffic-share/
Holy father christmas! Thats dystopian. Thanks for mentioning it.
Yes, lemmy.world is a mess right now
I‘m very happy that I‘m not totally alone with that opinion.
Nah, things seem okay. I’ve noticed more politics misinformation since it’s an election year.
That might be the reason for what I‘m seeing. Everything seems very politicised.
Toxic discourse in large Internet communities predates Reddit, even. It’s been a thing since before there was the web, becoming significantly more likely to find once you get to a critical mass of people.
It’s a good time in the political cycle to find and contribute to niche communities. I almost never come across this kind of thing because that’s where I hang out.
Good tipp! Thanks! I‘ll try that.
You’re not imagining it. I’m pretty sure you can see regular work from propaganda teams on lemmy. I’d love to see the backed logs to confirm it.
They tend to work in very hostile teams to brigade topics.
I‘m encountering it this exact moment in a piracy discussion where some very abusive people start arguing for IP and excuse the blatant manipulation by calling limited licenses „buying“ and „owning“.
It’s interesting right?
I’m thinking the architecture of the fediverse makes it particularly vulnerable to these sorts of attacks.
I’m pretty sure I’ve spotted bots circle jerking on some subjects also which makes me think there’s a few different sources.
Very interesting indeed.
I‘m starting to report, block and ban accounts from being viewed on my instance that use abusive language but from a systemic standpoint we should find a design solution to make this work.
Reddit had karma for this reason among others. People needed to make helpful contributions to prove they are able to function in the group.
For many reasons this is not implemented in the fediverse but a design solution would be good.
If I was designing an anti troll/bot system I’d implement a few things. Let’s call any bad actor on here a bot/troll or broll for ease.
- Reputation based posting isn’t a bad idea if carefully done
- When a broll is banned any users from the same ip are flagged a suspect and a subsequent ban causes delayed posting from that ip. If a VPN the instance host list has the same effect applied. Exceptions based on Reputation.
- You can check if text is ai/llm generated and an automated api check before posting and immediate ban if found.
- Checks on if a user posts inhumanly fast or is oddly active etc would be sensible.
- Any broll system has to be adaptive and measures taken need to be kept secret (this post for example).
You can check if text is ai/llm generated and an automated api check before posting and immediate ban if found
If this LLM-detection function ever results in false positives, this system will be banning innocent people.
Also there are many, many cases where a person openly displays results from an LLM, without it being in any way antisocial.
The odds of someone coming up with the same sentence as an llm within common sense bounds of time far exceed winning the lottery or getting struck by lightning.
Your second point is straight up nonsense. This platform is for humans to interact. The use of bots is inherently deceptive.
Fascinating to have someone argue for them. I think the backend logs will be pretty illuminating.
I don’t know what a person “coming up with the same sentence as an llm” would have anything to do with this unless the LLM detection is based on direct string comparison.
The use of bots is inherently deceptive
Nope. I can say:
Here’s what GPT-4 generated when I gave it that prompt: “[some LLM output that would get them banned by the machine we’re proposing to build]”
That is not deceptive. But it would be detected by this system and result in them being banned. Because you guys are gung-ho to build a powerful head-cracking machine and didn’t think of an obvious edge case.
Maybe because I don’t use Lemmy at real bot hours, I haven’t seen them. Maybe see a spam bot every other day.
I also tend to sort by top 6 hours or top 12 hours so a lot of low effort content gets filtered out.
I also don’t consider people who make off the wall comments or hold opinions I disagree with or think are uniformed or stupid as trolls.
The other thing is that I comment with the philosophy that not every comment signifies a response and so if a reply is a troll or in bad faith, I just keep scrolling.
I agree with most of this. Some might just be my hours being spot on.
But trolls and other idiots often dont turn out to be just that in the first response. I often give people the benefit of the doubt. If they start splurging no thought opinions or such I try to understand, maybe try to debate them. But some people repeat the same stuff over and over as if putting fingers in their ears. If I point it out it gets worse quickly.
So I‘m not exclusively dealing with bots and trolls. Its also very ignorant people who very much dislike being proven wrong or get their opinion challenged.
I’ve seen two trolls recently, but you can see them from very far away, and they post in general ask communities like AskLemmy or No Stupid questions.
On smaller communities, they are not around that much. And I don’t go to news or politics communities.
Can relate. I will probably have to just leave communities that enable this sort of behavior.
