To be clear, not talking about this community, obviously 😛.
What’s the point of writing down rules, if mods just do what they want? But I suppose that’s the risk you take when you call someone a liar in a small community; they might be a mod.
Edit: I’m not trying to say that mods suck, they perform a useful and often thankless job. Just that it can be difficult for small communities to get a healthy number of good mods, which can become a problem.
I got into an argument in the main Technology community a couple weeks or so back and while I admit that it got too heated so that both of us broke the “be excellent to each other” rule, I still feel that an immediate 3-day ban with no warning or notification (I had to check the modlog to find out why I suddenly couldn’t comment there) in a group where I’d never broken the rules before was ridiculous.
Didn’t help any that the mod almost immediately unbanned the other guy who had been equally unexcellent during the exchange and initially got the same ban and left mine in place…
I get the feeling you’re speaking from experience
Your honor, the prosecution is sullying the defendant’s reputation
Your honor, the prosecution just hit me with a whip
Lol perhaps 😅
It was a small community dedicated to shit talking another community, neither of which I was part of. A few posts showed up in my feed and one had a take I thought was kinda unreasonable, so I commented. I had a nice discussion with one community member, but OP came in hot. After a half-hearted effort to try to defuse, and being blatantly lied to in a few replies, I just told him he was a conniving liar.
A few days later I tried to comment on a different post, but I was banned.
Not a big deal, I’m not invested in either community, but it made me think of the struggles growing Lenny from these small nascent communities, into more more mature communities.
Ad hominem attacks generally result in bans in most communities from what I’ve seen. This is the way it should be.
That’s not an ad hominem, though. If someone says something, and you dismiss it and call them a liar, thats an ad hominem. If they tell a bunch of lies, and you label them a liar, that’s not an ad hominem. That’s accurately describing the person based on their choices.
Calling someone a liar is absolutely and always an ad hominem, because it labels their character rather than pursuing their argument.
You can call their words lies and attack those words and their intent, but once you start labelling you are looking to subvert it and attack character by assuming malicious intent.
Which you’re free to assume, but that doesn’t excuse you from the fallacy.
I’m ok with that.
If someone repeatedly and probably tells untruths, and then doubles down when confronted with evidence, I’m ok making that leap to calling them a liar.
It’s okay to be okay with it, it’s even better when there is convincing evidence. I’m just saying you can skip the fallacy by attacking their argument/lie, which you have to do regardless if you want to conject that they are liar.
However it still implies that they are a liar in some habitual or further-reaching sense. This is not easy to prove. Did they lie before? What were those lies and how can you prove them so? Will they lie in the future? How can you know for sure? These are the questions that make it a fallacious label as it frames character rather than argument, and it just seems a bit … dull and irrelevant, when you can attack the lie just as easily.
We’re pretty much all strangers online, correct?
If something is posted that is provably false, it is provably false. It doesn’t matter if the poster regularly posts accurate things about another subject. The post would still be provably false, even if the poster was normally truthful about barley.
Imo, if someone wants to be seen as honest, the onus is on them to act honestly. If you act in a way that’s dishonest, people will likely acknowledge that you’re acting in a way that’s dishonest. If their only experience of you is through you being dishonest, it only makes sense that they’ll think that you’re dishonest.
No one is owed being considered as an honest and trustworthy person. If you do lie, you should expect the people who you lied to to no longer trust you. Why would they? That’s not a reasonable expectation to have.
Being considered as an honest person is one of those things that you kind of have to do to earn. If you act dishonestly, it would be silly to expect other people to still consider you as an honest person. You don’t get to mislead people and then become upset when they don’t believe you anymore. That isn’t rational.
It’s pretty easy to avoid being labaled as a liar online, tbh. Verify your stuff before you post it. Don’t double down against solid evidence, especially without any of your own. Don’t make stuff up. Accept and acknowledge that you can be wrong sometimes, and strive for the correct answer instead of the one that “wins” the argument for you.
Misinformation is dangerous, and it deserves to be called out. Misinformation can cause a lot more harm than someone occasionally being called a “liar” online by a random stranger.
I would also argue that most people probably haven’t really had problems with being called a “liar” online.
