A new announcement is coming soon that will clarify matters.
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/24135976
> Communities should not be overly moderated in order to enforce a specific narrative. Respectful disagreement should be allowed in a smaller proportion to the established narrative.
> Humans are naturally inclined to believe a single narrative when they’re only presented with a single narrative. That’s the basis of how fiction works. You can’t tell someone a story if they’re questioning every paragraph. However, a well placed sentence questioning that narrative gives the reader the option to chose. They’re no longer in a story being told by one author, and they’re free to choose the narrative that makes sense to them, even if one narrative is being pushed much more heavily than the other.
> Unfortunately, some malicious actors are hijacking this natural tendency to be invested in fiction, and they’re using it to create absurd, cult-like trends in non-fiction. They’re using this for various nefarious ends, to turn us against each other, to generate profit, and to affect politics both domestically and internationally.
> In a fully anonymous social media platform, we can’t counter this fully. But we can prune some of the most egregious echo chambers.
> We’re aware that this policy is going to be subjective. It won’t be popular in all instances. We’re going to allow some “flat earth” comments. We’re going to force some moderators to accept some “flat earth” comments. The point of this is that you should be able to counter those comments with words, and not need moderation/admin tools to do so. One sentence that doesn’t jive with the overall narrative should be easily countered or ignored.
> It’s harder to just dismiss that comment if it’s interrupting your fictional story that’s pretending to be real. “The moon is upside down in Australia” does a whole lot more damage to the flat earth argument than “Nobody has crossed the ice wall” does to the truth. The purpose of allowing both of these is to help everyone get a little closer to reality and avoid incubating extreme cult-like behavior online.
> A user should be able to (respectfully, infrequently) post/comment about a study showing marijuana is a gateway drug to !marijuana without moderation tools being used to censor that content.
> Of course this isn’t about marijuana. There’s a small handful of self-selected moderators who are very transparently looking to push their particular narrative. And they don’t want to allow discussion. They want to function as propaganda and an incubator. Our goal is to allow a few pinholes of light into the Truman show they wish to create. When those users’ pinholes are systematically shut down, we as admins can directly fix the issue.
> We don’t expect this policy to be perfect. Admins are not aware of everything that happens on our instances and don’t expect to be. This is a tool that allows us to trim the most extreme of our communities and guide them to something more reasonable. This policy is the board that we point to when we see something obscene on !yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com so that we can actually do something about it without being too authoritarian ourselves. We want to enable our users to counter the absolute BS, and be able to step in when self-selected moderators silence those reasonable people.
> Some communities will receive an immediate notice with a link to this new policy. The most egregious communities will comply, or their moderators will be removed from those communities.
> Moderators, if someone is responding to many root comments in every thread, that’s not “in a smaller proportion” and you’re free to do what you like about that. If their “counter” narrative posts are making up half of the posts to your community, you’re free to address that. If they’re belligerent or rude, of course you know what to do. If they’re just saying something you don’t like, respectfully, and they’re not spamming it, use your words instead of your moderation abilities.
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I would not permanently ban somebody for saying the Earth is flat. Instead, I would ban them for a week and send them on a sanity pilgrimage complete with required reading and a final test.
This seems oddly timed with the whole meta thing going on.
Are people going to be forced to accept ‘a small amount’ of, ferinstance, asserting that homosexuality is a mental illness?
Seems to me there is a big difference between attacking someone’s identity and claiming the earth is flat or marijuana is bad. The fact the mods don’t seem to address this is concerning.
If you see offensive content, as always, report it, but the default position now is to respond with “No, you’re wrong, here are the supporting documents showing how wrong you are” rather than instant ban and removal.
Look, I respect the intent, but as someone who’s been on forums since the freaking 90s, I can say with confidence that that’s a toxic meltdown waiting to happen.
You need at least two bitter jaded cybersec experts and at least one game theory person on your team to stand a chance with this kind of thing.
Can you provide supporting documents that disprove :nasty insinuation about you:? Of course not. Do you want to have to keep being required to? No.
Can people provide supporting documents disproving :nasty insinuation about :demographic::? Also no. And they don’t want to have to keep being required to.
So there’s the constant tide of exhaustion of people being constantly undermined and dehumanised, and being forced to either respond to yet another argument that :demographic: don’t really count as people, or to just let it ride and try to ignore it. And then the wreckers use it as rage-bait to get people angry to the point of getting banned, and others walk off in disgust, more trolls smell blood in the water and the whole thing spirals.
It’s the damn nazi-bar problem: even ‘just a few’ nazis smirking in the corner create a hostile and unpleasant environment that other people don’t want to be in. And so they drive the good posters off, reducing the opposition - and within a depressingly short time, you’ve got yourself an alt-right shithole full of trolls and sociopaths that just love being able to exert that kind of power.
I’ve seen it approximately three bajillion times so far, and god dammit why won’t you youngins learn.
Yes, powermods and power-tripping mods are a problem. But the approach to it you’ve chosen was gamed out and defeated in detail probably before you were even alive.
And oh god, if you try to parse a rule about what categories of opinions and statements are covered by this, the rules lawyers are going to clown-shibari the entire damn site.
The only two rules I’ve ever seen be effective over time are:
- Don’t make us ban you
- Don’t make us de-mod you
and probably hard-cap the number of communities one person can mod.
Have other stuff on top of that, but they’re load-bearing and non-optional.
