this post was submitted on 10 Apr 2024
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Asklemmy
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People do report stuff, get yelled at by the mods, and then get banned by the admins for abuse of the reporting system, or mod abuse for getting clarification.
So if you do what you are supposed to, you get banned.
Would be better if moderation was actually taken seriously and the admins don’t excuse terrible mod behavior.
Those sound like extremely edge cases and are not a good reason to not justify not reporting anything.
Moderators are volunteers and most of them simply want to make their communities better, so they do take these reports seriously. Plus at this stage Lemmy lacks robust tools to help them accomplish this. The very least general users can do is flag problem comments and accounts to help them out.
There’s posts about mods complaining about users using the report button as a “super downvote” you go to those posts, there are people legit trolling in them and the content is still there.
The excuse is, Lemmy needs content, so they are very loose and liberal in applying moderation like that against users that add content.
I’ve had an admin defend a mod when I reported them with “they aren’t as bad as some of the others”. So Lemmy admins know they have moderation issues, if they fix it, they lose their content and their free labor. So they just turn a blind eye and let the mods do what they want, which is quite frankly nothing. And when asked they report you to the admins. They really only deal with illegal stuff unfortunately, since they have to or they can get in shit personally.
Trolls unfortunately add content, which is desperately needed. Some communities deal with it, larger let it go for discussion and metrics sake. Lemmy isn’t perfect, and we should be able to discuss its darker side.
Are you talking about Lemmy.ml specifically or Lemmy in general?
Ugghh that’s a good point, this was .world for admins, but the moderation issues seem to be non instance specific.
Also makes me wonder if some of the trolling is dealt with and its federation issues then…
Still, the amount of trolling comments, and users being banned for pretty frivolous things isn’t a good look.
There's also a fine line between legitimate trolling and having unpopular or dissenting opinion. I've seen plenty of threads where 2 or more people are arguing about a given topic, and while the unpopular opinion isn't being inflammatory or breaking any rules, they still get their comments removed after being down voted into the ground. It's happened to me as well.
My only contention with this is finding a way to foster conversation without censoring opinions just because they're not widely shared. As long as the argument is in good faith, mods shouldn't be removing content they don't agree with, only those that are inflammatory, overly insulting, blatant trolling/shilling, or breaking community rules.
I think it depends. You can be a really polite Baptist preacher being very earnest in !196 about how you think people should behave, and that’s just not what they want. Even in a discussion thread, writing a nonspecific defense of FGM, for example, is going to be offensive enough to probably disrupt the conversation, and I can see removing it.
I’m not suggesting that’s what’s happening; just saying that I like your idea, with some tweaks
Trolling is simply noise and garbage to dispose of when it becomes an attack on the person. It brings nothing of value and it diminishes the value of everything else it pollutes.
Trolling doesn’t ONLY require personal attacks…. That’s the issue, mods only step in when things progress too far and have reached that point….
What mods/admins are doing this? I would not stick around a community or instance run like this. Luckily with the Fediverse, you can choose what instances or communities you want to go to, you're not stuck in the same way you were on Reddit. Use that power - don't let abusive mods/admins be your host.
Moderating comments, even trolling is suppressing free speech. So it goes against the entire purpose of fediverse, it’s an issue with its own system. So people say to report them, but they won’t act on reports since just having an opinion that goes against the narrative can fall under free speech. And moderation it will create other issues.
Go elsewhere, smaller communities, less content, more moderation so less content, it’s all potential issues all the way down that are created by itself.
The purpose of the Fediverse is not free speech or censorship-resistance. It's more like to have a choice in your social media landscape and to make it more democratic, via users choosing what server to use. If you want a server that doesn't supress free speech, join one like that or make it yourself. If you want a more strictly moderated server, go to one like that or make it yourself.
And yea your choice may not be as popular so maybe there'll be less content, but you'll be in the area you chose and maybe others will follow you over time.