If the misinformation is about how many seeds an orange has, people probably won’t care too much, as it doesn’t really cause a lot of harm. That type of misinformation usually just gets passively corrected.
If the misinformation ends with someone else suffering, it will likely get called out harshly, and probably deservedly so.
I don’t know what’s happened to cause you to dislike people being called liars to this extent, but there is a good reason for people doing that sometimes. I’m not going to stalk your page or comments, so idk where you personally fall on that. Calling someone a “liar” is similar to calling someone “dishonest”.
Sorry, but that’s crap. Questioning the credibility of a liar is not automatically fallacious reasoning or an ad hominem. Attacking their character instead of arguing against their points is an ad hominem fallacy. Pointing out the consistency of lies from a single source and then extrapolating out to question the validity of future statements of fact is rational, logical, and reasonable. It’s perfectly valid to label a liar when they repeatedly tell lies, as long as you can support the label by proving they are lying.
I mean, if some lies, and I come with receipts and tell them that they’re bad for doing so, I should get a ban? That doesn’t seem right.
My main account got a temp ban for 14 days, the first 3 days I just thought Lemmy is broken, again. My feed was lost, but “all” worked.
A notice or a simple warning would be nice the next time.
Yup, I got a 30 day ban & still don’t know why. Someone must’ve just gotten butthurt lol. I’m probably gonna make the same mistake again ¯_(ツ)_/¯
There are potentially 3 different groups of people that may ban you for a comment. If you break a community rule, a moderator may ban you as you would expect from reddit. However, since reports also notify the admins of the community instance and the admins of the instance of the reporter, you may end up banned by an admin if they believe you are breaking an instance rule.
The modlog is great for transparency, but lemmy should also make it clear what group has banned you and why. I haven’t been banned before so I’m not sure what that process looks like currently though.
This is my first time. I’m not even sure where to find the modlog in jebora.
And yeah, notifying me that an action has been taken against me and the reason for that action would help me understand that I’ve done something wrong, what it was, and how to modify my behavior.
A ttrpg called .dungeon got a remaster recently and I keep coming back to one of the screenshots on the store page, because I’m such a big fan of the rules for community moderation it enumerated:
#5 is the worst rule there. I’ve been called that for the most milquetoast of statements. You really have to be more specific. This community sounds like an annoying pain to be a part of tbh, I don’t have time to feel like I’m stepping on glass every day
Stop lickin boots then
Nothing says “well-moderated community” quite like vague, easy-to-bend rules!
Nothing says bootlicking by applying the same bad-faith thinking you accuse others of having without caring about the fact that humanity has had to operate on good faith the entire time it’s existed.
Define “bootlicking” please.
Antidisestablishmentarianism. That’s functionally what it is.
That should be in the rules instead of “bootlicking,” then. Well-defined rules make it harder to enforce them unfairly. The fewer questions the community has to ask about guidelines, the easier it is to follow them.
Thank you for answering in good faith, by the way.
Often the mods are arbitrary and inconsistent. Moderation can really suck sometimes
Many many years ago I modded a few small reddit subs, and it was a horrible job. You’d set up these rules, and some tween edgelord d-bag would test you to see how much they can push. Some comments deserve an insta-ban with no warning and no debate.
I don’t know what happened to OP, and plenty of mods let the tiny amount of power inflate their heads past the point of reason. But I think of modding like I think of parenting. I’m not going to criticize someone else’s methods, because I’m sure as shit not going to do it for them.
You’d set up these rules, and some tween edgelord d-bag would test you to see how much they can push.
You can just call those people buttheads and hit them with short bans until they get the message. Really, you can hand out 3-day bans like candy. It’s infinitely more useful than any form of 3-strike punishment game or kneejerk permaban.
I think this is good, as long as the user gets informed a) they they’re banned and b) what rule they broke.
A warning first would also be nice, especially if it’s in the community rules 😛
Reddit’s automatic mesages on mod action were a positive and arguably necessary feature.
But if bans are long enough to annoy and short enough to frustrate, they basically are the warning. Less gun-to-your-head, more spritzing a cat in the face.
