Hello I’m not a person who is affected by this community moderator but I’m posting on behalf of people who are, since they don’t seem to know of this community yet. I attempted to reach some via DM but I’m not sure they’ll respond. So I’m making this post since I feel this needs to be addressed.
Recently I was made aware of a community that appeared randomly on Lemmy.world. It seems to be a troll community given the type of content, but the reason I’m posting about it here specifically is that this mod seems to be banning anyone who points this out or goes against his narrative. Furthermore he is only using the autoremove on ban function, not removing any content the users have posted, which I believe is deliberate in attempt to prevent the content from showing up under the modlog and revealing the hypocrisy.
Some samples of comments:
Comment from: @[email protected]
Everything else you posted has been pretty cringe but what he fuck is up with this one, dude lol
comment from: @[email protected]
comment from: @[email protected]
First off, nice new community. I look forward to days of quality posts such as this./s
Second, how many Linux distros have this level of data collection, and what is their estimated market share?
All of these were retrieved from the API, even though they aren’t included in the modlogs, I could’ve included more but it’s kind of a time consuming process to look for them and retrieve them. Viewing removed comments is easier on Lemmy than it is on Reddit but it still isn’t easy.
What do you guys think, does this seem like power-tripping? Also does this person’s content seem like blatant troll content?
CC: @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected]
People who’s comments I mentioned, I CCed them so they know I did this on their behalf
it’s me!!!
Linuxsucks community? It got to be satirical!
Oh… It’s not…
It could be a place to discuss interesting points, for after all, there are legitimate points to be made. But it’s not…
The ironic part is that by creating this community the mod is actually working against his own movement because he’s resorted to trolling and power-tripping, instead of a community to discuss interesting points. Meaning less people will ultimately be willing to take him seriously.
I unfortunately am starting to lose faith in Lemmy’s desire to reduce toxicity. They just now finally banned Linkerbaan, but it took 11 months of extreme trolling in support of Trump for it to happen. Days before the election, they finally took action. The user is probably laughing his ass off, having already reached 99.9% of the users they were hoping to.
Their cherry on top is they got away with accusing people of supporting/loving genocide hundreds of times unscathed. Most of the time where I witnessed that behavior, the person they attacked hadn’t even expressed any form of support for Israel.
If you hang out in politics communities they are gonna be toxic. I don’t think that’s a fair characterisation of lemmy in general though tbh. There are plenty of wholesome communities.
Glad to hear they’re gone
Yeah, only downside is at this point we won’t know if what many had speculated would happen. After the election, a lot of us expected them to vanish.
Yeah, I’ve noticed that very often admins are very slow at dealing with these kinds of problems, also many community mods seem to protect users from receiving admin action. Which really is not good, it leads to people like Linkerbaan and CookieJarObserver being able to thrive and troll for months without issue, and only finally being banned after they’ve caused the harm months later.
I find it really stupid that Lemmy’s Devs think that reports are a fast and reasonable way of dealing with harassment
What would be the alternative? As you pointed out, it’s the admins who can be slow to act
I mean the fact that they consider registration applications to be a silver bullet just goes to show that it never occurred to them that people can and do blatantly lie on their registration applications.
What would be the alternative?
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Unless I’m missing something this seems like a significant misrepresentation of that user’s behavior. I found them to be an annoying ideologue but having strong views and a focus on a singular topic isn’t the same as trolling.
Okay well they were banned from the instance for trolling. I think many people thought they clearly were doing so.
Certainly. But I never felt that way.
Technically, they were banned for: “constant attacks on other users, sealioning and general bad faith discussions and baseless accusations” which might be adjacent to trolling but I think is a more fair and objective description of their behavior.
The problem with trolling is that it’s usually not possible to identify with certainty because it depends on a person’s intent and state of mind. In your judgment Linkerbaan was trolling. In mine they weren’t. But who is right? There’s no way to be certain, it’s just a guess based on their behavior. That’s why I don’t think it should be used in moderation decisions. It’s just too subjective.
A user who constantly accuses anyone who disagrees with them of holding horrifying offensive views is a troll in my book. I think that’s pretty reasonable.
