To be clear, not talking about this community, obviously 😛.
What’s the point of writing down rules, if mods just do what they want? But I suppose that’s the risk you take when you call someone a liar in a small community; they might be a mod.
Edit: I’m not trying to say that mods suck, they perform a useful and often thankless job. Just that it can be difficult for small communities to get a healthy number of good mods, which can become a problem.
I get the feeling you’re speaking from experience
It happens on Lemmy all the time. I’ve been shadowbanned at least three times, all on the bigger instances.
I really, really suspect that the big Lemmy instances are being run by Reddit admins or spooks or some-such. They’re moderating their instances in the exact same way Reddit did minus the profiteering. The censorship is the exact same.
Also, the fact that it’s possible to shadowban people and the software itself doesn’t circumvent that by auto-messaging you or putting a banner on the top of your screen when you are banned from an instance or community is reason #589238923 why Lemmy fucking sucks ass.
It’s because the most insufferable people from reddit all came over to Lemmy/kbin when they got banned for being exceptionally insufferable.
It really does feel like the more popular instances are nazi bars run by the same kinds of people who made reddit shitty.
A ttrpg called .dungeon got a remaster recently and I keep coming back to one of the screenshots on the store page, because I’m such a big fan of the rules for community moderation it enumerated:
#5 is the worst rule there. I’ve been called that for the most milquetoast of statements. You really have to be more specific. This community sounds like an annoying pain to be a part of tbh, I don’t have time to feel like I’m stepping on glass every day
If you have to step on glass to not side with genocide and oppression then that sounds like a you issue.
A prime example of the vitriol he’s talking about!
It’s true, I have zero chill.
Clearly you have no sense for nuance. Not everything anyone disagrees with is siding with genocide and oppression just because they disagree. It’s concerning that that’s immediately what you assumed.
Nuance nonces on their way to defend nazi war criminals.
I really need to make that a bot.
Often the mods are arbitrary and inconsistent. Moderation can really suck sometimes
Arbitrary is fine - there’s a reason we have humans do this. But any enforcement of bad rules will always suck.
“Be nice” is a bad rule.
“Be nice” is a recipe for failure, and it always winds up protecting mildly cautious assholes. If you see someone reply ‘so you think [insane garbage unrelated to parent comment]?’ and the accused shoot back ‘shut up,’ and you only remove the person brushing off that troll, your forum is for trolls. That is who you’ve protected. That is what you’ve encouraged. That is how things will go.
If you think the right answer is to always expend great effort peeling apart that disinformation, you do not know what trolling is.
It’s outright insane, in communities about serious topics. If your forum’s about knitting - yeah, you can expect and demand televisable language. The vibe is properly casual. But if you deal with politics then you’re going to get people being called subhuman, and if you don’t come down ten times harder on sneering bigots than their pissed-off victims, you’re not preventing abuse, you’re enabling abuse.
Trying to enumerate all the ways someone could deserve a time-out is a fool’s errand. You can be mercilessly rude with nothing but a thumbs-up emoji. Or “Great Save!” More importantly - some vitriol is justified. Be human, god dammit, and spend thirty seconds figuring out if someone’s being a crank or merely dealing with cranks. If you think there’s never any reason for one user to tell another where to shove it, then you are wrong and you should quit.
I’ve never seen “be respectable” rules that haven’t been in service of protecting nazis, so I always go out of my way to be as thorny as possible.
EVERY single ban i’ve caught so far has always been the result of going against the mods/admins (usually calling them out on their contradictions) or, more often, for being openly antifascist. They’re going to look for an excuse to ban me anyway and if they don’t find one they’ll just make something up, so why bother being nice?
I need to make a pie chart.
Reasons I have been banned from subforums:
20% swearing at trolls.
20% swearing at Nazis.
60% genuinely polite interactions catching a boot in the ass for incomprehensible reasons.
Your mistake was interacting with internet hatethiests. The only interaction you should ever have with them is reminding everyone in the room that they were a big part of the rise of the alt right and that the movement never underwent even a little bit of denazification.
Hey look, a worse take than ‘how dare you say yes.’
I’m on your side, dumbass.
Yay! The whole Reddit experience, but without warning…
meh if you’re being a shit starting nazi fuckwit I’m all for just banning and moving on.
First they came for…
They in this case being the fucking nazis, who first came for the trans people, and then the communists, the socialists, the trade unionists, Jewish people, etc
Reddit bans you for calling out the shit starting nazi fuckwits.
Lemmy world’s admins silently banned me from the entire instance after I said that anticommunism is equivalent to pronazism.
The only reason I knew is because the amount of weird harassing comments I was getting from there suddenly dropped off.
Your opinion is braindead, however, I’ll defend to the death your right to say and have it. Shouldn’t have been banned for that. Shame on them.
Your opinion is braindead
Justify.