And I get that the site is trying to be a neutral platform that’s insulated from the content, but honestly I don’t think that’s feasible. Sometimes you need to just throw people out of your bar regardless of the exact phrasing of the terms and conditions, and that means picking a side.
Also can we have a better markdown parser that doesn’t turn angle brackets into failed html markup sometime please
For folks who have missed the Nazi Bar reference, this should be required reading:
https://bsky.app/profile/iamragesparkle.bsky.social/post/3lbidcyu5ic2b
(glad to see he left the Nazi bar X is becoming.)
A lot of that falls under “attacks on users” or “attacks on groups”. Of course we’re still going to enforce that.
“Don’t make us de-mod you” is effectively what a lot of this comes down to. The goal is to be just a little less quick with moderation tools and, when we can, use our words a bit more.
I don’t expect this to change much for 95% of communities. The ones that are really going to have to change are the ones with super fragile philosophies that can’t stand up to a single sentence of criticism.
But you’re taking ‘don’t make us ban you’ off the table for the mods.
“Oh no, I’m not attacking trans people, I’m just saying that children deserve protection. Surely you’ll agree there’s no rule against that?”
Sealioning. JAQing off. Ragebait. That very specific, slightly-too-formal dialect of trollspeak. Shitty edgeplay designed to taunt and demoralise without ever quite stepping over any well-defined line, and a bat-signal to like-minded sociopaths that the dog is chained up.
Hell, bluesky has been infested with LLM debate-bots recently that fucking automate the process.
I suspect that you’re mistaking the symptoms for the problem: it’s not that mods are too quick on the button and need to learn to tolerate a little raw chicken in the mayo, it’s that some of them have been captured by corporate / PAC / generally-unsavoury interests, and use the button as a weapon.
And to those people, there’s only one thing you need to say.
Mods are still generally going to have a lot of discretion. How often do you see admins get involved here?
We’re not going to allow hate speech. This is fully intended to give us something against those who, as you say, use the button as a weapon.
Give us a chance and let’s see how this actually plays out.
Shitty edgeplay designed to taunt and demoralise without ever quite stepping over any well-defined line
You could as well have said “I want to ban everyone who disagrees with me without them having any recourse”.
Introduce rules disallowing lies (anything which can be proved as not being factual - hard facts rather than opinions) Nazi propaganda, illegal contents, post supporting genocide. This is completely sufficient for the vast majority of contents. You definitely should not ban users because they engage in what is in your OPINION “edgeplay designed to taunt and demoralise without ever quite stepping over any well-defined line”.
Lolno. God, lawful-neutrals and their damn rules.
If you do that, they get to play the dictionary-definitions game and well-ackchewally at you indefinitely and demand you provide sources for the word ‘the’, while creating endless reports demanding people be banned because technically that’s not paedophilia that’s ephebepholia… or whatever the fuck.
It’s a game to them; all they care about is making a disruptive and unpleasant environment.
The only way to win is to not play.
When you recognise the pattern, you short-circuit the whole damn thing and just boot them out.
It should take them at least as much effort to say what they want to say as it takes to debunk it, so they would have to “escalate” first before I put any effort into a reply and escalate my effort too.
Just as long as everybody remembers that fighting ideas with ideas only works when everybody is honest.
Even if they are both honest, it only works when you agree on the aims each one is trying to reach (and ground rules, those are already in the sidebar). If one is trying to learn something and the other is trying to win the argument or pose for your potential readers…you get a shit debate where no progress is made.
That is some church right there, cous’.
Huh… that’s disappointing.
It was entirely predictable from Vichy Twitter and Meta, but I didn’t expect lemmy - even .world - to kowtow.
In principle, this seems like a solid rule change.
However, considering that lemmy unfortunately has a large number of tankies, I could see how it could be abused lower the quality of discussion and spread tankie propaganda and genocide whitewashing.
tankie
They love their slurs against anyone they disagree with
tankie is a slur
Jfc I get that the term is overused by liberals who think it just means “anyone to the left of me whom I don’t like” but saying it’s a slur is fucking pathetic.
What its origins are I neither know nor care.
Tankie is an easy-to-remember word for people of limited intelligence and vocabulary to throw around. u/Skiluros managed to use it twice in one sentence in his efforts to assert that only propaganda that fits the approved narrative should be allowed.
Yeah and? You’re not the dumbfuck who said it was a slur, I wasn’t picking a fight with you.
I used tankie in the specific meaning of the word.
Far left individuals who white-wash the crimes of states like USSR (Russia), China, support authoritarianism and oppose self-determination for countries who suffer from the yoke of russian genocidal imperialism.
You’re just playing dumb.
only our propaganda is true, trust us
FTFY
Nah, you’re just a vile genocide whitewashing scoundrel hiding under big words about “your propaganda”. We both know this.
When I see individuals like you, for some reason the fate of Donbas cowboy, Russell Bentley, comes to mind:
Bentley, whose military call sign was Texas, went missing in Donetsk in April.
According to the Investigative Committee, Vansyatsky, Agaltsev, and Iordanov tortured Bentley on April 8, and he died shortly afterward.
Vansyatsky and Agaltsev are suspected of blowing up a car with Bentley’s body in it and ordering Bazhin to get rid of what was left of his remains.
slur noun: an insinuation or allegation about someone that is likely to insult them or damage their reputation.
It is a slur, and liberals love their slurs. They love labeling people that they view as beneath them.
It’s a factual description. Far left supporters of russian/Chinese genocidal imperialism and authoritarianism.
