I do agree that this particular user was overlooked. I actually wanted to ban them ages ago, but (IIRC) another admin disagreed, see above. I probably should have spoken against it more or just taken the initiative initially, I admit. I actually didn’t mention my desire to ban them to the other admins at all, which wasn’t good.
I also want to clear up that I have not been the one banning communists for using words like fuck off (I didn’t ban Catraism for example). They also don’t get permabanned unless there’s something else a lot more serious going on.
I also disageee that we cater to libs or treat them with any more favour than communists. Actually, we’ve very much been overlooking communists breaking the rules way more than libs or conservatives. I haven’t counted, but pretty sure more of the stuff in the modlog (from us, don’t mistake the actions of other instances for ours because it all shows up in the same feed. Example: the screenshot attached to this very post had nothing to do with anyone on Lemmy.ml and was an action undertaken by the mods of !anarchism@lemmy.ca.) is dealings with liberals, not communists. Again, half the admins are ML, me included.
You treat them with more favour than communists because the nature of communists (and other leftists) is that we generally don’t seek to abuse site systems in any which way we can in order to achieve political goals. The liberals currently attacking your site are (I suspect) the same wreckers that have attempted to attack hexbear numerous times, they are committed, will not go away easily, and you will need to learn to recognise their tactics and methods quickly in order to deal with them. You will also need to inoculate the wider community to wrecker activity, in that they will need teaching of wrecker tactics, methods, how to spot them and that their reports are genuinely useful in getting them.
When one side is actively weaponising you (the modteam) as a tool against their political opponents while the other side is not, the outcome is that you come down against the leftists more than the liberals.
I will keep raising the point that tone policing rules have a liberalising effect on communities by alienating working class voices that don’t “speak right”. These rules in particular will be weaponised by wreckers in a particularly effective way.
I also don’t think I understand what you’re getting at. Going by the activity in the modlog, we actually rarely remove stuff from communists even when they technically break the rules, we even more rarely ban communists. We remove and ban libs and especially conservatives a lot more often. Part of that is actually because communists tend to be mode civil than libs.
Again, no need to take my word for it, that’s what the modlog is for. If you have any specific concerns with a particular mod action, feel free to ask me about it.
I’m also confused by your insistence on getting rid of tone policing. Just to be clear: being angry, frustrated, salty, sarcastic, incredulous, etc are all not against the rules, and you can see in the instance that those tones happen all the time and we allow those tones all the time. Basically the only thing that would violate the be civil rule, in practice, is direct personal attacks (example, “fuck you” as opposed to “fuck off”, and even a fuck you by itself is unlikely to warrant a direct mod action based on my observed behaviour from me and the other admins), and direct threats like “I’m going to come over to your house and kill you”. I get the impression that you think we strictly enforce being civil as in “you can only talk in a formal, emotionless, robotic voice no matter how bad faith the other side is arguing”, which isn’t true. I really don’t think disallowing that very narrow definition of personal attacks and threats harms the working class’s discourse. If you have specific examples to help me understand your view, I’d love to see them.
I get the impression that you think we strictly enforce being civil as in “you can only talk in a formal, emotionless, robotic voice no matter how bad faith the other side is arguing”, which isn’t true.
I have participated on one single thread on this account which I’ve sat on for 3+ years. I received a warning via PM for the one single instance of me telling a lib to fuck off when they pull the “whataboutism” card for pointing at the western 5 Eyes and Snowden revelations in response to their claims that China is the biggest mass surveillance state in the world. If you say something is the worst you are making a comparison with others and claiming “whataboutism” when people point out you’re fucking wrong is ridiculous and someone deserves to be told to fuck off for that shit.
For the one single “fuck off” in my responses(edited now but it was in the first line after “Bruh.”) I was warned via PM that if I do not edit my comment it would be removed.
How these rules are interpreted and implemented by others in the team seems to be different to how you think. A communist arguing with a liberal on the site will get picked up for this shit in the very first thread they participate in for one single instance of it. This is how tone policing rules always end up. And as a result of getting picked up for it I’m not alienated from the instance, I don’t want to be in an instance where I will get slapped repeatedly for not speaking right or for going off now and then, very rightly so in some cases.
Warned by PM? Can you post a screenshot with the username and timestamp visible? That’s very unusual because the admins on Lemmy.ml tend to publicly post their warnings as a direct reply, with the actual intent being transparency. I’d like to see the exact nature of the conversation.
