Hello I’m not a person who is affected by this community moderator but I’m posting on behalf of people who are, since they don’t seem to know of this community yet. I attempted to reach some via DM but I’m not sure they’ll respond. So I’m making this post since I feel this needs to be addressed.
Recently I was made aware of a community that appeared randomly on Lemmy.world. It seems to be a troll community given the type of content, but the reason I’m posting about it here specifically is that this mod seems to be banning anyone who points this out or goes against his narrative. Furthermore he is only using the autoremove on ban function, not removing any content the users have posted, which I believe is deliberate in attempt to prevent the content from showing up under the modlog and revealing the hypocrisy.
Some samples of comments:
Comment from: @glimse@lemmy.world
Everything else you posted has been pretty cringe but what he fuck is up with this one, dude lol
comment from: @rain_worl@lemmy.world
comment from: @rain_worl@lemmy.world
comment from: @the_toast_is_gone@lemmy.world
First off, nice new community. I look forward to days of quality posts such as this./s
Second, how many Linux distros have this level of data collection, and what is their estimated market share?
All of these were retrieved from the API, even though they aren’t included in the modlogs, I could’ve included more but it’s kind of a time consuming process to look for them and retrieve them. Viewing removed comments is easier on Lemmy than it is on Reddit but it still isn’t easy.
What do you guys think, does this seem like power-tripping? Also does this person’s content seem like blatant troll content?
CC: @glimse@lemmy.world @rain_worl@lemmy.world @the_toast_is_gone@lemmy.world
People who’s comments I mentioned, I CCed them so they know I did this on their behalf
This is an example of a community I don’t subscribe to, because I’m not the target demographic.
I think a Linux sucks community should exist, it can exist, and if the moderator wants to remove anything about Linux not sucking that’s fine too. The way this moderator is doing it, they should just turn on mod only posting.
I looked at the community sidebar, and one of the community rules is no promoting Linux, no defending Linux, so at least it’s consistent
Lemmy needs a diverse set of voices.
Counterexample: if I go into fuck cars and talk about vehicles in any positive fashion, I’m going to get dog piled and probably banned
I think that there are key differences between
- A community criticising something, backed up by reason and evidence. Even if it’s something popular, doubly true if there’s a circlejerk around that thing. This can and should exist.
- A community created to circlejerk against something, through insane troll “logic” and silencing any dissidence. This is fertile grounds for idiocy and misinformation, thus harmful for the society [I can go further on that if desired] and the Fediverse [ditto], and should not exist.
Sometimes the boundary between both is not clear - but this community, unless it’s a troll comm, falls cleanly into the second case. Specially given how opaque the moderator is trying to be (check how none of the removals appear in the modlog).
I think it’s very clearly a troll community since really the only person posting there is the mod, most of which are very transparently troll content, like this one hating on the idea of OpenSource and Free licenses for some really weird reason, that hasn’t actually been clarified. Someone said to me when I showed that to them that they could be an alt-right corporate shill, but I don’t have enough information to come to that conclusion. Only thing I can clearly tell is that they are very obviously a troll.
And yeah I definitely agree that these types of communities are very harmful, and definitely something we should nip in the bud before they get out of hand and start spreading disinformation, as well as fostering toxic or even dangerous sentiment.
I think that many people here would benefit from you going further into why it is harmful to society, since people seem to be nonchalant about this issue, or worse, are dismissing the post as an opinion piece.
OK! Short version:
- Idiocy and misinformation are a vicious cycle: idiocy breeds misinformation, and misinformation makes people more likely to accept idiocy.
- Misinformation can harm people - both the individual accepting it, and the ones interacting with that individual.
- The community in question promotes both things for a specific topic, and because of #1 it’s encouraging that vicious cycle.
Long version:
What I called “idiocy” and “misinformation” there can be rephrased as “not thinking rationally” and “incorrect and/or harmful beliefs” respectively.
Thinking rationally is doing things like this:
- asking yourself “is this true?” before you believe in some claim;
- acknowledging that sometimes you simply don’t know, or you are not certain of something;
- telling apart what you want to be true from what you think to be true;
- not oversimplifying situations;
- not accepting fallacious reasoning as if it was valid; et cetera.
Thinking rationally is essential to prevent you from holding incorrect and/or harmful beliefs - because, if you have access to good and true information, and use rationality on it, your conclusions will be consistently good and true too. But only if you think rationally.
(Programmers’ analogy: if your algorithm is rubbish, then no good input saves you from getting rubbish output.)