I modded a Discord for a Gamesworkshop video game and it was like that. It really boils down to whether or no people see it as benefit or nevessary burden. I was offered the mod by devs for making some guides and took it because i knew my discomfort with weilding that power would be for the benefit of the community. I would bend over backwards to not take things personally or react but alot of edgelords still made it into an “us vs them” mentality.
I’ve also been permabanned from a steam game hub by power tripping mods who couldnt handle someone calmly disagreeing with them and thought they had the right to insult me and ban me for standing up for myself, then pretend like i was the one who was in the wrong for not eating their shit with a smile. (Distant Worlds 2/Slytherine Games)
It’s like being in politics, you gotta find people who feel obligated to do it as a public service and not those who have any desire for power.
Arbitrary is fine - there’s a reason we have humans do this. But any enforcement of bad rules will always suck.
“Be nice” is a bad rule.
“Be nice” is a recipe for failure, and it always winds up protecting mildly cautious assholes. If you see someone reply ‘so you think [insane garbage unrelated to parent comment]?’ and the accused shoot back ‘shut up,’ and you only remove the person brushing off that troll, your forum is for trolls. That is who you’ve protected. That is what you’ve encouraged. That is how things will go.
If you think the right answer is to always expend great effort peeling apart that disinformation, you do not know what trolling is.
It’s outright insane, in communities about serious topics. If your forum’s about knitting - yeah, you can expect and demand televisable language. The vibe is properly casual. But if you deal with politics then you’re going to get people being called subhuman, and if you don’t come down ten times harder on sneering bigots than their pissed-off victims, you’re not preventing abuse, you’re enabling abuse.
Trying to enumerate all the ways someone could deserve a time-out is a fool’s errand. You can be mercilessly rude with nothing but a thumbs-up emoji. Or “Great Save!” More importantly - some vitriol is justified. Be human, god dammit, and spend thirty seconds figuring out if someone’s being a crank or merely dealing with cranks. If you think there’s never any reason for one user to tell another where to shove it, then you are wrong and you should quit.
Yes! I didn’t wanna say mods suck. It is an important and often thankless job.
Just that small communities without many mods are at risk of getting a bad apple.
Yay! The whole Reddit experience, but without warning…
meh if you’re being a shit starting nazi fuckwit I’m all for just banning and moving on.
First they came for…
They in this case being the fucking nazis, who first came for the trans people, and then the communists, the socialists, the trade unionists, Jewish people, etc
Why? Because internet.
A lot of communities dedicated to politics arent dedicated to political discourse.
They mostly are enforced echo chambers. At best.
I didn’t get a ban, but definitely had a post “disappeared” with no explanation because I had the audacity to mention the extreme anti-Israel bias around here.
That’s one of the real problems I see so often, moderators feel strongly their side is right therefore anyone on the other side MUST be a bad actor and therefore it’s good to get rid of them using any means necessary - I’ve seen the same happen with people arguing against just stop oil and various other similar things - in the mods minds they’re just getting rid of bad faith posters and evil agents but in reality they’re silencing anyone who disagrees.
Some improvements I’d like to see, but maybe I’m missing something and could be a bad idea
- The submitter gets notified if an action is taken on content they’ve submitted or on their account.
- Define rules with a tally of how many times a user breaks each of them, with well-defined consequences that can be programmed.
- The addition of polls
- Restrict polls to users already subscribed to the community at the time of the poll creation, or with a minimum of xx days subscribed and/or xx amount of submissions, upvotes, etc
- Have the rules voted by the community, and moderators elected/impeached by its community.
I implement the first two and the last rules in all the communities I moderate. Everyone gets either a message or a comment if they break the rules/I remove their comment/I give them a warning. I also reply to the vast majority of mod reports made, explaining what action I’ve taken and why. All my communities have a one-warning-then-you’re-banned rule, but bans are rarely permanent.
I repeatedly state that I’m looking for moderators, that I welcome all constructive feedback and suggestions regarding the way the community is run and what the rules are. I make it clear I want the communities to be a community effort. I’ve never ever vetoed a suggestion someone’s made - I always offer to let the community decide. What happens? People complaining/criticising but never taking me up on the offer to hold a vote on whatever it is they don’t like. It’s like shouting in the wind and it’s exhausting.