Also, keep in mind that if this was three years ago, it would have been close to the Lemmy project first being started, when federation was still a distant feature a lot of critics doubted would ever actually be implemented, and we likely would have been inexperienced at modding (I wasn’t even an admin then), and our views certainly have changed a lot in those three years. I don’t think it’s fair to judge us based on mod actions that long ago, when we have a modlog if much more recent actions. NVM I misinterpreted it as this happening three years ago. Checked your profile, and all your activity was actually from yesterday. That does make it very different.
I can but that seems like putting this specific person on blast, which is not my goal. If not this person it would be someone else because this is what tone policing rules cause. As the site grows more team members will be required and more team members will interpret (and reinterpret) tone policing rules on top of contributing to discourse that expands and compounds upon the problems that they cause. The end result is as I said before - these rules have a liberalising effect. Whether it happens in the short term or whether it happens in the longterm organisationally, they’re a negative.
Certain specific things end up going on wild unexpected tangents with these social media platforms when interpreted by teams. I recall when reddit completely destroyed the entire ecosystem that their platform had existed upon up to that point when they implemented the “no witchhunting” rule. This rule was intended to be a rule to stop people doing off-site witchhunts of people like the boston bomber or the lady that threw a cat in a wheeliebin because people get things very wrong in those witchhunts. Modteams however across the entire site re-interpreted the rule in a way that suppresses the ability of any userbase on reddit to raise the issue of a moderator abusing their powers on another subreddit. This completely collapsed reddit’s whole “just go make another subreddit” ideal that it was based on because you can’t just get an entire subreddit to move subreddits if no modteam will let you talk about the issue with another modteam because “witchhunting”. The effect of this rule was the longterm degeneration of the entire ecosystem reddit relied upon and I don’t even think a lot of reddit’s own admins realised what it did to the site.
Obviously that’s not directly relevant, just a tangential example of how different certain things can work out when teams interpret and re-interpret and re-interpret a concept multiple times down the line.
For me, tone policing rules in any form should always take the format of good faith vs bad faith participation. Let people speak how they speak, so long as the content of what they’re saying has merit and is being written in good faith. If however someone is participating in bad faith then slap them around a bit.
(Happy to share privately but again, this isn’t about the individual mod for me but about a rule that needs to be more carefully thought about with regard to its implementation)
The main issue here is ultimately how to let people speak the way they might speak in any environment, that includes if they’re in the pub and some dickhead deserves to be called a dickhead from time to time. The leeway to allow that is useful in generating a trust-based community. Another factor here is that is just happens from time to time. Everyone on these platforms is human - speaking collectively we have workdays, we have good sleeps and bad sleeps, we drink and do drugs, we get grumpy and we get happy. Sometimes something minor makes someone pop off, sometimes something absolutely deserves it.
Building a community isn’t just setting a bunch of rules but it’s also building a culture, and for me this culture and having people in a community understand the above, that everyone there is human, is an integral part of being in a community. People popping off from time to time, arguing, having spats, these things are ok if the activity among people is still all in good faith. They’re just elements of people being human. Some of these negative events even lead to people coming back the next day and regretting some things they said, apologising, and deepening bonds with others over those negative outcomes. Sometimes that’s not the case too and that’s OK.
Your community will suffer immeasurably more damage from the people attempting to harm it, who are acting very much in bad faith, compared to the people that might be a bit rude from time to time but in good faith. A community can’t be built on mechanical factors alone, it has to be built on the interpersonal relationships of its userbase.
If I were going to recommend any particular course of action it would be to tighten the bonds of the community itself around the obvious task that needs to be carried out which is an anti-wrecker campaign. Hexbear carries out these kinds of posts alongside anti-wrecker memes and the like regularly to maintain a community that is well-versed and capable of instantly recognising wrecker shit and dunking on it quickly.
One of the primary things the wreckers want to do is play on your inability to spot them, and this goes 100x for community members who are not privvy to the longterm moderator issues at the backend. These issues won’t get smaller, they will get larger with growth and your instance will need to figure out things like what kind of culture it wants its community to have and how aspects of that culture are important elements of preventing longterm issues.
While you’re at it, can you delist wolfballs? 1 click on the site reveals anti trans content. The images are obviously a bit offensive, as some of them are just plain bad, so I’m pretty sure you’ll see them! 2 click on the site offers a couple more examples.
Lemmy.ml has blocked and defederated from Wolfballs ages ago. You can verify who we block by going to Lemmy.ml and clicking on “Instances” at the bottom of the page. I don’t like the fact that it’s still listed on join-lemmy.org, but I’m not a maintainer of that site.
