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
Oh hey, I was wondering if this might show up here.
I will admit that I was aggressive in calling them out, but I’d seriously had enough of scrolling through All and seeing nothing but their name on everything, on top of seeing the same post on 3-5 different communities.
Language aside, I believe my concerns were reasonable enough and clearly stated. Power users of that nature can control what everyone on this platform is exposed to, potentially manipulating opinions and injecting disinformation. Lemmy is still small enough that a handful of people could potentially influence the entire user base. Vigilance is key.
My remaining concerns are 1) There are still other accounts with identical behavior that have not been addressed and 2) I have seen accounts like this one cycle through instances, and I expect we’ll see a new account begin the same behavior from somewhere else soon enough.
Quite amusing that Cat deleted their account though. Exactly the sort of behavior you’d expect from someone just innocently posting content, right?
Beyond that, I could see a temp ban for my language. But 15 days? Yeesh. It was actually removed a short time ago so I guess another mod got a look at things.
Here’s the ban explanation, basically saying “spammers and suspicious activity is a-okay, and how dare you say anything about it”
Quite amusing that Cat deleted their account though. Exactly the sort of behavior you’d expect from someone just innocently posting content, right?
Because an admin threatening to ban you for being too active is surely something that makes you feel warm and welcome there. /s
This is the kind of reductive, uncharitable take you see on the VAC forums on Steam, I’m surprised you’re expressing such a baseless bad-faith claim here about said person, not a good look for you.
I’m not surprised they deleted their account upon threatening to be banned for being too active, I would probably do the same thing. Especially with my past experiences with @PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat, he seems like a pompous uptight control freak. Not the kind of person I want having access to my email address and my last known IP logins.
If you don’t like me saying any of this about you @PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat you know exactly what to do about it 🔨
Because an admin threatening to
bantempban/limit you forbeing too activespamming
FTFY
It’s usually a mods job to help control spam. Deleting your account the moment someone points out your iffy spamming is, in fact, suspicious. I always found it so on my forum back in the day, anyway
This take is wild, man.
Spamming: “Being too active”
Responding to user reports, after a long time of deciding they weren’t my business and ignoring them: “control freak”
Explaining the norms of the network this person is participating in, and backing up the consensus of the users of said network to try to address a problem: pompous bad faith reductive uncharitable threatening
You can think whatever you like obviously but this is some Peggy Noonan shit.
“How can you possibly say you DON’T WANT notifications about goods and services in your inbox, don’t you like getting activity? And messages?”
So let me get this straight, you think that I’m a rightoid because I disagree with you and would never want to share a server with you because you bullied and scared someone into deleting their account? Go fuck yourself Phillp I have nothing more to say to you. I didn’t like you when I met you and I like you even less now.
I will admit that I was aggressive in calling them out
Dude, you’re fine. Full stop.
Lemmy.world is the only instance that does this super-weird moderation philosophy of actively refusing to take action against people who are obviously objectively pissing off the vast majority of people, but then taking action against users who get understandably pissed and react in any way that’s “uncivil.” It’s bizarre and unnatural. They also like to send condescending messages about how we’re the weird ones, if we have a problem with it, and they’ve figured it all out from their higher perspective, and everything they did was right.
Don’t let them gaslight you into thinking that it was wrong to be irritated about it. It is better if people speak up about people causing problems. Since the mods are committed to not doing anything about it for some ridiculous reason. IDK, I’ve ceased trying to understand what’s behind it and just don’t much participate in lemmy.world anymore. I only even became aware of this situation because I saw reports about spam that was coming from one of my users.
I can be a cockhead sometimes, but neither you or I was being in any way unreasonable anywhere in that thread. You’re allowed to have human emotions, including irritation. If you want my conflicted-of-interest opinion.
- I have seen accounts like this one cycle through instances, and I expect we’ll see a new account begin the same behavior from somewhere else soon enough.
Yeah. Being able to make new anonymous accounts and be as much of a cock as you want until someone’s motivated to fix you individually after a long time of you getting the benefit of the doubt, which only solves the problem for a few minutes until you make a new account, is a problem. What the solution is I have no idea.
It was actually removed a short time ago so I guess another mod got a look at things.
I mean this is how it’s all supposed to work. I don’t think anyone needs to get 100% of the calls correct. They’re all volunteers, they’re doing an important job, it’s not fair to jump down anyone’s throat if they make a misjudgement through lack of information or not wanting to spend an hour getting up to speed, or anything.
Most of the reason I sound pissed off about it, above and beyond just a “hey I think someone should take another look at this”, is the overall condescending tone of “we never did anything wrong, we know more than you” that accompanies every dogshit moderation decision like a little dollop of frosting on the turd. It seems guaranteed to ensure that they won’t learn anything from any given instance where someone did mess up, because they already decided they’re a special type of people who are empowered to come down and need to educate all the rest of us.
Right there with you on all of this. I actually just said as much in reply to Java’s comment to you.
To summarize: “They did nothing wrong and we knew nothing about it”.
- The first part of that statement is false.
- The second part of that statement is either 1) false 2) admission that they don’t pay a bit of attention to communities they signed up to pay attention to, or 3) indication that they’re buried and need more assistance with moderating (to be charitable)
And trust me, if speaking out like this is the only thing that results in action being taken I’ll continue to do so, though it would be nice to see that change.
This fails to at all explain why the block button would not have solved your problem with zero drama.
You’re not a leader in that community? Petition the community and become one. Don’t want to be an agent of change? Join another community. There are so many outlets to getting this user out of your feed that don’t involve you posting comments of negative sentiment like you are some kind of guerilla police force.
Especially with a community as tended toward toxicity and slapfights as this one, I absolutely understand the motivation to preemptively remove threads that veer into the off topic than let them fester, especially if it’s happening a lot.
YDI sorry :( next time I would make a meta thread or just block the offensive user.
The upvotes for this person’s point of view were pretty much unanimous. Most people clearly didn’t see it as negativity. Also, reports of the original user for spamming or unreliable sources are pretty common. IDK how the !news@lemmy.world rules are written, but in most internet communities, spamming the feed with low-quality content in large quantities is a violation of how you’re supposed to do things.
Also, the slapfight was not removed. One side of it only was removed.
Doesn’t matter. If you make a meta petition thread next time you might have more luck. I don’t want to see flame wars enabled just because they get lots of upvotes. Make a petition post to ban users and raise awareness. Don’t put it in the comments.
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.
Why is posting a lot of content considered spam though? Don’t we want more content? Is there something wrong with the content being posted?
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?
Here is that discussion for context: https://ponder.cat/post/1728396
I’m not sure I’d characterize their posts as spam; I definitely noticed their posts, and their name showing up often, but it didn’t seem detrimental.
LW mods can still be dumb as hell though.
Ok but a mod removing an admin’s comments is absolutely bizarre. Do the admins have the power to reinstate them?
I wrote an entire paragraph, then deleted it to say just YDI, learn how to use the block button lol.
Creating a Lemmy account should not include a “manually block this ever-increasing list of spammers” step.
exactly that’s why im glad Ghyste and OP got an action. for spamming negativity guerilla style instead of participating in any kind of community involved process to improve things.
