This one is both upsetting and weird.
So there was a user on ponder.cat who’s been spamming posts. Like a lot. 58 per day, on average. Not 58 comments. 58 posts.
I started seeing a little scattering of reports about it, mostly just figured it was the mods’ business to deal with, and then finally today I actually really took a look at what they were doing and realized it was way over the top. Pretty much everyone in the comments agreed when someone brought it up.
A 25 day old account with 1,400+ posts? What the actual fuck? My entire goddamn feed is this one account…
Touch grass. Good lord. You’re carpet bombing multiple communities with repeats of the same crap.
The user was not receptive.
lol.
I guess people here do not know how to block an account.
:)
Is that a compliment or a rant?
May I introduce you to Lemmy block function.
If you don’t like my posts then block me and you will never see them again. As simple as that.
That’s a bunch of bullshit. The voting was about as you would expect. I said to the user:
That’s not how it works. If you’re interfering with the average Lemmy user’s experience, you don’t get to claim it doesn’t count because each individual person would be able to block each individual problematic account, if they wanted to have a good experience. Honestly, these people have a point. You have been posting an average of 58 posts per day. That’s too much. I post a ton, and that’s about 10 times more than me, and I’ve gotten multiple complaints about posting too much in particular communities. The handful of times it’s happened, my reaction was “Oh my bad what sounds like an acceptable level” and then to more or less stick to an acceptable level. Getting snarky with people who are asking you to cool it is very bad. Please stop posting so much. Anything about 10-15 posts per day starts to feel really excessive to me. Definitely don’t be dismissive about people’s complaints to you about it.
They rejected my suggestion, so I sent them a DM that was a little more direct about it: Stop doing this if you want to keep your account on my instance.
Then, for some reason, they deleted their account on their own.
Well, that was weird, but at least it’s all resolved and we can all get back to what we were doing. Or wait… what’s happening now?
I wasn’t expecting “making sure we make a safe space for the spammers by banning people who complain about spam” to be an important moderation duty, but I guess in the bizarro world that is !news@lemmy.world moderation philosophy, it makes perfect sense.
https://lemmy.world/modlog/1347
@Ghyste@sh.itjust.works
Oh hey, I was wondering if this might show up here.
I will admit that I was aggressive in calling them out, but I’d seriously had enough of scrolling through All and seeing nothing but their name on everything, on top of seeing the same post on 3-5 different communities.
Language aside, I believe my concerns were reasonable enough and clearly stated. Power users of that nature can control what everyone on this platform is exposed to, potentially manipulating opinions and injecting disinformation. Lemmy is still small enough that a handful of people could potentially influence the entire user base. Vigilance is key.
My remaining concerns are 1) There are still other accounts with identical behavior that have not been addressed and 2) I have seen accounts like this one cycle through instances, and I expect we’ll see a new account begin the same behavior from somewhere else soon enough.
Quite amusing that Cat deleted their account though. Exactly the sort of behavior you’d expect from someone just innocently posting content, right?
Beyond that, I could see a temp ban for my language. But 15 days? Yeesh. It was actually removed a short time ago so I guess another mod got a look at things.
Here’s the ban explanation, basically saying “spammers and suspicious activity is a-okay, and how dare you say anything about it”
Because an admin threatening to ban you for being too active is surely something that makes you feel warm and welcome there. This is the kind of reductive, uncharitable take you see on the VAC forums on Steam, I’m surprised you’re expressing such a baseless bad-faith claim here about said person, not a good look for you.
I’m not surprised they deleted their account upon threatening to be banned for being too active, I would probably do the same thing. Especially with my past experiences with @PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat, he seems like a pompous uptight control freak. Not the kind of person I want having access to my email address and my last known IP logins.
If you don’t like me saying any of this about you @PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat you know exactly what to do about it 🔨
“You can interact with the fediverse how you like. Also, we’re banning you for interacting with the fediverse in a way we don’t like.”
Dude, you’re fine. Full stop.