But that’s not what trolling means. Frankly, I’m starting to think this term is doing more harm than good in building more positive, informed, and respectful online communities. Trolling can theoretically be any type of behavior that another user doesn’t like–but it has to be intended to cause those feelings. But as I said, we can’t know each others intentions, and of course, bad actors are likely to lie about them. It’s better to describe things in terms of objective actions a user took. The description you give here is a fine basis for a ban–but it’s still not possible to say it was trolling.
The reason this bothers me is that many tightly regulated echo chambers, including some highlighted on this community, accusations of trolling are levied against anyone who doesn’t toe the party line. Presentation of inconvenient or disliked facts may cause a negative emotional reaction–but that’s not trolling unless the emotional reaction was the purpose of the interaction. I think at least some of the backlash against Linkeraan was due to their treatment of other users. But at least some was also because they were not willing to let people ignore the complicity of the US and the Democratic Party in the mass killings in Gaza. I think that’s an important truth that risks being drowned out or silenced, but obviously it should be voiced in a way that is more respectful.
You cannot force me to adopt your definition of trolling, not that it would even matter what you called it.
Do you think we have a different definition? I honestly hadn’t considered that. What is your definition then?
I’m glad this community is a thing. There is [email protected] for lore, drama and debacles, which is interesting to see when there is conflict between multiple somewhat reasonable sides, but when it’s just mods behaving silly it doesn’t feel as right a place.
Well my only post was telling them to ban me, so mission accomplished I guess
I don’t think it was that big a feat, he was banning people when the comments were too vague to tell if they were pro-linux or anti-linux. Really funny, and goes to show how insecure he is in his opinions.
This is an example of a community I don’t subscribe to, because I’m not the target demographic.
I think a Linux sucks community should exist, it can exist, and if the moderator wants to remove anything about Linux not sucking that’s fine too. The way this moderator is doing it, they should just turn on mod only posting.
I looked at the community sidebar, and one of the community rules is no promoting Linux, no defending Linux, so at least it’s consistent
Lemmy needs a diverse set of voices.
Counterexample: if I go into fuck cars and talk about vehicles in any positive fashion, I’m going to get dog piled and probably banned
I’ve suggested a rule in the past, but we don’t have this rule now.
Community Manipulation
Communities should not be overly moderated in order to enforce a specific narrative. Respectful disagreement should be allowed in a smaller proportion to the established narrative.
i.e. A user should be able to (respectfully, infrequently) post/comment about a study showing marijuana is a gateway drug to !marijuana without moderation tools being used to censor that content.
There are times people wouldn’t like it, but it’d fully solve this !linuxsucks issue.
Oh, Hello voice of common sense. Been a while!
Going into subs about a specific topic to troll should get your shit removed.
I’ve had run-ins with Linuxsucks’ owner and basically only poster over on linuxmemes. They’re a troll, a contrarian, uninterested in any kind of honest or good-faith discussion, and an overall dickhead. The community is a one-man circlejerk.
You’re right about needing counterpoints, but Linuxsucks ain’t it.
I think he basically only made it because he somehow thought that if he had his own community his memes wouldn’t get as heavily downvoted, as they do on [email protected] though they’re pretty wrong about that. Pretty much all but one of their posts there on linuxsucks are getting downvoted heavily.
Maybe the just want to vent, and not get sealioned all the time
Will you though? Dogpiled? Yes, that’s just the nature of Lemmy. Banned? I have not heard of this happening but maybe I’m just ignorant.
I’ve actually been fairly fine in fuck cars, both Reddit and Lemmy editions. I actually like cars, well, some of them anyway.
The difference between [email protected] and linuxsucks is that the first one is largely a fact and logic based community about the problems with car dependency in urban areas, and car-dependent infrastructure.
linuxsucks is a single troll who’s talking shit about linux for seemingly no real reason, some of his posts are insanely illogical, and make very little sense. So yeah I definitely think these communities are anything like each other.
I don’t think you want to create an expectation that communities have to be logical and open to reasoned debate. That’s a lot of work to enforce
I don’t expect that for all communities. That would be unreasonable. Though generally, it’s preferable to not have communities with no other purpose than trolling. Which is basically all of the content in the community I mentioned in the post. These types of communities don’t really benefit anyone and can be breeding grounds for toxicity and possibly even dangerous misinformation.
I like how far backwards you’re bending over to ignore the point. You must really love windows
The point is the discussion is more valuable than being right. It doesn’t matter if I’d like Linux or not.
