cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/35891683
I have changed the original title of this post, as it is imo, thanks largely to discussion in this thread, with a lemmyusa mod, unnecessarily incendiary.
Original Title:
"lemmyusa.com is engaging in vote manipulation, suggest defederating unless it is addressed"
Mod Abuse:
https://lemmy.world/modlog/1432313?page=1&actionType=All
The instance has 3 active subs, it's unlikely the admins are not also the mods engaging in this.
Banning anyone who downvotes is a clear attempt to foster a chilling effect on dissenting opinions. The mods and admins of this instance are putting their thumb on the scales in order to make their ideas appear more positively received than they actually are.
Thanks for your attention to this.
I realize that doing a cross post here is... unorthodox, and this doesn't drectly involve my own interactions, and I am technically breaking a number of the rules of this comm...
... but I think this is worth the discussion and consideration of, and potential further investigation from this comm, which essentially functions as a de facto place for discussing things like this.
Further context / info I have been able to gather:
Here is a direct link to their own modlog.
Their dedicated legal page:
Their described 'sidebar rules' appear to only be:
We're keeping it simple:
Be thoughtful, act responsibly, and treat others with respect.
No NSFW content.
Everything else seems to be in the Legal / TOS / Privacy Policy section.
My preliminary, most charitable interpretation of mod/admin activity here... is that they can and will essentially ban anyone who posts on their instance and is not a lemmyusa user, as any other user would not have agreed to their TOS.
???
Further, this instance appears to be hosting an account that is impersonating SatansMaggotyCumFart, a fairly well known, mostly parody/dedicated 'bit' account here on lemmy...
The profile description of their version of SMCF claims to be 'the only real profile!', and is using a clearly AI generated avatar/profile pic... and uh, to me at least, it seems very unlikely this is the actual SMCF.
UPDATE:
Ok.
After some conversation in this thread, I should add:
There is, and there was at the time this all started, a rule in the comm that much of these downvote bans took place in, which reads:
'No Serial Downvoting.'
Personally, I find this rather vague.
How many dowmvotes, in what timeframe, across how many comms/comments/posts, etc?
I am also still uncertain to what extent these actually are dedicated, persistent, serial downvoters, vs just a whole lot of randos seeing something on their feed and then downvoting it and moving on.
I get the intent behind trying to stem a mass wave of negativity, nobody likes a wave of mass downvotes and hostile comments...
But on the other hand, there should probably be a bit more clarity and specificity here, less heavy handed actions for less comitted and persistent behavior.
IMO, a balance has to be struck between allowing people to genuienly freely express their opinion via downvoting, but at the same time, there are clearly also cases where people or groups of people basically just downvote all comments or posts from a specific user or in a certain comm or pertaining to a certain topic, etc.
I myself am fairly confident I have managed to attract at least one person who downvotes all my posts/comments on their instance, simply because I am on their shitlist, apparently.
So ideally... we could maybe have a constructive conversation about that.
As to the SatansMaggotyCumFart profile on lemmyusa being an impersonatory account:
We've got one mod from lemmyusa here saying he really isn't sure, and personally blocked him, I think from his own user standpoint, not from the standpoint of himself as a mod.
IMO, the account still strikes me as likely another person, impersonating the actual user... I of course cannot be certain, but the profile still strikes me as very sus.
Finally, I am least personally going to strongly discourage any one reading this from popping in to lemmyusa and going out of your way to downvote every single thing on there simply because it is on that instance.
They are already in more or less lockdown mode, call that a win if you must.
I did not intend nor do I want this very post to act as an attack vector.
UPDATE 2
SatansMaggotyCumFart, the real one, has appeared in this thread and confirmed that the lemmyusa profile is indeed an impersonation, is not them.
That is precisely what it is. I would say that browsing only a particular community's content and none other is not the most common way that people look at Lemmy.
Dude what kind of content are people posting that is prompting any detectable number of people to run around downvoting all of it?
