It feels like the amount of both, divisive posts and ghoulish comments is rising again.
One could argue that the world has a lot of divisive stuff going on and lemmy just talks about it. But the way people post about stuff seems more oot and hateful than it has been in the past.
Not saying it is that but if I wanted to bring the Fediverse down or at least keep my customers from going there, I would sow this stuff as much as I can.
I’m blocking ghouls left right and center atm but if I ever asked a friend to join lemmy, I’d hate to think of what they would see that I dont anymore.
Do we need stronger moderation?
- Maybe ban politics from c/memes?
- Become a little more stringent on “dont be a jerk” rules in communities?
One thing that really bothers me is the collapsing “discourse”. Trying to mend fences and keep the conversation between sides going ime leads to nothing but downvotes and shitstorm.
I feel like a little more interaction (instead of intervention, at first) of the moderators would do wonders there.
Thanks for reading this rant. Have a nice day.
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I’ve certainly encountered a few of them myself. I keep reporting them.
Good idea. Thanks for commenting. Have a good one. :)
Being old enough I used to wear an onion on my belt heres my perspective. I see it like back in the day we had radio and tv. Radio often played songs you didnt like. I remember thinking how awesome it would be to have a station that only played what I liked and no “shitty” music. But alas, when a shitty song came on you changed the station or turned it down. Same with tv. They were a public good and we had to tolerate what others preferred. I see it as my personal responsibility to curate my lemmy experience and thankfully theyve given me the tools to do so. It takes 2 seconds to block a shitty user and instances that arent to my liking. This was difficult on reddit due to the size and firehose nature of it but its quite effective here, for now. Do I see comments I dont like? All the time…once. Then that user is blocked. Hopefully people who dont like the cut of my jib have blocked me as well so their experience is better tailored to them. If your expectation is the radio station never plays a shitty duran duran song youre gonna be disappointed. And in general if you try to control other people youll find yourself frustrated. Be careful who you give your time and attention to.
A shitty Duran Duran song? You take that back!
Unless you’re talking about modern Duran Duran, in which case please continue.
I completely agree. Thats why I like the fediverse so much.
But if your favorite radio station started to host lets say very divisive content more often, wouldnt you be a little upset since they had been a stable installation in your life? Would you not call at the station and feedback them? Would they not want to hear if something they did was a very bad move from their audiences perspective? I know I‘d want to know if my customers/audience was very upset with me, ideally before I‘m alone, screaming into the void.
Just my take ok this :)
That analogy doesn’t work for malicious state-managed LLMs.
I was about to left Lemmy/Kbin for good when some stupid fascists from Lemmy(grad).ml called me names and harassed me, despite the fact that I’m neurodivergent (like that would stop them from doing such actions, but anyway). And then I started blocking every community and user from those places, as well as any community/magazine about US politics or about any US topic because I don’t give a damn heck about that place. And my experience improved really well.
While I sympathize with a fellow ND, I dont think calling lemmy.ml fascist is a great idea. They might be tankies from what I hear but thats the other extreme.
Still, thanks for sharing your opinion.
Well said. Lemmygrad.ml and lemmy.ml are malicious misinformation factories supporting authoritarian governments, namely the Kremlin and CCP.
They’re worse than garbage and I’ll never recommend the fediverse to anyone, or even admit to using it, while they’re so prominent.
Out of curiosity, can you specify the topics or give specific examples of this shitty behavior you speak of? Without examples it is impossible to determine if you are discussing behavior that is straight-up pathological (e.g. name-calling) or people having a different opinion.
Okay, I did mention it in another comment but I didnt do so in the main post. Thanks for pointing it out.
I‘m talking about name calling, ad hominem attacks, ridicule, twisting words, bad faith arguments. So, mostly abusive language/rhetoric, not disagreement or different opinions.
how do you differentiate what you perceive as bad faith vs disagreement and differing opinions?
i frequently see simple disagreement here being painted as bad faith when its just… disagreement.
And to the contrary, I’ve seen people claiming blatant bad-faith behavior as “just disagreement”.
Wikipedia:
Bad faith (Latin: mala fides) is a sustained form of deception which consists of entertaining or pretending to entertain one set of feelings while acting as if influenced by another. It is associated with hypocrisy, breach of contract, affectation, and lip service.
Here are some nice examples. I can’t come up with a perfect example rn. https://www.grammarly.com/blog/bad-faith-good-faith/
It boils down to essentially playing devils advocate just to shut someone up.
i know what it is, i was asking for more specifics about what you see on lemmy.
I‘m not sure I understand your question. Do you want me to come up with examples from lemmy?