A point was being made, your only concern seems to be ignoring it
YDI. You know fire burns but stuck your hand in it all the same.
Reading comprehension ain’t your strong suit eh.
I guess that's not surprising
Hello I’m not a person who is affected by this community moderator but I’m posting on behalf of people who are, since they don’t seem to know of this community yet. I attempted to reach some via DM but I’m not sure they’ll respond. So I’m making this post since I feel this needs to be addressed.
I think that there are key differences between
- A community criticising something, backed up by reason and evidence. Even if it’s something popular, doubly true if there’s a circlejerk around that thing. This can and should exist.
- A community created to circlejerk against something, through insane troll “logic” and silencing any dissidence. This is fertile grounds for idiocy and misinformation, thus harmful for the society [I can go further on that if desired] and the Fediverse [ditto], and should not exist.
Sometimes the boundary between both is not clear - but this community, unless it’s a troll comm, falls cleanly into the second case. Specially given how opaque the moderator is trying to be (check how none of the removals appear in the modlog).
I think it’s very clearly a troll community since really the only person posting there is the mod, most of which are very transparently troll content, like this one hating on the idea of OpenSource and Free licenses for some really weird reason, that hasn’t actually been clarified. Someone said to me when I showed that to them that they could be an alt-right corporate shill, but I don’t have enough information to come to that conclusion. Only thing I can clearly tell is that they are very obviously a troll.
And yeah I definitely agree that these types of communities are very harmful, and definitely something we should nip in the bud before they get out of hand and start spreading disinformation, as well as fostering toxic or even dangerous sentiment.
Lol I just figured I’d respond to a random post about how Linux users are paranoid conspiracy theorists. Got banned on sight. I shoulda seen this coming…
Yea we should remove Linux from existence just to see all the things that stop working. No more internet.
Whats next? Watersucks? Unless you are drinking the closed source Coke.
It’s what plants crave:-(
People dont get notifications if you pinned them from a post, you have to do it from a comment
Oh, that’s unfortunate. Well I guess I’ll just do it in a top comment.
from their community
Their house. Their rules. You aren’t welcome everywhere. We aren’t ants.
I use arch, btw.
By your logic it seems you believe this community has no merit and that moderator power tripping isn’t a valid. You’re entitled to your opinion but many people do indeed disagree with you on that. I’d suggest blocking this community because a good amount of the posts here center on the idea that community stewards can indeed abuse their power on an instance to either obscure information pertaining to the reasons they actioned someone, or that they are banning people and removing posts to avoid being banned themselves from the instance for Code of conduct infractions on their part.
NTA your house your rules /s
Subscribed! The amount of linux fanboyism on this platform has been insane as of late to where if you even post anything factually negative (yes, Linux can get viruses) you get downvoted to hell. It’s nice to see a counter-culture sub once in a while.
As others have said, if you don’t like it, block it.
As others have said, if you don’t like it, block it.
I didn’t say explicitly that I didn’t like it or that people shouldn’t use it, just that the main mod has been power-tripping and very likely is a troll. So if you want to hang out there that’s fine. Though I wouldn’t expect any kind of content diversity there. It’s likely going to be just be the main mod making posts, which he might even give up on later. It’s also very likely he’ll ban you for a misunderstanding, since some of the people there were banned seemingly for nothing.
You’re aware of the Streisand effect, right? It actually cuts both ways. I browse all and hadn’t even heard of that sub and a lot of others probably haven’t too. But your whining about the mod and community have brought a spotlight to it which raises the amount of attention it gets, probably not in the way you’re wanting.
Are you deliberately trying to misrepresent the meaning of the post or do you legitimately not understand. I’m not telling you to not go to the linuxsucks community, go join it if you really want to. This isn’t a plea to get people not to join it. It’s a warning about their behavior. But please, feel free to go on about how I’m supposedly helping them. The goal of this post is neither to help them, nor to hurt them. It is simply to provide information.
Yeah but they moderate voluntarily so you should thank them.
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The obvious sarcasm is lost on you, huh?
oh
![[email protected] mod silently bans people from their community for disagreeing, and tries to hide the comments from being seen in the modlog.](https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/pictrs/image/9f2537e4-bfdf-43b4-b12a-0012335d0d4d.webp){kind=link}