Lemmy.world is the only instance that does this super-weird moderation philosophy of actively refusing to take action against people who are obviously objectively pissing off the vast majority of people, but then taking action against users who get understandably pissed and react in any way that’s “uncivil.” It’s bizarre and unnatural. They also like to send condescending messages about how we’re the weird ones, if we have a problem with it, and they’ve figured it all out from their higher perspective, and everything they did was right.
Don’t let them gaslight you into thinking that it was wrong to be irritated about it. It is better if people speak up about people causing problems. Since the mods are committed to not doing anything about it for some ridiculous reason. IDK, I’ve ceased trying to understand what’s behind it and just don’t much participate in lemmy.world anymore. I only even became aware of this situation because I saw reports about spam that was coming from one of my users.
I can be a cockhead sometimes, but neither you or I was being in any way unreasonable anywhere in that thread. You’re allowed to have human emotions, including irritation. If you want my conflicted-of-interest opinion.
Yeah. Being able to make new anonymous accounts and be as much of a cock as you want until someone’s motivated to fix you individually after a long time of you getting the benefit of the doubt, which only solves the problem for a few minutes until you make a new account, is a problem. What the solution is I have no idea.
I mean this is how it’s all supposed to work. I don’t think anyone needs to get 100% of the calls correct. They’re all volunteers, they’re doing an important job, it’s not fair to jump down anyone’s throat if they make a misjudgement through lack of information or not wanting to spend an hour getting up to speed, or anything.
Most of the reason I sound pissed off about it, above and beyond just a “hey I think someone should take another look at this”, is the overall condescending tone of “we never did anything wrong, we know more than you” that accompanies every dogshit moderation decision like a little dollop of frosting on the turd. It seems guaranteed to ensure that they won’t learn anything from any given instance where someone did mess up, because they already decided they’re a special type of people who are empowered to come down and need to educate all the rest of us.
Pretty common irl, ppl that are constant problems get away with shit because its expected, anyone retaliating because they reached their breaking point looks insane in comparison
Right there with you on all of this. I actually just said as much in reply to Java’s comment to you.
To summarize: “They did nothing wrong and we knew nothing about it”.
And trust me, if speaking out like this is the only thing that results in action being taken I’ll continue to do so, though it would be nice to see that change.
This fails to at all explain why the block button would not have solved your problem with zero drama.
You’re not a leader in that community? Petition the community and become one. Don’t want to be an agent of change? Join another community. There are so many outlets to getting this user out of your feed that don’t involve you posting comments of negative sentiment like you are some kind of guerilla police force.
Especially with a community as tended toward toxicity and slapfights as this one, I absolutely understand the motivation to preemptively remove threads that veer into the off topic than let them fester, especially if it’s happening a lot.
YDI sorry :( next time I would make a meta thread or just block the offensive user.
The upvotes for this person’s point of view were pretty much unanimous. Most people clearly didn’t see it as negativity. Also, reports of the original user for spamming or unreliable sources are pretty common. IDK how the !news@lemmy.world rules are written, but in most internet communities, spamming the feed with low-quality content in large quantities is a violation of how you’re supposed to do things.
Also, the slapfight was not removed. One side of it only was removed.
Doesn’t matter. If you make a meta petition thread next time you might have more luck. I don’t want to see flame wars enabled just because they get lots of upvotes. Make a petition post to ban users and raise awareness. Don’t put it in the comments.
If I had wanted to ban this user, I would have just done so, instead of talking about it. They’re on my instance (or were).
I think talking out issues is a good thing. A lot of people are capable of doing that without it becoming some kind of big debacle. We might have been going in the “ban” direction, if the conversation really remained at an impasse, but the only part of the whole event that really irritated me and led to the post was the least blameworthy user getting a two-week ban, and the spam staying up. Oh, and also my stuff getting deleted and the spam staying up. Bro WTF.
I know you and I have a difference of opinion on it, and that’s all good, but you’re not going to convince me that this user was not spamming, or that I need to respect the mod’s judgment about it when to me that judgement seems clearly not well-thought-out or credible.