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
Wow lemmy is becoming more like reddit every day.
A lot of it seems to be one particular moderator.
Most of the big-name lemmy.world communities have moderation that in my opinion is just kind of clueless, but that might be just a product of having to deal with a neverending flood of hundreds of different issues (not being able to devote any amount of attention to each one of them beyond the most basic possible glance at it.) There is one specific moderator who seems to be consistently at the root of these totally backwards-land decisions though. What the reason for that is, I have no idea.
Lemmy.world has always been the most Reddit-like in terms of operation. Most others are reasonable about spam management.
- Ban spam: Normal
- Fail to ban spam: Understandable, maybe not ideal but people get busy
- Get mad at the people who don’t want spam: Okay? Maybe someone’s having a bad day
- Ban the people who don’t want spam, delete their comments leaving the spam alone: ???
Lemmy is reddit. Always have been. Including the false superiority complex that somehow comes with both platforms.
That sounds just like another pretty infamous 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?
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.
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?
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…
Wow, and I’ve been concerned with how my moderation is looked upon in my tiny corner. I don’t feel so bad now.
