The whole thing sounded to me like a smokescreen for, “We fucked up, and we shouldn’t have banned talking about it in the first place. We talked about it and banning it was a bad decision that we briefly doubled down on.”
Credit to them for reversing themselves, I guess. That said, coming up with contrived explanations for why you never made a mistake in the first place, because you’re always right, is one of the telltale signs of being full of shit. You can just tell people the main explanation. They’ll actually respect you more, not less, if you don’t engineer your reasonings to maintain this Wizard of Oz veneer.
Lemmy world should have lost all credibility after they hard commited to the bias bot against the majorities wishes, but even on the fediverse people just don’t want to move instances. Im starting to think centralization is far from the only issue with social medias today, probably still the biggest, but by a lot smaller margins than I used to think.
I think they did, to be honest. I’ve abandoned most of the LW communities and I think I’m not the only one. There’s enough inertia in the system that I’m sure they will still be a big instance, but the reputational impacts of things like that are often permanent.
To me, the big thing about the bias bot wasn’t the enforcing of the bias bot, it was the lying. If they had come out and said, “The bot is useful for moderation, we’re keeping it even if people don’t like it,” I don’t think it would have been any kind of big deal. What causes people to have this really unhappy reaction is telling them, “People love the bot! The minority who doesn’t like it is just mounting a pressure campaign” or “You just don’t understand the issues involved like we do” or “We’re fighting misinformation!” or “The admins are making me keep the bot” “No we’re not, the moderators want to keep the bot” or deflecting into this conversation about the cost of accessing the MBFC API or whatever other totally weird irrelevant issue.
The !news@lemmy.world moderators were the ones who asked their users, got the answer that people didn’t like the bot, and took it away. It doesn’t have to be complicated. That’s why I’m still subscribed to !news@lemmy.world when I’ve abandoned the other LW news communities, and I’ve noticed that my Lemmy browsing experience has been remarkably free of weird bad-moderation bullshit ever since. There are no friendly conversations between jordanlund and UniversalMonk. I haven’t had articles I’ve posted get removed for totally frivolous reasons. There are no bots that every user hates and every moderator insists has to be there. It’s just news! Good stuff.
Tinfoil hat time, I think MBFC bot was the smokescreen for a GroundNews sponsor/ad.
The bot started up at the same time GN started a massive ad campaign sponsoring a lot of YouTubers (~7 months ago). MBFC was the bias checker and GN was the hot new “good” source included in every single post. I bet Rooki or someone was getting checks.
Lemmy world should have lost all credibility after they hard commited to the bias bot against the majorities wishes
Hard agree!
but even on the fediverse people just don’t want to move instances
Soft disagree. I took a long time to do it, but I moved from .world because of the whole “being the r/politics of Lemmy” thing.
You won’t find a more wretched hive of scum and Neoliberalism than the .world admins and mods anywhere outside of the aforementioned subreddit and the DNC itself.
The world admins have a long history of this kind of shit.
A great example was when they updated the TOS to remove specific call outs for (if memory serves) transphobic hate being against TOS and instead replacing it with very generic text. The response being that they didn’t need that text because the generic call outs covered it.
Nobody with two brain cells was fooled and everyone knew it was about getting ahead of angry chuds who might be mean to the admins. But enough people were mysteriously banned for horrible shit (with their whole post histories being wiped) and everyone else who cared left for different instances.
I’m not going to fault admins for not wanting to get calls from the FBI. I will fault them for abandoning our friends because they don’t want angry emails. But, either way, the constant need to build up weird narratives and assume everyone else is really THAT stupid is just tiresome.
Nobody with two brain cells was fooled
That’s the thing. For some reason, people will come up with this logic that’s designed to fool a 4-year-old, and then just assume that all the adults who are reading it will be totally taken in by it. I don’t know why. Maybe they don’t want to throw some individual who ran out in front with a bad decision under the bus. Or, maybe it’s just painful to say out loud, “I think we were wrong now that we’ve had a chance to look at it more.”
I’m not going to fault admins for not wanting to get calls from the FBI.
Yeah, but that’s why you need legal advice. They’re sort of pretending that they’re qualified to make determinations about what is and isn’t a legal problem, which isn’t always a good idea to do all on your own once you’ve grown beyond a certain size. Pretending that you’re making these decisions from a position of knowledge and authority just compounds the problem.
The reality is that legality doesn’t matter a lot unless you have enough lawyers on staff to fight various government agencies. That is WHY most creators and communities use established services like youtube or reddit because it offloads that hassle to a company that actually has the lawyers to figure out what is and isn’t a risk.
Whereas a lemmy instance is a few people who have no idea what they are doing.
The best metaphor I have heard to explain this is: A group of weirdos start singing prayers while you are boarding a plane. The flight attendant tells you that you need to sing along or you will be kicked off the plane. You say that is nonsense. They say they are going to have you escorted off the plane if you continue to be disruptive.
You KNOW you are within your legal rights to not do that bullshit. But you don’t have a lawyer with you. Best case scenario? You get off the plane, you get an apology handy from a CSR, and you get to get on a different plane in 12 hours. But now you have missed your connecting flight and 1-2 days of your trip. So you are wasting personal days or pissing off your boss and missing an important client meeting and blah blah blah. And… the browner you are, the less likely you are to see that CSR after the cops escort you off a plane.
So… you just sing along because it is easier. Even if you know it is bullshit, you know it is “close enough” that your life will become a living hell.
Which is why I have no issue with a site policy of “We don’t want that smoke. Please don’t make jokes about the guy who killed a piece of shit CEO until we know we won’t get investigated by law enforcement”. But I DO have issues with making up weird narratives to justify it.
The whole thing sounded to me like a smokescreen for, “We fucked up, and we shouldn’t have banned talking about it in the first place. We talked about it and banning it was a bad decision that we briefly doubled down on.”
I mean… Yeah.
You’re not allowed to talk about smokescreens before the act of fucking up.
