I tend to browse /All and by New on Lemmy. I went to respond on a thread on !vegan@lemmy.world to thank someone for a recipe that looked good, and found out I had been banned.
Odd, considering I hadn’t posted to that sub at any point in the past. I checked the modlog to find that “Mod” had banned a bunch of people citing “Rule 5.”
Their Rule 5 states: Bad-faith carnist rhetoric & anti-veganism are not allowed, as this is not a space to debate the merits of veganism. Anyone is welcome here, however, and so good-faith efforts to ask questions about veganism may be given their own weekly stickied post in the future (see current stickied discussion).
I (and hundreds of others) seemingly broke rule 5 of this community without ever posting there. What is going on?
And my apologies if this isn’t the place for this, but I had no idea where else to post the question.
This post may be relevant: https://slrpnk.net/post/11069853, i.e. perhaps one of those mods is using this same bot. So yeah, you seriously and literally might have been banned bc of a couple of downvotes in some totally unrelated community!?!? As that post says:
e.g. I just found out that I’ve been banned from a community that I’ve literally never heard about, on an instance I rarely visit, as a result of this bot. Though I never got a message about it, nor does the modlog give a length of time for it? (Nor can I even see the ban in several different modlogs on instances other than Lemmy.World - so there may be issues with federating this action? The community seems to be new, created in the last month, and filled with a deluge of posts from the same few people - so very likely nobody from my instances has subscribed to it yet, and perhaps that caused the ban for it to also not be propagated? I dunno. It’s odd to not see a length of time for it though - does it look different to someone who has an account on Lemmy.World, like with an expiration that somehow wouldn’t show for someone not logged in?)
And even there, aside from how that post calls us “jerks”, and the community too (thereby exposing hypocrisy - bc everyone that they don’t like are labeled as “jerks”, while they rise above us all, by their own way of thinking…bc they are never downvoted?) it seems to be malfunctioning, bc I most definitely don’t have more downvotes than upvotes, either overall or it mentions over the past month - not that we are even allowed to see those? Perhaps it is counting per-community somehow? I do have this comment in !lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world that people seemed to dislike greatly. Probably I was too serious, in a community dedicated to shitposting? :-P And now therefore I banned from this community that I, and probably mostly all of us, have never so much as heard of?
Summary: some children are attempting to play around with what they seem to think is AI, and are now weaponizing downvoting in an attempt to cheap out on modding effort. Not only that, but they are using my data without my consent, or apparently much thought into it at all. And to top it all off, they call anyone they want to as “jerks” - bc obviously anyone who ever receives downvotes, even once, even on a single comment, in an entirely unrelated community, qualifies for that label, don’t you agree? /s I think you should form your own opinion though, as to who may be acting like jerks here:-).
Edit: the bot post has a spoiler tag at at the end, but with nothing inside except a horizontal line? i.e., they don’t seem very experienced with markup, and presumably therefore with actual coding as well?
Edit 2: omg reading through those comments - it just keeps getting better and better! Especially how readily they take to criticism, but this comment also caught my eye:
Wow, just wow. The author also did not seem to care about the load this will put onto the instance servers, to be federating hundreds or thousands of community bans, and then lifting them, and then reapplying them again later, however often this bot will be ran. More to the point, modlogs seem like they will become no longer human-readable? (unless perhaps you could filter out all actions taken by these bot accounts - which I can’t see how to do) As such, I wonder if this will be treated by other instance admins as an attack against the Fediverse? What would the limit be, I can only guess - 100 community bans per account per day? 1k? 10k? We might soon find out, whether we want to or not!?
If they’re indeed using this bot or something similar the amount of idiocy goes up the roof.
The bot author outright says that the bot is experimental. Automatic bans are stupid and silly. Using votes as grounds for banning is something that should be done only to address vote manipulation, or something damn serious. And it should never be done based on a single vote, but on voting patterns.
And they’re showing the exact same lack of transparency as a certain instance, except that instead of “rule 1 and 2” it’s “rule 5”.
They don’t even see the contradiction: that in an attempt to fight the fascists (as they say in the post I linked), they have become ones themselves.
Also, I don’t mind if they user block me using such a bot - that is simply curating their own feed (I may not think highly of their choice, but at least I agree that it would be their choice) - but to ban me from some place, and more importantly make a note in my modlog to that effect, is something else entirely. It’s the difference between choosing not to have an abortion for oneSELF, vs. making that determination for someone ELSE to not be allowed to have an abortion.