Yes
Just so everyone is aware, this is the thread OP interpreted as so abusive it would warrant banning this person across multiple instances.
In this thread, you’ll notice that another user dares to disagree with haui_lemmy. haui_lemmy interprets that as trolling, and goes on a crusade to purge the entire lemmyverse of dissent.
Nice, so now you‘re trying to discredit me somehow for disliking your way of commenting? You need help, seriously.
It kinda bugs me when one of the more prolific posters get shitty comments directed at them specifically in return for their contribution. Maybe it’s just a side effect of being a small community but for real just shut up and enjoy the memes, if you have nothing nice to say keep scrolling.
Only the wet-lipped and dry-eared are upset by trolls.
What does that even mean.
You’re not imagining it. I’m pretty sure you can see regular work from propaganda teams on lemmy. I’d love to see the backed logs to confirm it.
They tend to work in very hostile teams to brigade topics.
I‘m encountering it this exact moment in a piracy discussion where some very abusive people start arguing for IP and excuse the blatant manipulation by calling limited licenses „buying“ and „owning“.
I followed the thread you’re talking about, you might be a bit overly sensitive to what constitutes a conversation on the internet. I don’t find the trolling any worse or better today vs. last week or last year.
You might want to make an account over at beehaw, they like to stay pretty sheltered over there and have defederated from, well, pretty much everyone.
Well, I‘m not a bit overly sensitive I just dont like to be manipulated and insulted. It frankly do not care how people treat their family and friends. Having a discussion without personal attacks is normal and everything else is normalized abuse.
You mentioned them calling something buying and selling. Did they also insult and manipulate you?
Not sure if this is a sincere question.
Manipulative and degrading rhetoric is what I‘m talking about. Bad faith arguments, assuming that someone arguing in a certain way must be naive or stupid, etc.
The question is definitely meant to highlight that I think you may be exaggerating, but in that purpose it is sincere.
Sincere trolling you mean?
He didn’t seem very sincere tbh. Odd
Do you also get the feeling that this might be what we were talking about?
It’s interesting right?
I’m thinking the architecture of the fediverse makes it particularly vulnerable to these sorts of attacks.
I’m pretty sure I’ve spotted bots circle jerking on some subjects also which makes me think there’s a few different sources.
Very interesting indeed.
I‘m starting to report, block and ban accounts from being viewed on my instance that use abusive language but from a systemic standpoint we should find a design solution to make this work.
Reddit had karma for this reason among others. People needed to make helpful contributions to prove they are able to function in the group.
For many reasons this is not implemented in the fediverse but a design solution would be good.
If I was designing an anti troll/bot system I’d implement a few things. Let’s call any bad actor on here a bot/troll or broll for ease.
- Reputation based posting isn’t a bad idea if carefully done
- When a broll is banned any users from the same ip are flagged a suspect and a subsequent ban causes delayed posting from that ip. If a VPN the instance host list has the same effect applied. Exceptions based on Reputation.
- You can check if text is ai/llm generated and an automated api check before posting and immediate ban if found.
- Checks on if a user posts inhumanly fast or is oddly active etc would be sensible.
- Any broll system has to be adaptive and measures taken need to be kept secret (this post for example).
You can check if text is ai/llm generated and an automated api check before posting and immediate ban if found
If this LLM-detection function ever results in false positives, this system will be banning innocent people.
Also there are many, many cases where a person openly displays results from an LLM, without it being in any way antisocial.
The odds of someone coming up with the same sentence as an llm within common sense bounds of time far exceed winning the lottery or getting struck by lightning.
Your second point is straight up nonsense. This platform is for humans to interact. The use of bots is inherently deceptive.
Fascinating to have someone argue for them. I think the backend logs will be pretty illuminating.
I don’t know what a person “coming up with the same sentence as an llm” would have anything to do with this unless the LLM detection is based on direct string comparison.
The use of bots is inherently deceptive
Nope. I can say:
Here’s what GPT-4 generated when I gave it that prompt: “[some LLM output that would get them banned by the machine we’re proposing to build]”
That is not deceptive. But it would be detected by this system and result in them being banned. Because you guys are gung-ho to build a powerful head-cracking machine and didn’t think of an obvious edge case.
Very good ideas! Any idea if something like this already exists? If not, shall we work on something? I have some experience in python if that helps.
PieFed is an open source lemmy alternative (written in Python) that makes good use of karma/reputation, as shown in this video:
Try the demo site at https://piefed.social and check out https://join.piefed.social. Also see https://piefed.social/c/piefed_meta for recent feature announcements.
Thank you very much for sharing, I’ll keep an eye on it.
I‘m not searching for another thing to start but a way to make the current thing work. But thanks.
