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
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 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
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.
I think that many people here would benefit from you going further into why it is harmful to society, since people seem to be nonchalant about this issue, or worse, are dismissing the post as an opinion piece.
OK! Short version:
- Idiocy and misinformation are a vicious cycle: idiocy breeds misinformation, and misinformation makes people more likely to accept idiocy.
- Misinformation can harm people - both the individual accepting it, and the ones interacting with that individual.
- The community in question promotes both things for a specific topic, and because of #1 it’s encouraging that vicious cycle.
Long version:
What I called “idiocy” and “misinformation” there can be rephrased as “not thinking rationally” and “incorrect and/or harmful beliefs” respectively.
Thinking rationally is doing things like this:
- asking yourself “is this true?” before you believe in some claim;
- acknowledging that sometimes you simply don’t know, or you are not certain of something;
- telling apart what you want to be true from what you think to be true;
- not oversimplifying situations;
- not accepting fallacious reasoning as if it was valid; et cetera.
Thinking rationally is essential to prevent you from holding incorrect and/or harmful beliefs - because, if you have access to good and true information, and use rationality on it, your conclusions will be consistently good and true too. But only if you think rationally.
(Programmers’ analogy: if your algorithm is rubbish, then no good input saves you from getting rubbish output.)
And what you believe on has a huge impact, on both you and the people interacting with you. In some this is clear; for example, someone who believes that “all white mushrooms are safe to eat!” might get someone eating a death cap, or even eat one themself. Or, for more realistic examples:
- The peak of the COVID pandemics had people touting ivermectin as a cure for COVID (it is not) - and plenty people didn’t seek actual treatment because of that, making the disease worse for themselves and the pandemic worse for everyone.
- Political beliefs affect whom you vote on, so they’ll affect public policies, and you might end with a muppet in power that will do everything to make your life miserable (and their pockets full).
- Some people are literally persecuted and killed due to this sort of belief. Cue to the historical witch hunts.
Someone might say “isn’t this overblown in this case? It’s just a community against Looniks and freewarez!”. Well, no, it isn’t overblown. Our lives revolve around software in the XXI century, like it or not - it’s a data centre used by the hospital, it’s your morning news, it’s someone spying on you, it’s a country spying on another… all those involve software - sometimes libre software, always some sort of operating system.
But even if we disregard the above, the fact that someone is promoting lack of rational thinking (what I called “idiocy”) and incorrect beliefs (what I called “misinformation”) is bound to get people used to those things as if they were OK. Thinking rationally is not just an “I did it once, so I’m good to go”. It’s a lot like brushing your teeth - you need to create some habit to avoid the associated [mind / mouth] problems and have good [mental / buccal] hygiene.
As such, I do not think that we should give this community a free pass. Even if it’s a troll community, as both DraconicNEO and me believe it to be, it’s still promoting misinformation and idiocy, and should be handled as such.
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 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.
I’ve done that in fuckcars and not gotten banned. A lot of the users can be rabid but the mods aren’t quite vegan tier as far as I can tell.
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.
Edit: I realized after saying this that there are two fuckcars coms. The one on LW has banned like 3 people ever. The one on .ML has banned tons of people though it was hard to tell which ones were instance-wide bans since the admins love to do that over trivial BS. So depending on which com you might be right. But on LW community you can definitely go there and argue that cars are great and harmless as long as you’re nice about it. I personally think that’s healthy.
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.
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.
Sure, we lost a prominent one. But we will always have plenty of MAGAs cosplaying as leftists just from federating with .ml.
That account. I doubt they are gone.
They have two other accounts, one on .ml and one on discuss.online. Wouldn’t surprise me if there were sockpuppets as well, it always seemed like the same few users would always show up to agree with whatever they posted.
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.
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?
deleted by creator
They just now finally banned Linkerbaan
Good fucking riddance.
They finally banned them? It’s about time, they were insufferable.
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?
Any review of his post history would show that above all, Linkerbaan was pro-Palestinian.
Many users on lemmy.world seem to think any criticism of the Biden Administration’s support of Israel’s Genocide in Gaza and deliberate war crimes (which Israel often brags about) is somehow supporting Trump.
One of the reasons I left reddit was the circlejerking that went on there but Lemmy.world is giving reddit a run for it’s money.
Yeah it’s an issue. But I find the leftist instances as bad or worse than LW in terms of the group-think. As long as you’re polite, at worst you get downvoted or insulted on LW but on Lemmy.ml you can be banned from the whole instance just for stating certain historical facts. The issue with Linkerbaan was they were quite rude in presenting their views.
Unfortunately, I’ve come to believe it’s a direct result of the nature of these platforms. I think we need innovation to create more positive and pluralistic communities. The platform itself incentivizes bad behavior, but what if it incentivized good behavior instead?
Agreed [email protected] is a far superior community in so many ways, best part of all though, they’re not tolerant of slur usage. Which is more than I can say about the one I mentioned in the main post unfortunately.
Interesting to see people who argue for free speech but also are against it.
Where did you get the idea we were “freeze peach”? I’m certainly not, nor are most people here. Most of us very firmly believe in the idea that certain types of speech is absolutely unacceptable, after all when the intolerant are tolerated, tolerance dies.
I don’t know where you got the idea that we’re free speech advocates or how you thought that was at all relevant to this discussion. FYI most Lemmy instances aren’t free speech advocates, and do firmly believe in moderation of unacceptable speech, which does often includes tolling, disinformation, and bigotry (including homophobia, transphobia, racism, ableism, etc.).
Maybe it’s probably a good idea not to make such assumptions about people or places, since you end up making an ass out of yourself when you do, and potentially exposing your beliefs when you might not want to.
Archived Link containing your comment just in case you delete it: https://archive.ph/gIDOg
Guys definitely trolling or not right. Straight up agreed that Linux is probably mentioned too often but given this sites origins, it shouldn’t be surprising a lot of people advocate for it here. @[email protected] banned me for it. Sad guy.
Edit: Bizarrely enough the guy used to comment in Linux communities. Including, ironic enough, a comment shitting on a distro for being “new user friendly” but not really much easier to use. I guess when their takes were met with disagreement they decided yelling into the void and banning dissenters was a better option.
I guess he was under the impression that if he ran a community he could make posts and not get as heavily downvoted for his bad takes as he did in the linux communities. Doesn’t seem to be working out for him, his posts are still heavily downvoted despite him banning anyone who disagrees with him in comments. He hasn’t gotten any support for it from others, the only other person besides him who posted in that community is a person who seems to actually support linux,
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:-(
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…
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.
it’s me!!!
Recently blocked that community and person, once it became unavoidably clear it’s not a gag. Just a trolling asshole extraordinaire, picking a fight with like half of Lemmy, and worst of all, doing a shite job of it.
He’s currently sunk to using a slur in his memes. Probably thinking it makes him sound cleaver but it just makes him sound immature. Ah well, at least it’ll probably contribute to their community or account getting booted faster. Trolling can be overlooked, but slurs are very often a no-no.
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.
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.
I guess it’s fine it exists as a site. But, what a juvenile, immature thing.
But it’s not a good fit for those comments. If they want to have a little community to hate on Linux and ban everyone who doesn’t what is the problem?
So the main purpose of these posts is to make people aware of such communities for what they are, so they are aware and don’t assume they are something else more redeeming due to a lack of any dissent about or against them. That’s the purpose of [email protected].
Though when it comes to troll communities like this one there are indeed some problems, the biggest one is that troll communities do often become breeding grounds for toxicity, bigotry, and even disinformation.
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
![[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}