This one is both upsetting and weird.
So there was a user on ponder.cat who’s been spamming posts. Like a lot. 58 per day, on average. Not 58 comments. 58 posts.
I started seeing a little scattering of reports about it, mostly just figured it was the mods’ business to deal with, and then finally today I actually really took a look at what they were doing and realized it was way over the top. Pretty much everyone in the comments agreed when someone brought it up.
A 25 day old account with 1,400+ posts? What the actual fuck? My entire goddamn feed is this one account…
Touch grass. Good lord. You’re carpet bombing multiple communities with repeats of the same crap.
The user was not receptive.
lol.
I guess people here do not know how to block an account.
:)
Is that a compliment or a rant?
May I introduce you to Lemmy block function.
If you don’t like my posts then block me and you will never see them again. As simple as that.
That’s a bunch of bullshit. The voting was about as you would expect. I said to the user:
That’s not how it works. If you’re interfering with the average Lemmy user’s experience, you don’t get to claim it doesn’t count because each individual person would be able to block each individual problematic account, if they wanted to have a good experience. Honestly, these people have a point. You have been posting an average of 58 posts per day. That’s too much. I post a ton, and that’s about 10 times more than me, and I’ve gotten multiple complaints about posting too much in particular communities. The handful of times it’s happened, my reaction was “Oh my bad what sounds like an acceptable level” and then to more or less stick to an acceptable level. Getting snarky with people who are asking you to cool it is very bad. Please stop posting so much. Anything about 10-15 posts per day starts to feel really excessive to me. Definitely don’t be dismissive about people’s complaints to you about it.
They rejected my suggestion, so I sent them a DM that was a little more direct about it: Stop doing this if you want to keep your account on my instance.
Then, for some reason, they deleted their account on their own.
Well, that was weird, but at least it’s all resolved and we can all get back to what we were doing. Or wait… what’s happening now?
I wasn’t expecting “making sure we make a safe space for the spammers by banning people who complain about spam” to be an important moderation duty, but I guess in the bizarro world that is !news@lemmy.world moderation philosophy, it makes perfect sense.
https://lemmy.world/modlog/1347
@Ghyste@sh.itjust.works
The sheer volume of it (again, 58 posts per day) and the sort of indiscriminate nature. I could make a bot that would repost random stuff out of the RSS feeds into other people’s communities, that doesn’t mean that it’s “more content” and good for those communities.
There were also some propaganda sources in there, RT.com among them.
Yep. That user is formerly:
- 000@reddthat.com
- joker@sh.itjustworks
- dot@feddit.org
- 101@lemm.ee
- 101@reddthat.com
And probably more. I was only paying attention since Dot, but I recognized the pattern retroactively for the two “101” accounts.
They post a LOT of stuff back to back, mostly “offbrand” news and blogs pretending to be news. They also start slipping in the propaganda news as well (as you pointed out). When they get called out, they delete their account with content removal set to true.
Now that you’ve called them out, expect them to nuke their account and all content soon. That’s their standard play. They’ll be back in a day or two with a brand new account on a different instance and starting the pattern all over.
FWIW, I locally banned their current alt (Cat) as soon as it popped up after they deleted their 000 one and started back with the same pattern. They leave a lot of abandoned comments in their wake which turns into database clutter and inaccessible conversations.
Hit the nail on the head. This is the same pattern I’ve seen and exactly why I called them out: In addition to spam levels of posts, they were also breaking community rules concerning reputable and unbiased sources. I find it hard to believe that their activity was unnoticed by the mod teams of any of the communities they were flooding and yet their posts were never moderated. I think I was banned for drawing attention to the issue.
I wonder which instance the next account will be on…
Makes perfect sense. Yeah, some people told me about them and I kind of left it alone, for overly long I guess in retrospect. They weren’t as bad the last time I had looked at them.
The more interesting question is, why are the lemmy.world mods coming out swinging for this user?
By the time we received complaints about your comments, the user in question (cat) had already deleted their account.
I don’t have time to track down every post of theirs to check for sources. We tend to do that when people report posts.
The post that was reported that was submitted by cat was this one:
https://a.lemmy.world/lemmy.world/post/25907073
Nothing wrong with that post. The reason given in the report:
WTF is this power user stuff? That's a lot of freaking posts in less than a month
Again, prolific posting isn’t against any rule. The post didn’t break any rule. Why would I remove that?
Now, on to the reason I gave a temp ban.
Comment:
What the actual fuck? My entire goddamn feed is this one account…
Attacking the user for posting? You may not like them, but again, we only received one report on that user. Apparently their content, while aggressive, broke no rules, and upset nobody until today, according to my reports and mod logs.
Next:
Touch grass. Good lord. You’re carpet bombing multiple communities with repeats of the same crap.
Another personal attack against the user.
Next:
I’m not blocking an account that could easily pivot and start blasting multiple communities spanning multiple instances with subversive information.
Much better to bring awareness to such ridiculousness. The motives of an account with such activity should be questioned. ESPECIALLY since all posts are in news and politics communities.
Another person attacking them for posting. Do we attack Flying Squid, Admiral Picard, MicroWave, or others for contributing more than other users? Again, they broke no rules, and we received our first complaint about that account today.
There were a lot of people attacking that user, and a lot of reports on the comments attacking that user. Those are just a few examples.
Yes, I moderate, but I have a ton more going on in my life, so I’m not always on Lemmy to see what’s happening, and I do rely heavily on reports to find points of pain in the communities I moderate. I also rely heavily on the rest of the moderation team, as well the great tools that people like @ptz@dubvee.org make.
If you go through the posts in this community, you’ll see tons of places where I personally have worked with other users who had complaints. We try to be fair, but attacking users is a violation of our community rules.
Can’t answer that, but it’s possible they’re simply not aware of their alt history. There’s a similarly active user, Microwave, but they’re legit; they always post quality stuff with no agenda. Perhaps they’re giving “Cat” the benefit of doubt? They also give several other controversial posters a lot of leeway (won’t mention them, but you probably already know the handful I’m referring to). Not suggesting any kind of agenda with the LW mods; just seems like they’re trying a bit too hard to be “fair and balanced”.
This user nukes their accounts, so unless one is familiar with the patterns of their previous accounts, it’s difficult to correlate them with no history available. If they’re on your instance and you have concerns about them (and they haven’t self-destructed yet), you might be ahead to just ban them ahead of time (w/o content removal) so there’s record for later comparison.