I do agree that this particular user was overlooked. I actually wanted to ban them ages ago, but (IIRC) another admin disagreed, see above. I probably should have spoken against it more or just taken the initiative initially, I admit. I actually didn’t mention my desire to ban them to the other admins at all, which wasn’t good.
I also want to clear up that I have not been the one banning communists for using words like fuck off (I didn’t ban Catraism for example). They also don’t get permabanned unless there’s something else a lot more serious going on.
I also disageee that we cater to libs or treat them with any more favour than communists. Actually, we’ve very much been overlooking communists breaking the rules way more than libs or conservatives. I haven’t counted, but pretty sure more of the stuff in the modlog (from us, don’t mistake the actions of other instances for ours because it all shows up in the same feed. Example: the screenshot attached to this very post had nothing to do with anyone on Lemmy.ml and was an action undertaken by the mods of !anarchism@lemmy.ca.) is dealings with liberals, not communists. Again, half the admins are ML, me included.
You treat them with more favour than communists because the nature of communists (and other leftists) is that we generally don’t seek to abuse site systems in any which way we can in order to achieve political goals. The liberals currently attacking your site are (I suspect) the same wreckers that have attempted to attack hexbear numerous times, they are committed, will not go away easily, and you will need to learn to recognise their tactics and methods quickly in order to deal with them. You will also need to inoculate the wider community to wrecker activity, in that they will need teaching of wrecker tactics, methods, how to spot them and that their reports are genuinely useful in getting them.
When one side is actively weaponising you (the modteam) as a tool against their political opponents while the other side is not, the outcome is that you come down against the leftists more than the liberals.
I will keep raising the point that tone policing rules have a liberalising effect on communities by alienating working class voices that don’t “speak right”. These rules in particular will be weaponised by wreckers in a particularly effective way.
I also don’t think I understand what you’re getting at. Going by the activity in the modlog, we actually rarely remove stuff from communists even when they technically break the rules, we even more rarely ban communists. We remove and ban libs and especially conservatives a lot more often. Part of that is actually because communists tend to be mode civil than libs.
Again, no need to take my word for it, that’s what the modlog is for. If you have any specific concerns with a particular mod action, feel free to ask me about it.
I’m also confused by your insistence on getting rid of tone policing. Just to be clear: being angry, frustrated, salty, sarcastic, incredulous, etc are all not against the rules, and you can see in the instance that those tones happen all the time and we allow those tones all the time. Basically the only thing that would violate the be civil rule, in practice, is direct personal attacks (example, “fuck you” as opposed to “fuck off”, and even a fuck you by itself is unlikely to warrant a direct mod action based on my observed behaviour from me and the other admins), and direct threats like “I’m going to come over to your house and kill you”. I get the impression that you think we strictly enforce being civil as in “you can only talk in a formal, emotionless, robotic voice no matter how bad faith the other side is arguing”, which isn’t true. I really don’t think disallowing that very narrow definition of personal attacks and threats harms the working class’s discourse. If you have specific examples to help me understand your view, I’d love to see them.
I have participated on one single thread on this account which I’ve sat on for 3+ years. I received a warning via PM for the one single instance of me telling a lib to fuck off when they pull the “whataboutism” card for pointing at the western 5 Eyes and Snowden revelations in response to their claims that China is the biggest mass surveillance state in the world. If you say something is the worst you are making a comparison with others and claiming “whataboutism” when people point out you’re fucking wrong is ridiculous and someone deserves to be told to fuck off for that shit.
For the one single “fuck off” in my responses(edited now but it was in the first line after “Bruh.”) I was warned via PM that if I do not edit my comment it would be removed.
How these rules are interpreted and implemented by others in the team seems to be different to how you think. A communist arguing with a liberal on the site will get picked up for this shit in the very first thread they participate in for one single instance of it. This is how tone policing rules always end up. And as a result of getting picked up for it I’m not alienated from the instance, I don’t want to be in an instance where I will get slapped repeatedly for not speaking right or for going off now and then, very rightly so in some cases.
Warned by PM? Can you post a screenshot with the username and timestamp visible? That’s very unusual because the admins on Lemmy.ml tend to publicly post their warnings as a direct reply, with the actual intent being transparency. I’d like to see the exact nature of the conversation.
