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.
There’s nothing wrong with posting as much as you want, as long as the moderators are willing to accept your posts and don’t reject them.
There’s nothing wrong with a moderator kicking someone for personal attacks, so Ghyste’s ban was completely justified and is certainly an example of YDI.
The only PTB I see here would be admin of ponder.cat, if they’d actually delete someone’s account for adding more content to Lemmy; but cat deleted their account themselves, so it’s not like that. They are PTB anyway, since that acronym can also stand for PhilipTheBucket, lol.
Yeah some communities choose different moderation styles (often because of a tendency to fraughtness or sensitivity) and at some point users with different personal preferences in a community just have to deal with it. It’s a temp ban preemptively removing off topic comments, lol, like it’s going to be fine.
If the banned comment had been in an on-topic meta or petition thread, my tune would change immediately.
The reality is it is trivial for me to block one user whose volume of posting I dislike. I cannot trivially block dozens of people who dogpile and start campaigns against that user, swelling threads to become fully off topic and often toxic.
There’s nothing wrong with posting as much as you want, as long as the moderators are willing to accept your posts and don’t reject them.
This is a super weird and authoritarian philosophy.
I get where you’re coming from, but imagine “There’s nothing wrong with posting Nazi content, as long the moderators are willing to accept your posts et cetera.”
See how insane that sounds? The moderators can be wrong. The users can be wrong. Everyone has their judgements, but the idea that it’s appropriate for people to become totally passive in the face of whatever the moderators decide, even if it is irritating them or seems wrong, because the space “belongs” to the moderators to do what they want with it, and the users need to leave if they don’t like that, is some bullshit.
IDK how this type of thinking crept into the internet. It didn’t used to be here.
It might be true, as a practical matter, that the moderators have control over their spaces. That doesn’t mean that by definition there is “nothing wrong” with what they are doing with it. That’s the whole point of this community here.
on the contrary it sounds insane to equate “posting with high volume” with “posting Nazi content” as though that’s a fair example you can use toward your argument at all
“people who post a lot are basically Nazis” ??? hello? lmao
if they are posting content that shouldn’t be there, report it. if the mods disagree, start a petition or encourage a migration. if you still can’t make change, use the block button. it’s really actually easy lol
Okay, sure.
“There’s nothing wrong with posting ads for your home supplement company, which everyone hates, as long as you cleared it with the mods first and they said it was okay.”
That one’s probably a more accurate analogy.
so did that actually happen? and if so why would you complain about it as a volume issue and not a self advertising issue?
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.
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.
What “community-involved process”?
like… a meta post? make a petition? talk to the mods? there are so many options that were avoided here and we just jumped straight to threats of account termination and posting to PTB lol
Wow lemmy is becoming more like reddit every day.
Lemmy is reddit. Always have been. Including the false superiority complex that somehow comes with both platforms.
It’s literally just open source reddit that redditors used to flee reddit. Not sure why people are surprised. Social media is only as good as its users.
Foss chads do be like that
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: ???
This is what reddit is, report said spam, large subs will ban you in retaliation for " making too many reports or if they feel your reporting is not a reportable offense"
Engagement numbers are like crack for some people I guess
Reminds me of UniversalMonk - the combative tone, the posting patterns. Not necessarily the same person but definitely following the same playbook.
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”
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.
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 🔨
Ohhhh shit👀👀
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.
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
000one 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?
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
catwas 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 monthAgain, 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.
I don’t see why Ghyste should have been punished here. Their comments were critical of the actions of Cat, and encouraged skepticism for their motives. Ghyste had inflammatory wording, but that doesn’t seem enough to warrant action. For the record I don’t think posting a bunch should be something that needs correction even if it does dominate a community 's feed, but complaining about one person driving discussion by themselves is certainly reasonable. If a decent portion of those posts do end up having problems like misleading headlines or bad sources, then maybe action should be taken, but that should be up to mods to judge. I’m more concerned that it sounds like they regularly delete accounts as soon as people start calling them out and pick it back up on a fresh one, since that sounds like ban evasion or legitimate bot activity.
Ghyste had inflammatory wording, but that doesn’t seem enough to warrant action.
For me, not the case. I absolutely hate coming in to a comments section and all the discussion is relegated to inflammatory comments about OP. Just discuss the content, people. I do not go into news stories to see the users’ personal preferences about how often they see each other.
I’ve said it before: It’s trivial for me to block one inflammatory user. It’s not easy for me to block like thirty people complaining about that one user instead of them just downvoting to oblivion and moving on.
Or make a meta petition thread. Like there’s so many other options that actually keep the utility of the community and its discussions intact.
For me, not the case. I absolutely hate coming in to a comments section and all the discussion is relegated to inflammatory comments about OP. Just discuss the content, people. I do not go into news stories to see the users’ personal preferences about how often they see each other.
Yeah, I don’t like seeing people be rude to each other either. That doesn’t mean such comments should be removed though. As long as it stays civil, I would expect mods to let people say their piece. News communities especially are likely to stir up reactions in people, so mods should be cautious about what’s considered rule breaking, lest they be accused of censorship or being partisan.
I’ve said it before: It’s trivial for me to block one inflammatory user. It’s not easy for me to block like thirty people complaining about that one user instead of them just downvoting to oblivion and moving on.
I get that, but I also think a lot of people having the same complaint about one particular user suggests it may be worth paying attention to.
Or make a meta petition thread. Like there’s so many other options that actually keep the utility of the community and its discussions intact.
I agree that a meta post is a good idea for something like this. Normally reporting should be enough, but this is something difficult to describe in individual reports and should be shown to the community as a whole, not just mods. But I would still say meta discussion about a community’s content seems fair game for a comment section under a post that serves as an example of your complaint. Comment threads are conversations, and this is the sort of thing that will come up naturally.
