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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Politics is banned from c/[email protected]
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.
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.
Edit: oh wait no I do remember you. You kept insisting the meme was misogynistic and then started making generalizations. The meme in question? A dude gagging with the text “When the gay porn shows an ad of a woman masturbating”. Yeah. Not even remotely misogynistic, which other people pointed out to you and why you were downvoted. You then doubled down and made homophobic generalizations. That’s why you were banned. Because you were actively stirring shit and making a safe place inherently less safe by slinging generalizations at the entire community.
Wouldn’t have remembered if you didn’t double down on that misogyny accusation.
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.
Being a jerk is extremely subjective - someone could brand you much worse than that just from a polite disagreement from your side, that they don’t want to deal with. Aside from anything else, this is a highly “techie-y” space with a ton of strongly held opinions and ideals, and misunderstandings when communicating/discussing them happen. A lot. It will keep happening. People will look like asses without necessarily doing so intentionally.
Now, outright trolling, spamming, shitting on discussions with obvious bad faith participation, consistently derailing unrelated threads with one’s hobby horse, obvious flamebaiting and so on… great. Reporting and removing more of that should be a priority everywhere.
Banning politics from any non-political community that can be persuaded to do so also sounds like a great idea on general principle. Politics is poison (particularly what passes for it in the US), and it would be polite to not shove it down the entire fediverse’s throat. Every geographical sub is politics, every news sub is politics, there are dedicated politics and politicalmemes communities, and still it’s fucking everywhere else also. Asklemmy and NoStupidQuestions are full of thinly veiled soapboxing (which leads to a lot of awfully stupid questions). People who want to JAQ off to politics can easily make their own community for that (that way, the rest of us can block it, as intended), or else keeping it in their pants would’ve been kinda polite, idk. Seems odd to insist on posting political stuff everywhere.
People here are blaming politics. I don’t think that’s it. The quality of comments and discussion here has taken a massive nosedive for the past four months or so, no matter what the topic is.
I think it’s pretty simple, the terrible won. Everyone who wants good quality discussion left quickly when people started to act terrible. They didn’t come back. So now we’ve created the toxic enabling environment that is enabling it hard today.
You can fix it with moderation, but that’s a lot of work, and people get really angry.
I’m pretty close to just cutting my losses on lemmy. It’s heading in the same direction as reddit but with less moderation, and simply because it’s smaller, the awfulness is more visible.
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“.
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.
Election year in the US and EU while Russia is invading a neighbor and China possibly preparing to do the same. There couldn‘t have been a worse time for LLMs to be so accessible, capable and fairly unregulated. The perfect conditions to make this year the worst for internet content we‘ve ever seen. By a landslide. We will look at the last 10 years and feel nostalgic on how good these years were with their little bot armies, cute clickbait and adorable fake news.
Election year in the US and EU while Russia is invading a neighbor and China possibly preparing to do the same.
Interesting you don’t mention Israel doing a fucking GENOCIDE and the USA supporting it.
No, the US is not supporting genocide.
When the Jewish people took the motto NEVER AGAIN what, exactly, did you think that meant? Did you think it would mean “oh please, Sir, don’t hurt us please?”
Hamas, seeking the elimination of the Jews of Israel decided to find out, and used their own population as shields.
You reap what you sow.
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.
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.
A lot of it depends on the instance. I think there’s a little bit of a smartest bears type of problem going on, with a lot of the bad-faith content coming from just ignorant and abrasive people being sincerely ignorant and abrasive, not anything that’s a bot or a deliberate troll.
Personally, I’ve done some rounds of unsubscribing from tech and politics subs on lemmy.ml and lemmy.world, and when I’ve done that my amount of toxic content and interactions went way down. I think the prevalence of the exact same thing on the tech subs points to it probably being just a bad-person problem in large proportion, although I’m sure deliberate malfeasance is at the root of some of it also.
I agree that some people just are original jerks. But those still cant roam free in a community. Its like making a bar and knowing that people are getting mugged in the restroom. The bar owner or personnel (even if its a coop) need to intervene.
Well… that’s why I used the smartest bears analogy. I’ve noticed the mods are usually pretty on top of removing content that’s genuinely personally insulting or racist or what have you. But there’s a wide, wide grey area of someone whose post is discussing “the issue” in a technical sense, but just comes at it from a perspective of “here’s why I am right and you are wrong and not only that you’re clearly not smart enough to see my side and I can’t believe I need to explain it to someone again” with 0 interest in learning anything on their side. IDK if it’s reasonable to try to remove comments or ban people for that behavior, but it definitely doesn’t lend itself to a good discussion, and it’s common (probably majority) particularly on lemmy.world and lemmy.ml.