Also, keep in mind that if this was three years ago, it would have been close to the Lemmy project first being started, when federation was still a distant feature a lot of critics doubted would ever actually be implemented, and we likely would have been inexperienced at modding (I wasn’t even an admin then), and our views certainly have changed a lot in those three years. I don’t think it’s fair to judge us based on mod actions that long ago, when we have a modlog if much more recent actions.NVM I misinterpreted it as this happening three years ago. Checked your profile, and all your activity was actually from yesterday. That does make it very different.I can but that seems like putting this specific person on blast, which is not my goal. If not this person it would be someone else because this is what tone policing rules cause. As the site grows more team members will be required and more team members will interpret (and reinterpret) tone policing rules on top of contributing to discourse that expands and compounds upon the problems that they cause. The end result is as I said before - these rules have a liberalising effect. Whether it happens in the short term or whether it happens in the longterm organisationally, they’re a negative.
Certain specific things end up going on wild unexpected tangents with these social media platforms when interpreted by teams. I recall when reddit completely destroyed the entire ecosystem that their platform had existed upon up to that point when they implemented the “no witchhunting” rule. This rule was intended to be a rule to stop people doing off-site witchhunts of people like the boston bomber or the lady that threw a cat in a wheeliebin because people get things very wrong in those witchhunts. Modteams however across the entire site re-interpreted the rule in a way that suppresses the ability of any userbase on reddit to raise the issue of a moderator abusing their powers on another subreddit. This completely collapsed reddit’s whole “just go make another subreddit” ideal that it was based on because you can’t just get an entire subreddit to move subreddits if no modteam will let you talk about the issue with another modteam because “witchhunting”. The effect of this rule was the longterm degeneration of the entire ecosystem reddit relied upon and I don’t even think a lot of reddit’s own admins realised what it did to the site.
Obviously that’s not directly relevant, just a tangential example of how different certain things can work out when teams interpret and re-interpret and re-interpret a concept multiple times down the line.
For me, tone policing rules in any form should always take the format of good faith vs bad faith participation. Let people speak how they speak, so long as the content of what they’re saying has merit and is being written in good faith. If however someone is participating in bad faith then slap them around a bit.
(Happy to share privately but again, this isn’t about the individual mod for me but about a rule that needs to be more carefully thought about with regard to its implementation)
You do raise some good points. Very thought provoking. I’ll definitely have to think on it and raise the issue with the other admins.
The main issue here is ultimately how to let people speak the way they might speak in any environment, that includes if they’re in the pub and some dickhead deserves to be called a dickhead from time to time. The leeway to allow that is useful in generating a trust-based community. Another factor here is that is just happens from time to time. Everyone on these platforms is human - speaking collectively we have workdays, we have good sleeps and bad sleeps, we drink and do drugs, we get grumpy and we get happy. Sometimes something minor makes someone pop off, sometimes something absolutely deserves it.
Building a community isn’t just setting a bunch of rules but it’s also building a culture, and for me this culture and having people in a community understand the above, that everyone there is human, is an integral part of being in a community. People popping off from time to time, arguing, having spats, these things are ok if the activity among people is still all in good faith. They’re just elements of people being human. Some of these negative events even lead to people coming back the next day and regretting some things they said, apologising, and deepening bonds with others over those negative outcomes. Sometimes that’s not the case too and that’s OK.
Your community will suffer immeasurably more damage from the people attempting to harm it, who are acting very much in bad faith, compared to the people that might be a bit rude from time to time but in good faith. A community can’t be built on mechanical factors alone, it has to be built on the interpersonal relationships of its userbase.
If I were going to recommend any particular course of action it would be to tighten the bonds of the community itself around the obvious task that needs to be carried out which is an anti-wrecker campaign. Hexbear carries out these kinds of posts alongside anti-wrecker memes and the like regularly to maintain a community that is well-versed and capable of instantly recognising wrecker shit and dunking on it quickly.
One of the primary things the wreckers want to do is play on your inability to spot them, and this goes 100x for community members who are not privvy to the longterm moderator issues at the backend. These issues won’t get smaller, they will get larger with growth and your instance will need to figure out things like what kind of culture it wants its community to have and how aspects of that culture are important elements of preventing longterm issues.
Pretty interesting analysis. Thanks!
While you’re at it, can you delist wolfballs? 1 click on the site reveals anti trans content. The images are obviously a bit offensive, as some of them are just plain bad, so I’m pretty sure you’ll see them! 2 click on the site offers a couple more examples.
Lemmy.ml has blocked and defederated from Wolfballs ages ago. You can verify who we block by going to Lemmy.ml and clicking on “Instances” at the bottom of the page. I don’t like the fact that it’s still listed on join-lemmy.org, but I’m not a maintainer of that site.