OK peeps, I am seeing a lot of flamewars lately which go off-topic of this comm. I am also getting dozens of reports about people reporting each other for “rudeness” or “trolling”. I don’t want this comm to start becoming a drama haven, so I want to try and prevent people getting worked up like this.
What do you think about me starting to deploy strategic 1-day bans for people who I notice are getting into flamewars? If not, what else do you suggest to help people remain civil?
Don’t just upvote/downvote. I won’t take these into account, I want actual comments about this to better make a decision.
banning people for reporting seems like a way to discourage reporting.
but banning for flaming and trolling sounds reasonable, especially if it’s a short ban. even a 6 or 12 hour ban might send the right message.
Eh, you’d be amazed how many people use reports to say “I don’t like this, and it’s your problem” instead of it actually being a community rule violation. I don’t moderate any busy lemmy C/s, but I did some high traffic reddit subs, and I’d even say that half of reports were just trying to get a mod to shut down the other person in a slap fight. Then they’re amazed when you shut both parties down lol.
I definitely think that anything more than a one day ban for single reports is way over the line. And I’d prefer warnings with an explanation be the default.
Is it if they’re flooding your feed with nonsense reports? That stuff takes time to sort through, and the time spent sorting through it takes away from other moderation duties.
Besides, if you’re only banning excessive reporters like that, aren’t you only discouraging people who are actively abusing the report button?
EDIT: to be clear, I mean a temp ban, not permanent one
it’s my feeling, and I’m open to disagreeing about this, that it should be encouraged to report bad behavior, and the only use of the report button i would characterized as “abuse” is something like actual automated spam or opening a users page and reporting everything regardless of content or context.
being wrong about whether content does or should break community standards should not be a bannable offense.
I mean, that’s a fair way to look at it, but if I was going through a bunch of reports about what were clearly innocuous and inoffensive posts, and someone was reporting them simply because they were upset over each of them somehow, I’d still feel like my time was being wasted.
People have a right to feel certain ways about things, but they don’t necessarily have a right to dictate to an admin/mod what is “reasonable” and if that mod feels like they’re reporting posts unreasonably (like an excessive amount of what are clearly meant to be inoffensive posts), it may not matter how the user feels if the mod feels its a waste of their time. It’s definitely at each mods discretion how they choose to deal with such things.
obviously I can’t tell a mod what to do, but I think they should keep the channel open.
does the moderation backend need sorting and batch tools? it should not be arduous to moderate a flame war.
I don’t know, I don’t do a ton of modding myself (only mod one dead community, go Joe Pera!), I’m just trying to visualize being an unpaid moderator who has limited time in their day and is dealing with a user who is being unreasonable. I don’t think a temp ban for that is an unreasonable response, but that’s just me and I can see why you’d want people to feel like the channel was open to them.
Also, I’m trying to think of the particular mod who posted this, who moderates many communities as well as being the admin (and I think owner) of the entire dbzer0 instance. I just think they probably already deal with a flood of stuff already, and I personally do think silly egregious reports eventually can begin to bog someone down with what I would call “unnecessary work” when the work is having to take the time to read the report, evaluate it, and just to file it away doing nothing.
Maybe the backend is cleaner than I expect, maybe it takes less time than I expect, but it’s part of why I personally really only try to report truly egregious stuff and not waste moderator time. I just worry about their real lives and how much effort they put into these communities for us for free and don’t like to see them bogged down with more when it can impact their mental health make them burn out.
Lemmy’s mod report feature sucks absolute ass. It is simply one big long list of each report one by one, with zero ability to sort or filter or do anything else useful besides separate those that are “resolved” already vs. those not yet. And also you cannot even access those reports from your home instance, unless it is the same identical one to where the community is also located.
There is a reason why so few people are willing to become mods on Lemmy: the tools are barely functional for the job. Which is how we end up with super mods who handle many communities at once, like if they have a job situation where they can quickly check in on things every ten minutes or so.
this is really good feedback. maybe a client could be developed for mods, that would do client side sorting.
I don’t see any way to read mod reports at all in Voyager, nor could a client overcome the backend limitation in cases where reports are not even federated between instances to begin with, but yeah, it could be done? Though still, not every mod would want to use the same app, and like it would have to work for both Android and iOS.
Perhaps one of the available apps may already do so even?