/0 Governance

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.