this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2025
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Hi I'm the mod of these two communities, so I'm going to give my input on this. Basically this started back when I began before I started my first community and I noticed that other AI communities receive a surprisingly large amount of downvotes, however when I started my first community !stable_diffusion_mycology@lemmy.dbzer0.com I found that number to be much higher, and when I looked into the Voter data I found that it was being brigaded from users who moderate !fuck_ai@lemmy.world as well as very active participants there. So I made a decision that instead of allowing them to suppress and hurt my community I would ban the ones who do it so they can't hurt my community. Eventually I found that that wasn't enough because there were too many of them just waiting to take the place of banned users, so I started screening users by post history, and if they made bad faith anti-AI arguments I banned them, and yes I also used posts like the linked one as honeypots to catch other Anti-AI trolls who would complain about banning. When I began !stable_diffusion_witches@lemmy.dbzer0.com I transferred the bans from my already established community because I knew that these same people would continue at it again.
I know that these people will not block and ignore these communities on their own, they are intentionally trying to suppress it, some of them have actually admitted to doing such and saying they won't block posts. If it's considered unacceptable or against the rules to ban people in this manner then that means it's essentially impossible to fight large scale brigading and hate voting like this, which I do not think is fair for people wanting to start communities here.
In addition to simply brigading my communities I have had people harass me in DMs, make death threats towards me, and make fun of me for being a recovering alcoholic. I've had these people deny my gender identity, claim I'm a woman, deliberately use the wrong pronouns, and even one person impersonating me while acting like a pig. Really vile stuff.
In short these are not knee jerk reactions, the vast majority of the bans I cast are for good reasons, and while I have made mistakes on occasion, the majority of these bans are correct, and I don't believe we should be forced to allow known problematic users to hurt our communities just because they haven't left comments there yet.
You may wanna say this in Ye Power Tripping, I'm trying to defend you there. But I understand if you don't wanna, the people there can be weird.
I try to avoid that place, it has a lot of toxic people there and most of the ones there are just upset about being banned, they don't care that it's actually for a good reason or not, they just want to be unbanned so they can do whatever they want. My comment about the reasons largely fall on deaf ears. And also since many of the people there are the people who have been brigading even if they know and understand they will double down because it's in their interest too.
Also by the way I saw your comment there and just want to clarify that I go by Ze/Zir pronouns I don't go by she/her, I tolerate it sometimes but being called by she/her gives me mild dysphoria and ickyness, so I'd prefer not to be.
Fair, and I am trying to edit my posts. Please lemme know if I missed any!
Will do 👍
Thank you!! I'm still learning neopronouns and proper use of them. :3
Smart. YPTB seema to be flooded with the same kind of morons who think they should be able to say whatever they want without repercussions. I'm blocking it myself after making this comment.
I think it's a good idea to be able to call out bad moderation practices but I think that bellyaching and free speech entitlement needs to be culled way more aggressively to make it actually work, otherwise it'll just be filled with the worst people all the time complaining that they got banned, even though it was for more than good reasons.
It cannot be neutral, it has to have some level of bias to balance out the natural bias of moderation disproportionately affecting those who really deserve it, otherwise it'll be a majority of people who really deserve it commenting and shit-talking there, and they'll talk over a lot of the real issues and make them harder to discuss, or worse seem less credible.
I used to be head mod of a 1M+ subreddit some years ago. Believe me - I get it.
We mitigate all we can, but there will always be sore losers in public forums. YPTB was probably made with good intentions, calling out obvious tankie bullshit and the like, but it's just turned into cesspool.
Just a random thought, its a shame flairs aren't better implemented (and available lemmy-wide) so they could be used for preferred pronouns, that would be great.
Sorry pretty far OT, just thinking that would make communication here even easier
Yeah it would be nice. Display names work well enough, but it would be better to have flairs since they can be more noticeable.