And then telling that person what you think about the situation, at whatever frequency that bot is run, essentially spamming the Fediverse with your own speech, in an attempt to silence someone else’s (in your community… except that unless you are an instance admin - in which case you don’t need to resort to this type of implementation - you don’t “own” any community, even if you started it, i.e. there are still instance rules that need to be followed, and anyway you certainly don’t own the modlogs of every person across the entire Fediverse!!!).
If I were the author of this bot, setting aside how I never would have made such in the first place, the best solution now would be to throw it away entirely, as it is far too broken to be fixed with mere tweaking, like minimum of five comments rather than one. Even then, that account might end up being banned from several instances, for “vote manipulation”, and it even puts the instances that allow users to run it at risk of being defederated as well, eventually if that becomes a pattern and the admins are unresponsive to deal with it, for violation of the rules of the Fediverse, especially spamming. These are like constant advertisements of “I don’t like this other person, and want them to only have access to separate but equal communities away from me”, which is… not ideal but basically their private thoughts, not something that needs to fill up the modlogs of a large fraction of people across the entire Fediverse, especially mostly innocent people getting caught up in too wide of a net, and making the modlogs of those thus affected no longer human readable.
I disagree with the idea that the bot author is “becoming a fascist” in their attempt to fight fascism. Sure, the bot is a dumb idea; and I predict that it’ll reinforce local circlejerks (even if it does nothing, as long as people think that it does). But I don’t see it being able to enforce some unpopular and harmful ideology by force, allowing it to take over.
There is a contradiction or two though - votes and moderation are supposed to handle different types of undesired content, so one cannot rely on the other. And by giving votes a stronger effect (they might cause someone to be banned) the bot is discouraging their legit usage (content sorting - what if someone gets banned because of my downvote?) and encouraging the non-legit one (e.g. someone did nothing wrong but I have a pet peeve against them and I want to see them gone, so I downvote them).
That’s how I see it too, on general grounds (not just for this bot). Blocking is ultimately about you not hearing the offending party; banning is about the offending party not being able to talk.
The bot does use force though: e.g. if I had wanted to post in the community, now I am unable to b/c despite my consent and against my judgement (in this scenario), I am no longer able to. Granted, this level of “force” does not rise to full “violence”:-).
Though does fascism necessarily imply violence? Yes they are willing to use it, and moreover they don’t shirk from it as others do, seeing it as a healthy and natural part of the world, but they seem to me to simply want to win, using whatever means necessary, rather than having that be a defining characteristic for them, as if using it were their sole or even primary tool? As the current regime of disinformation warfare is showing us, if lies work better than tanks, then those are what you want to use to convert your target from a foe into an ally. The goal for them being the attainment of said goal, unlike e.g. liberalism that focuses more on the process to get there - the means not justifying the end (for some, though fascists would ofc disagree… violently if necessary).
Also, for me it is not just the improper technique - if they want to do something incorrectly, that’s on them, e.g. I don’t need their code to compile & run, only my own - but rather the various means of imposition that their application of their tool has upon me / us all. e.g. right now my account has zero bans on it (ironically including this one, b/c outside of Lemmy.World I cannot see this ban, only on that exact server instance), but if this bot makes a new “determination” for me lets say every other day, then in the course of the next quarter I (or whoever) could have nearly 50 mod actions taken against me. That means then that if I get legitimately banned, from a real community that I may actually care about, I will have a much harder time even noticing that, if I have no tools to separate out those automated bans from the human ones (just b/c it has not happened to me yet, doesn’t mean that it never will!:-P). It is the email spam issue all over again, or the older I-was-just-sitting-down-to-eat-dinner-with-my-family-when-the-salesman-calls (or shows up at your front door, at a time they figured you would be home): how do you maintain utility of a tool (your email address, your phone number, your front door visitation privileges), when someone abuses those, spamming it at all hours of the day and night with their blitzkrieg approach to “just making sure that I/you are aware of this amazing opportunity… and if you act now then you can…” I am saying: these mod actions are not harmless - they deny us the use of the normal functioning of the modlog.
