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
PTB, the mods in !news@lemmy.world are really aggressive power-trippers in this current day and age. That’s why a hands off approach like what certain servers do where they “choose not to interfere with communities” is not a good approach. Even Reddit has a Moderator CoC. Instance admins can and should hold communities to a certain standard of moderation and ban or reassign moderators which don’t or abuse their power.
I always assumed cat@pondercat was an unmarked bot for your instance.
Yeah, I started thinking I should talk with them or ban them or something because they would make me look bad. I actually did send them some DMs recommending that they tone it down, without much result. They solved the problem for me though before I had to decide what to do.
Sounds to me like some moderator wanted those unreliable sources and pieces of propaganda slipped in.
Definitely PTB.
Wow, look at the last removal from that timeframe in the modlog. Someone literally just said they think the other person might be a spam bot and got their post removed for it. There’s definitely a mod with an agenda there.
Honestly? I think you’re right.
With the exception of MBFC bot, every one of these weird disconnects that has arisen between the lemmy.world moderators and the overwhelming majority of the users of lemmy.world, has followed the pattern of “someone is posting propaganda and bullshit, everyone hates it, and the LW moderators are lecturing everyone about how they really need to accept that it’s here to stay, because it is allowed, and people who are vocal about having a problem with it are going to get banned.” You can see the official mod explanations down below for why this particular (pretty minor TBH) decision was the way it was. The explanations are objectively not true. So what is the actual explanation for the decision?
I’ve observed on Reddit what happens when clearly bad-faith moderators take over a space to clear the way for it to become a little propaganda home. I think we’re observing here the beginnings of that process, where at least some of the mod team is actively working to make a safe space for the propaganda, and they’ve become ensconced enough to be able to mandate a certain amount of propaganda be part of the space. I actually didn’t see Cat’s postings as being all that propaganda-y, but there certainly was some amount of it in among the general spam and clutter.
Honestly I think the root of the issue is the whole design where the space is “in the control” of some particular person to do whatever they want with it, and that person has to be a volunteer and so there’s always a crushing shortage of people to do it, so it’s going to work 100% of the time for someone who wants to put effort into controlling the space to be allowed to have free rein, after a while.
Reminds me of UniversalMonk - the combative tone, the posting patterns. Not necessarily the same person but definitely following the same playbook.
I slept 3 hours last night so I haven’t processed everything in this post yet but I do have one thought. Your complaint was that they post a lot and should “touch grass”. Sidenote, I don’t think that it was necessarily the best foot to put forward by just openly throwing shade like that in the first message as an admin… Again, Idk where the hell I stand on any of this at the moment because I can’t remember how to circulate my own blood.
But.
If you have that issue with their posting habits I am genuinely wondering what you think about people like myself or Picard Maneuver then. Not meant to be snide or sarcastic. I am genuinely curious with no emotion attached to it other than curiosity itself.
I didn’t tell them to touch grass, that was one of the users that was sort of arguing with them in the comments. My first involvement was the long and serious comment that I quoted last. I’ve been trying to be less of an asshole online, and that message keeping the sarcasm out of it and just being straight with them about what was going on, was a good example.
It wasn’t just that they post a lot, it’s a very spammy collection of articles including some from open propaganda sources like RT.com. My main concern with them was the volume but also the low quality of the posts, but I left it alone as not my business until there was widespread complaining from users coupled with total disregard on their part for what the users were saying about it.
You and The_Picard_Maneuver are completely fine. Usually I like when people post a lot. The only exception is what it’s all low quality or just-to-full-space stuff, which certainly isn’t you.
To give a frame of reference, you and The_Picard_Maneuver both make about 5 posts a day it looks like. This person made over 10 times that many (58 per day average) and people were actively asking them to cool it, and they were sort of snarking back at the people who were making the request. Y’all are fine.
To give a frame of reference, you and The_Picard_Maneuver both make about 5 posts a day it looks like.
Ha. I just added up posts over the lifetime of your account. I just looked over the last couple pages and you might do a little more than that in the recent past. Dude, you’re fine. It’s largely meme content in meme communities. If you were posting RT.com to the meme communities and often to multiple communities with all the same story from RT.com it would be a little more of an issue. Like I say, it wasn’t the volume (although that certainly was a factor), it was more that they were putting all kinds of unreliable or explicit-propaganda stuff that was drowning out the news that was not that.