Thanks but not sure what’s currently implemented or even what the code base is written in 😅.
I might have a poke around and see if there’s any low hanging fruit.
Call me crazy but with a 5b ipo about to start I’d be shocked if reddit wasn’t paying some troll farms to brigade the fediverse and it’d be a shame if spez wins
Thats an interesting idea! Thank you very much for mentioning it!
We can absolutely write a bot in python and could try to use it like that. I already made a discord bot so this shouldn’t be brutally hard.
So these trolls’ tactic is to disagree with you about semantics?
No, not really.
Okay here. Since you want to mark me as a troll now, I’m just gonna stop being polite about how I do this. Because the polite way Om trying to do this is coming across to you as inauthentic, and the inauthenticity is coming across as trolling, and now you’re talking about applying this proposed mega ban hammer to me.
I don’t believe that you’re capable of seeing this clearly, and I won’t believe it until I you have linked to at least ten comments, in other threads, that you think represent this particular type of toxicity you’re complaining about.
In any given public space, the pendulum swings endlessly. Or is it just a wrecking ball? Can’t tell.
Anyway, nothing lasts forever. More so for human relationships else the divorce rate wouldn’t be as high as it is.
As products of knowledge and emotions ranging from zero to Infinity, the variety will always divide one from the other at some point. Even twins can grow to dislike each other, let alone complete strangers.
So asking for uniformity is a lost cause from the start. Civility is enforceable up to a point. And chaos is unreasonably violent.The obvious solution is compromise. Some like to give and take in turns, others to merge opinions into something that all sides agree to or something no one wants. Yet nothing is guaranteed to work because we simply aren’t built that way.
Individuals will individualize, eventually. Willingly or not.
Try to find an instance that bans trolls?
I am on my own instance and I ban them but if someone joins world, they’re f*cked. I feel like the communities are very lenient which is fine in normal situations but when peeps start shitting on others (be it religion, ideology or others) they should act. Just my two cents though.
Yeah.
I guess we can’t just direct friends to “Lemmy” in general and instead direct them to beehaw.org, or your instance, or wherever there is the kind of moderation we agree with. From there our friends can see a filtered view of the communities on lemmy.world.
If the biggest instance has a libertarian mod policy that does mean “more selective” instances need to put in more work but on the positive side it does provide a more diverse pool of people and content to sift through.
Yeah we should have ignore and reporting lists that is on an invite only basis, which then can be shared by users of said list. If you didnt get invited then you should be able to copy a users reported/ignored list to make the whole fediverse more palatable. Each bunch of list users can then cross reference each potential bad actors. Then each month each admin could implement a ban of thoses accounts and perhaps try to filter new incomers.
As the fediverse becomes more and more of a feasible alternative to corporate social media, it will be inevitable that trolls and spammers will use our platform for malicious things. All we can do is to get better at moderation, maybe somehow bust these farms.
Politics is banned from c/memes@lemmy.world
And speaking as a mod, report things. The vast majority of things I’ve dealt with as a mod were ones I saw myself or things friends sent on discord. People need to utilize the report function more often if they want moderation on things. We’re not psychic.
As for being more stringent on the not being a dick rule, no. There’s a base level of civility we expect but if we start getting super stringent on what constitutes being a dick, that’s imposing moderator will on community and its what most of us left reddit to get away from.
Lastly, it’s the Internet. Assholes exist everywhere. You are not going to escape it, ever, if you’re using public servers. It’s pretty much required to accept that fact just to use the Internet. Moderators do not exist to prune and preen social media to make it more comfortable for people. We remind people to follow the rules and act upon those who do not. If you’re not breaking the rules then we’re not going to “interact” because we have our own lives and our own posts we are interested in.
that’s imposing moderator will on community and its what most of us left reddit to get away from.
Now I’m curious how common this is, because it’s not at all why I left. I left to get away from Reddit the company. If anything I think Reddit subs tend to be moderated too leniently (which is good for Reddit, because hate is engagement)
That’s fair. It depends on the communities. Places like Tumblr and Pics had effectively no moderation which left the entire place just a shithole. But then you had places like WorldNews and StarTrek where the mods became specifically known for stirring shit and causing a boatload of problems. Hell, one particular moderator of StarTrek is the reason that so many other communities splintered off.
For me it was a lot of heavy handed moderation. The lack of moderation was frustrating too, don’t get me wrong, but I guess the communities I was most active in were ones where people were constantly pointing out how the moderators were terrible people.
Right, that makes sense. I’ve managed to avoid most of that, except for two cases where a mod grew tired of the sub and decided to ruin it. One of them involved turning it into an unironic Mussolini fan sub so at least there the admins stepped in.