And what you believe on has a huge impact, on both you and the people interacting with you. In some this is clear; for example, someone who believes that “all white mushrooms are safe to eat!” might get someone eating a death cap, or even eat one themself. Or, for more realistic examples:
- The peak of the COVID pandemics had people touting ivermectin as a cure for COVID (it is not) - and plenty people didn’t seek actual treatment because of that, making the disease worse for themselves and the pandemic worse for everyone.
- Political beliefs affect whom you vote on, so they’ll affect public policies, and you might end with a muppet in power that will do everything to make your life miserable (and their pockets full).
- Some people are literally persecuted and killed due to this sort of belief. Cue to the historical witch hunts.
Someone might say “isn’t this overblown in this case? It’s just a community against Looniks and freewarez!”. Well, no, it isn’t overblown. Our lives revolve around software in the XXI century, like it or not - it’s a data centre used by the hospital, it’s your morning news, it’s someone spying on you, it’s a country spying on another… all those involve software - sometimes libre software, always some sort of operating system.
But even if we disregard the above, the fact that someone is promoting lack of rational thinking (what I called “idiocy”) and incorrect beliefs (what I called “misinformation”) is bound to get people used to those things as if they were OK. Thinking rationally is not just an “I did it once, so I’m good to go”. It’s a lot like brushing your teeth - you need to create some habit to avoid the associated [mind / mouth] problems and have good [mental / buccal] hygiene.
As such, I do not think that we should give this community a free pass. Even if it’s a troll community, as both DraconicNEO and me believe it to be, it’s still promoting misinformation and idiocy, and should be handled as such.
I’ve actually been fairly fine in fuck cars, both Reddit and Lemmy editions. I actually like cars, well, some of them anyway.
The difference between !fuckcars@lemmy.world and linuxsucks is that the first one is largely a fact and logic based community about the problems with car dependency in urban areas, and car-dependent infrastructure.
linuxsucks is a single troll who’s talking shit about linux for seemingly no real reason, some of his posts are insanely illogical, and make very little sense. So yeah I definitely think these communities are anything like each other.
I don’t think you want to create an expectation that communities have to be logical and open to reasoned debate. That’s a lot of work to enforce
I’ve had run-ins with Linuxsucks’ owner and basically only poster over on linuxmemes. They’re a troll, a contrarian, uninterested in any kind of honest or good-faith discussion, and an overall dickhead. The community is a one-man circlejerk.
You’re right about needing counterpoints, but Linuxsucks ain’t it.
I think he basically only made it because he somehow thought that if he had his own community his memes wouldn’t get as heavily downvoted, as they do on !linuxmemes@lemmy.world though they’re pretty wrong about that. Pretty much all but one of their posts there on linuxsucks are getting downvoted heavily.
Will you though? Dogpiled? Yes, that’s just the nature of Lemmy. Banned? I have not heard of this happening but maybe I’m just ignorant.
Edit: I realized after saying this that there are two fuckcars coms. The one on LW has banned like 3 people ever. The one on .ML has banned tons of people though it was hard to tell which ones were instance-wide bans since the admins love to do that over trivial BS. So depending on which com you might be right. But on LW community you can definitely go there and argue that cars are great and harmless as long as you’re nice about it. I personally think that’s healthy.
I’ve suggested a rule in the past, but we don’t have this rule now.
Community Manipulation
Communities should not be overly moderated in order to enforce a specific narrative. Respectful disagreement should be allowed in a smaller proportion to the established narrative.
i.e. A user should be able to (respectfully, infrequently) post/comment about a study showing marijuana is a gateway drug to !marijuana without moderation tools being used to censor that content.
There are times people wouldn’t like it, but it’d fully solve this !linuxsucks issue.
Communities should not be overly moderated in order to enforce a specific narrative.
Agreed. That’s exactly what is killing Reddit. They ban/permaban so many people just for disagreeing with them.
Can you imagine ml or hexbear adopting this rule though? I think it depends on the type of community. If it’s a “safe space” type community then I think it’s fine to keep out the dissenters. Eg I often remove right wing comments in lefty memes because it’s supposed to be a space for memes, not people shouting at each other. Likewise, if someone starts ranting about the evils of piracy in c/piracy then they are getting a community ban. But a US politics community has to be tolerant of alternate viewpoints, because of the nature of the community. That’s why it took a while to ban linkerbaan. He wasn’t banned for his politics though, more because of the way he treated other users in such a hostile way all the time, even people who mostly agreed with him.
Yea we should remove Linux from existence just to see all the things that stop working. No more internet.
Whats next? Watersucks? Unless you are drinking the closed source Coke.
People dont get notifications if you pinned them from a post, you have to do it from a comment
Yeah but they moderate voluntarily so you should thank them.