Have the rules voted by the community, and moderators elected/impeached by its community.
lol so you want to increase the amount of work mods do and then vote them out when they do shit you don’t like.
here’s an idea: become a mod yourself. do the unpaid work of cleaning up the trash so other people can whine in entitled posts like this about how all the mods are trash. jfc
spoiler: am mod, and apparently asking for fairness and clear rules agreed by the community is being entitled now
then vote them out when they do shit you don’t like.
no, it’s vote them out when they do shit the majority of active members of the community don’t like.
Yes, it’s unpaid, doesn’t mean you’re entitled to the community itself.
It happens on Lemmy all the time. I’ve been shadowbanned at least three times, all on the bigger instances.
I really, really suspect that the big Lemmy instances are being run by Reddit admins or spooks or some-such. They’re moderating their instances in the exact same way Reddit did minus the profiteering. The censorship is the exact same.
Also, the fact that it’s possible to shadowban people and the software itself doesn’t circumvent that by auto-messaging you or putting a banner on the top of your screen when you are banned from an instance or community is reason #589238923 why Lemmy fucking sucks ass.
It’s because the most insufferable people from reddit all came over to Lemmy/kbin when they got banned for being exceptionally insufferable.
I need to make a pie chart.
Reasons I have been banned from subforums:
20% swearing at trolls.
20% swearing at Nazis.
60% genuinely polite interactions catching a boot in the ass for incomprehensible reasons.
Do you think you were the good guy in that thread? You came off incredibly hostile. I would not have banned you for just that, but still I can see why.
How.
You signed off every comment with a snide shitty oneliner. Even if your point is well founded, conversing like that is going to catch you flak.
The hell I did. One’s an explanation, one is literally “thanks,” one is the only sentence and pointing to the initial not-remotely-hidden explanation, and one is that explanation made even more explicit.
What the fuck else was I supposed to say? Do I have resting bitch font - are people just automatically reading things in the shittiest possible tone of voice? Read it conversationally and there’s none of that alleged tone.
This and so many other conversations go ‘Why are you mad?!’ ‘I’m not and I don’t know how to convince you of that.’ ‘Ah-HA!’ There’s no winning. Once someone’s assumed you’re fucking with them, somehow, the words don’t matter.
Saying things like
“Go on, tell me…”
Or “thanks for playing along”
Is the stuff. Nobody likes that.
Yeah I don’t think that’s the issue, when the person who showed up to tell me and play along took the first one completely literally and the second one as sneering sarcasm. Where the goddamn mod chimes in is after a bone-dry run-down of how both were misunderstandings. Their scolding simultaneously blames me for expecting people to be psychic and also for talking down to them. How the fuck is anyone supposed to deal with that self-contradictory blend of bad-faith readings?
Ok
In a normal conversation you’d absolutely come across as a massive dick. You don’t have “resting bitch font” you just sound absolutely insufferable. You can make your point while not being a dick about it, you just need to choose your words better and not go for the “uh huh, definitely, here’s why you’re wrong and why I’m right, now piss off”
‘here’s why you’re wrong’
I agree with them.
I am abundantly agreeing with that confused dingus. They’re making the comparison I was making, in the first place. They just keep going ‘then what did you mean?!’ as I repeatedly clarify what was never a mystery.
This is a trolling tactic. I don’t think they did it on purpose, but the effect is the same. It creates no-win situations, where all responses can be twisted in bad faith and cast as vicious mockery. Even when it’s ‘I am not yelling at you… you are yelling at me.’
Do y’all think rhetorical questions are automatically hostile? If someone answers one, and I tell them it was rhetorical, and they still demand to know why I asked - what the fuck am I supposed to say? What sequence of words is not going to be labeled condescending, sarcastic, or backhanded?
Once everything gets read as insincere, the words don’t matter. Nothing I write will be taken seriously. A dry and complete accounting, just trying to smooth things over, is labeled “semi-friendly shit” and publicly shamed. No roads lead out of that trap.
Would any apology have worked? Or would it be read as more of the same sneering tone that is 100% inferred and 0% implied?
Fuck the lot of you.
Because people gave you answers to the question you asked?
Because people gave the same aggressively uncharitable reading of repeatedly telling someone ‘yes, I agree.’