Hello again Mr. Stamets! ❤️
<3
Thanks for elaborating. I didnt know the report button is not used often. Good advice. Will do just that.
As for moderation:
I‘m a mod myself (both here and on reddit) and I don‘t necessarily agree that its imposing to ask people for civility if a discussion gets heated and kneejerk reactions start popping up. But I‘m thankful for every mod that does the good work and even more so for you openly commenting about it. You’re doing important work.
Then there is „the internet“ which I think is like the world. If we were in a postapocalyptic hellscape, we‘d have no rules, no communities. Only fight to survive. But we aren’t and we do have communities and rules. Therefore, I‘d say we‘re still responsible for the stuff that happens in our tavern (for lack of a better analogy). Are we to keep the guy in the corner from saying things we dont like? No we shouldn’t, but we definitely should keep him from starting a bar fight.
This is just my opinion. Feel free to debate me on it. :)
I’d love to debate you on it, but you’re not giving me much to work with.
Generally, a mod willing to debate me is a mod I want around
Trying my hardest not to make others regret opening the app. Both for my answer and stuff that I could have moderated.
Are there any app notifications or email options to let yo know about reports? I modestly mod a couple subs and I have never found a way to reliably get report notifications unless I log in through a browser based front end.
Personally not familiar with any but I can ask around. I’m just always on PC.
I heard that someone was developing a tool to enable this
imposing moderator will on community
Rich, coming from the mod that banned me because I called him out on a shitty joke.
I don’t remember you but the modlog says you were banned for homophobic comments. So I’m gonna go ahead and say that nah, you weren’t banned for calling someone out on a joke 👍
You posted a misogynistic meme, I said “i thought we left that in 2023,” and apparently you didn’t like that so you called me a bigot and banned me. None of what I said was homophobic or bigoted. I just didn’t like your meme because it seemed like the millionth time one of us has made an “ew women” joke and it’s tired and shitty to women. So you said I’m homophobic and banned me then told me to fuck off basically.👎 Which cut me off from participating in the largest LGBTQ+ safe space on Lemmy. So yeah.
…riiiiiight. Or, and this is way more likely, you were banned for saying homophobic shit. Which is why it says banned for homophobic content. I’m going to go with the modlog reason 👍 I’ve yet to see someone on Lemmy who had something like “homophobic comments” added to their modlog ban be for no reason whatsoever.
You were cut out of that safe space because you inherently made it less safe. Of course you’re not allowed in if you’re going to go ahead and make it worse for everyone else. What insane arrogance.
I’m going to go ahead and go back to forgetting you exist now.
I mean, I have screenshots, but k.
lol they banned me for misinformation for calling theirs out. Deleted all the comments to control the dialogue as well.
Said I had proof during another exchange (they started) but the comments are deleted, admin came (yay I kinda thought) said the logs are public. Asked the mod (stamets) to show the deleted comments and the admin to show the log, or atleast how to access it, and banned again.
This place is worse than Reddit for this shit right now, you have an admin lying and hiding stuff for a mod, one they put as moderator for a bunch of communities. Thats not fishy or anything……
I would love to see this “public mod log” because their doesn’t seem to be a way to see (ALL) deleted comments on the current one.
I fully expect another ban for this, for no other reason than Stamets is a thin skinned mod who doesn’t have the emotional capability to mod, and antagonizes Lemmy users and uses their mod powers (abuse) to hide it. Its a fucking shame really, admins are letting it happen too, excusing it in a lot of cases.
I’ve said my peace, unfortunately not much more I can do. I’ll let him go Lord over his little fiefdoms as he wishes. The whole experience has totally turned me off of Lemmy TBH; I’ve literally never had this kind of issue with a mod here or on Reddit.
Stamets is the worst kind of power user. Spams garbage everywhere, argues with everyone. Fragile as glass.
Ok honestly thank you for that. I kind of gathered that from his pretty much only shitposting and attitude in his comments. Idk why but being banned because of him really bugged me.
Yeah you’re not crazy. He is provocative and cries transphobia when called out for it. Then deletes the comments that make him look bad.
Half of the traffic everywhere is bots:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1264226/human-and-bot-web-traffic-share/
Holy father christmas! Thats dystopian. Thanks for mentioning it.
Nah, things seem okay. I’ve noticed more politics misinformation since it’s an election year.
That might be the reason for what I‘m seeing. Everything seems very politicised.
Toxic discourse in large Internet communities predates Reddit, even. It’s been a thing since before there was the web, becoming significantly more likely to find once you get to a critical mass of people.
It’s a good time in the political cycle to find and contribute to niche communities. I almost never come across this kind of thing because that’s where I hang out.