And even if the modlog issue were fixed, it is still harassment. A white woman stopping an immigrant, or a black person, to “share their opinion” of whether the recipient should be in that particular place… “I’m just saying”, or “I’m just asking questions here…” except no you aren’t, you’re on a campaign to convey a message that “you[r kind] are not welcomed here, you should go elsewhere, imho”. It’s an attack - a fairly low-key, extremely ineffective one, but a pointed/directed, nonconsensual, not-friendly, abusive message that is being sent. Though unless I am misunderstanding something here, while I can block the sender, I cannot block those modlog entries… right? (do you know?) Thus they deny me the use of that, filling it up with their spam, even if - again - I have never visited nor ever desired to visit their community. Ofc if someone were an admin, or had access to some of those admin tools… then that would solve the issue for them personally, to either not have to see those messages or at least be able to filter them so that they can see others, but it would not help anyone else across the Fediverse - that is an unreasonable expectation that “we should all become admins of our own instances”. Thus, these qualify as “attacks” under those circumstances - do they not?
But I suppose where I went wrong was that “fascist” seems to imply a far-right nature? And while far-left totalitarians share a lot in common - the heavy directive role played by the mods/admins, the self-sufficiency not desiring input from anyone outside of the echo chamber of loyal
petssubjects, and the purity seeking to separate themselves from the denigrated “jerks” - they indeed differ, I suppose, in the specific definition of their end goals. So what do you think, would the more proper word be “authoritarian”/“totalitarian”, rather than “fascist”? I suppose we all (translation: me:-D) are playing fast & loose with that word, as in the concept of certain people being “like (without necessarily precisely being” (a fascist), but I’ve been doing so long already that I’m not putting it in quotes, and allowing myself to forget even inside my own mind whatever I may have originally meant. (And I may even have offered this exact apology before, to you, yet if so, then here we are again…)In any case, they do seem to be falling prey to the same format of thinking as those that they claim are “bad”? And then they ramp up the scale - if they downvote, then *I* will ban! (at which point the other side simply gets alts, etc.) And then in the process, as you pointed out, such an arms race nullifies the original/proper/intended use of those tools.
“Authoritarian” does sound more accurate, and I do agree with you that it’s a bit too forceful.
On fascism, Robert Paxton has IMO a good definition. The key points are, basically
A lot of those points go completely orthogonal to both the bot+bot author, and the vegan comm mod (if she’s using that bot; I don’t know, it might be something she coded herself).
I also don’t see it as coming from the mod of the vegan community, even if I outright ridicule her actions as being shitty for the community, the Fediverse as a whole, and herself.
I fully agree that it is spammy as fuck, over what would be remotely reasonable. And IMO Lemmy devs should be doing something to make modlogs easier to filter and audit.
(Your analogy with the salesman calls is perfect - the act itself wouldn’t be a big deal, if it wasn’t consistently obstrusive. I just want to dinner!)
I don’t think that you can. And… yes, it leaves a sour taste in your mouth, it’s like someone from a shop telling you “YOU ARE NOT WELCOME HERE!”. Even if you never entered the shop, and even if you don’t plan to do so.
It’s also a really shitty moderative practice. The whole idea of moderating is to stop people from ruining each other’s experience; and yet that’s exactly what they’re doing. (Perhaps I’m biased because I tend to issue a lot of warnings, but barely any ban. Still.)
I think so.
Fascinating. I always enjoy going deeper with you:-).
According to his definition, put forth in his 2004 Anatomy of Fascism (via that wikipedia page), he says:
I picked up on the usage of the wording of “jerks” - at least 3 times in the bot post, and more times still on the actual community page - bc of how much it struck me as a tactic of “humiliation”. As in, it’s not enough to ban someone - they need to be told about it (just when they sit down to dinner! 😔), everywhere they look, and have that word added, with the link to that word given specifically embedded into the modlog ban message. i.e. it’s very “in-your-face”. Much like how “the poors deserve their fate bc they’re lazy and spoiled and entitled”, never mind all the facts to the contrary e.g. what if a store is currently selling (almost expired) steak meat for half the price of ground chuck. But no, Kansas had to pass a law specifically prohibiting people on food social welfare programs - most often widows, whose husbands disappeared for whatever reason and left a single parent to now raise an innocent child - from purchasing steak with those funds, regardless of the pricing. The “luxury” items - even nearly expired ones - are too good for the likes of them, i.e. it’s a humiliation tactic used by conservatives to stick it to the poor. Just like that bot calls people “jerks”, as in it’s not enough to ban them, they must also have that label thrown into their face.
And we could go down, one sentence fragment at a time, one after the other - e.g. “obsessive preoccupation with community decline”, yup, check - and we see how well that bot post meshes with this definition of fascism. And even irl regimes don’t always meet all the criteria - with only Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy having done so. “working… with traditional elites” - yup, community mods, check. “abandons democratic liberties” - yup, people’s rights to only be banned after they have committed some offense, which downvotes do not qualify as, especially in some other community entirely, and all the more so when a single downvote can do the trick. “and pursues with redemptive violence” - yup, I mean it’s anonymous online, so fairly limited, but we agreed how it’s an “attack” nonetheless. “and without ethical or legal restraints” - yup, violates various codes of conduct as well as the entire spirit behind federation principles. “goals of internal cleansing and external expansion” - yup, get rid of the “jerks” and thereby make the communities that use the Santa-bot great again.
I dunno, the more I look into this, the full-on term of “fascism”, not just authoritian/totalitarian seems to fit better. But I’ll be curious to hear your rebuttal bc you definitely have read far deeper than I on this topic:-). I agree it’s strange to think in terms of fascism wrt online moderation principles rather than tanks and coups, but if the shoe fits, as the old saying goes…
About Kansas: I’m not sure but I feel like the humiliation is accidental, and yet the motivation resembles fascism in its own way - preventing the individual from choosing under the assumption that they’ll cause themself harm. As in, “if we let them buy steak they’ll wreck their budgets” style.
(It’s a discourse associated with authoritarianism, but authoritarianism is one of fascism’s “legs” anyway.)
In the case of the vegan mod: I’m really not sure if her bot complaining about “jerks” fits well with fascism. The humiliation that fascists complain about is not just about “wah, you were mean to me, I feel humiliated”; it’s more like “you’re humiliating me to drag me down from my rightful position”. To make it fascist she’d need to insert that into a context, like “if vegans weren’t so humiliated they’d be ruling the world/Lemmy!” or something like this.
Note that the criteria work more like a ladder than like a checklist. As in, to fulfill a criterion you need to fulfill the preceding ones. At most we could claim that she reached the third step (arrival to power), but her ability to exercise it is clearly handicapped (as in, the vegan community is clearly not buying her shit).
To be honest I didn’t. I’m actually defending my view but I’m aware that it might be completely wrong. I like discussing this stuff with you though.
(1) no it’s not; (2) because even if it had been originally, it was explained to them after-the-fact, yet they doubled down on it still, at which point it became “obstinacy” rather than mere “ignorance”. Also (3) even if it somehow was, the only other alternative is FAR worse - an outright immoral (and likely criminal) level of negligence, like a wealthy person who despite never having set foot inside of a grocery store… hey, quick side-story, this reminds me of Betsy DeVos who admitted to never having even been inside of a public school building in her entire lifetime in a Barbara Walters interview, even despite knowing about her upcoming appointment, she still never considered it a priority to do that, even just to see it visually with her own eyes. Anyway, despite never having set foot in a grocery store their entire lives, this individual yet still did not bother to do activities like to ask their butler or discuss it with the grocery store CEO whilst golfing, but nevertheless still takes action - not to be responsible with their own budget by limiting their own purchase of steaks, but to forcibly prevent anyone else from doing such “harm” to their own. (4) and even then, the final act itself is still humilating, whether the person is so warped & twisted inside their own mind to even so much as realize that or not.
The amount of money offered to food stamp recipients is already limited, yet the burden of compliance seems higher to prevent this than to allow all the variety of exceptions that would make sense - e.g. the expiration date. If something looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then why would we even entertain the notion that it could actually be a hunter dressed up like a duck? But even if it were, it makes no functional difference to the next step… (offering it a crust of bread perhaps?:-)
Anyway, no matter what it is totalitarianism/authoritarianism. But also, I think it would qualify as actual fascism? “obsessive preoccupation with community decline”, “working… with traditional elites”, “abandons democratic liberties”, “and pursues with redemptive violence”, “and without ethical or legal restraints” (they knew - they were told so even if not at first, after that they knew - yet they did it anyway), and finally “goals of internal cleansing and external expansion” (i.e. budget-friendliness achieved for the former, the latter presumably comes later as they proselytize their belief system to other states, the same as how Kansas itself looks to other states to model their own actions on)
In the case of the vegan mod: I am not so sure that it isn’t fascism, but I am also not so sure that it is either, though either way the tool seems to me to be thus, and even if she (the mod) made their own tool, the approach seems overall to be thus. As in, can a single thought that passes through our minds, and then is gone, be called “fascist”? What about one entertained over the course of a bad week, perhaps while going through a personal tragedy at home, or losing one’s job at work? I think so, at which point there would be degrees of fascism, like fascism-lite, not changing the quality of the substance yet greatly impacting its power to affect change i.e. the quantity. Like if a 2-year old punches you, it would not rise to the level of “assault”, but it is still a “punch”? But then it gets tricky: if a fascist bot/tool is applied by a non-fascist, and crucially I mean for its intended purpose, then does that change its intended purpose any? e.g. if a 6-month old “shoots” a gun, it makes it no less deadly, yet arguably we wouldn’t even call that “shoots”, or the baby a “shooter”, so much as they “accidentally caused the firearm to discharge”. But here’s the big difference in my mind: a mod is not a 6-month old, and rather in a position of authority, hence by definition of that is to be held accountable to their actions, however ill-advised and resembling those of a 6-month old they might be. Everything a 6-month old does is an “accident” (even smiling - is it intentional, or is it gas?), but everything a person in a position of responsibility does is something to which they can be held account, e.g. by being removed, possibly banned from an instance outright.
I do not understand this at all. The first thought that springs to mind is a white man in America lets say just prior to the Revolution denigrating a black man in any way feel threatened by the latter’s mere presence, lets suppose the latter is already working for the former, whilst wearing shackles and bent over in the act of something like picking cotton? Yes, sometimes - especially in modern times - fascists try to reclaim lost glory, but my analogy seems to depict something else entirely, as in a preemptive strike against someone else’s dignity as a person, not caused in the slightest by anything that the recipient has done (nor even plans to do - let’s further add the stipulation that the slave owner speaks first, and the slave does not even know that the master is nearby, until after the humiliating words have already been delivered; let us also add the stiuplation that the slave has never yet met the master prior to this interaction) but rather by the thoughts and actions and most importantly attitudes held inside the authoritarian’s own mind. i.e., in America the current set of neo-fascists seem to play the victim card a lot, and perhaps that is baked right into fascism from the start, but I don’t think it’s the only way to be fascist, and rather it’s more a tool that they very often use, thus it is commonly associated with them but does not act as a defining characterist. imho at least.
Yes, fair, and agreed that the vegan mod was blocked at that point hence it ended. So we can say that she was “attempting to be a fascist” (aka “acting like a fascist”), yet could not get all the way there b/c fascism implicates a continuance until it is entrenched, which she could not manage.
Perfection itself - how will we know about things unless we think about them, and by implication talk amongst ourselves (in a civil manner ofc) to debate the pros & cons, ins & outs, and variety of implications to & from? THIS is what I hoped to find on Lemmy, but it seems exceedingly rare to talk with someone in a respectful and deep manner. Mind you, both of those are already uncommon on their own, but to see them combined… is outright rare.
Don’t worry, mate. Take your time!
I fixed it - check the original again 😁
This is such a bad idea. Voting already achieves what they are doing - increasing the visibility of “good” content and minimizing the visibility of “bad” content through crowd sourcing. 1) Banning people for using that system is seriously off base, and 2) turning that system into outright bans from interacting at all is way too far.
This is an automatic system to rigidly create and maintain echo chambers. Really hoping this doesn’t spread.
*Also also - administering bans based on how and where people interact with content, even as mild as up or down voting, is a dangerous choice. Utilizing a purity test of who’s allowed to interact where isn’t going to make Lemmy a better place.
The author of the bot has already been challenged. It looks like (although I’m no admin so I cannot confirm) they simply downvoted that dissenting opinion, responding with derision (this we all of us can read since it’s public, note no /s tag either, though sarcasm heavily layered on), and proceeded to do whatever they wanted regardless of consent, by anyone.
i.e. they aren’t simply turning away applications to join a community, that’s 100% within their rights, although even that would be more than a little weird to scrape through every single downvote from every community across the entire Fediverse in order to make that determination. But even so, at least the applicant would be asking for it (hopefully with appropriate informed consent). Instead, they seem to be proactively judging the entire population present across the entire Fediverse, regardless of whether we’ve ever so much as even heard of their own community, and then filling up our modlogs with the manifestation of their disapproval. Like okay Karen, I don’t need you spamming my (public!) inbox with every thought that crosses your mind, that my post history happens to remind you of! :-P
I noted elsewhere that this is exactly what Trump supporters have talked about wanting to do, both online but also even irl as in Project 2025. However, the cat is out of the bag - we are not offered the choice to avoid this occurrence altogether, our only choice now is how we will respond to these attacks on the principles of freedom of expression, and also the ability to preserve the modlogs to be human-readable rather than continually polluted with bot actions, taken by every community that we have zero interest in to begin with, until they wormed their way to becoming the center of attention (Karen) with their expressions (Karen) of what they (Karen) seem to think of us, at every given moment that they decide is right for them to divulge that “information”.