Personally my opinion is that if you're using multiple accounts to artificially inflate your number of up or downvotes, you're doing something wrong, but if you just don't like a bunch of content, it doesn't really matter whether "you are part of the community" or like its subject in terms of whether or not you should be allowed to enter downvotes. That's why they're there, for stuff that people don't like. You can always visit an instance which just doesn't allow downvotes, if you feel your stuff needs to be insulated from anyone being able to say that they don't like it.
There are accounts who genuinely do go around downvoting en masse without any contributions. When I was growing my community, I caught about 5 accounts - some with no post history, and no contribution history on my community doing it. They also had a long mod log history of bans for doing it elsewhere.
So I banned them because they kept burying new posts. That is my right.
very much this! (im a mod in the conservative community post is about)
Was this for the television community? I feel like maybe people just don't like TV related content. I kind of feel the same way (and the same for sports content); I don't downvote it, but it doesn't really offend me if the community gives its input "Hey I don't want this." Sometimes people like stuff, and sometimes they don't, it is okay I think.
What do you mean by "mass"? Is it like hundreds of downvotes, or 5-10, or how many? And when you say, "no contribution history on my instance," why is that relevant to whether someone's allowed to downvote? This POV is just kind of strange to me. Why don't people have a right to downvote? Why does your stuff need to be insulated against people being able to "bury" it, isn't that what that button on their UI is for? Back when UniversalMonk and the media bias bot were active on lemmy.world, there were people who would give hundreds or thousands of downvotes to that content, but I feel like that's probably allowed. That's just the reaction.
I'm not trying to be argumentative about it, we may just not see eye to eye on it, I'm just trying to get a sense of what the details are, that's all.
If they don't like television content, they can just mute the community and cultivate their feed better. It's not for them, and that's fine, but the impact of downvoting hurts the visibility of posts on there across the Fediverse. They aren't "part of the community" in this context. They are hecklers.
They were downvoting almost every single post on there. Sometimes shortly after I posted it. They have the right to downvote, but I also have the right to judge as a community moderator whether or not I think the downvoting is reasonable. If you go on television now and look at most posts, you will see downvotes on most, and many of them actually participate in the community. I am not unreasonable on this. I don't ban anyone just for downvoting.
Very much this. yes.
Yeah, makes sense. I don't think it is reasonable to downvote literally every new post that comes from a given community, unless there is some wild shit coming out of that community or something. I think partly my reaction to this whole issue is colored by that AI art community mod who would literally ban anyone who ever gave his content a downvote, accusing them of being an "anti-AI troll" because his stuff needed to be exempted from criticism. That's the main context I have seen this argument take place in and the dude was entirely off his rocker about it. I get it if your content is completely reasonable and for whatever reason someone's downvoting literally every post or something.
The AI art posts pick up a ton of downvotes, way above average ratio compared to normal posts. This obviously hurts their visibility hugely, and there's no reason people who dislike AI art should be downvoting the posts instead of just blocking the community and moving on.
The AI art posts aren't that popular, way below average ratio compared to normal Lemmy content. This obviously means that they should be downscored when they're being presented among a bunch of other assorted content, and there's no reason any particular moderator should be able to insert their own content artificially higher than it organically would be, instead of just finding an instance for it that doesn't allow downvotes and moving on.
See how that works? I'm not necessarily saying the polarity you're using for the argument is wrong and mine is the right one, but there's a whole other side. I think there's just not broad agreement on how downvotes are "supposed" to work on Lemmy.
I actually quite like the AI art content and sometimes upvote it when I come across it. I'm just saying that it's sort of a slippery slope (in my subjective opinion) when you start deciding that your content needs to be exempted from downvotes, because it would be a crisis if people were able to give it the score they'd like to give it.
Yeah I know about the AI art stuff. That's a tough one to me because a lot of the fediverse will downvote AI automatically, so if they did nothing, every single post there would be met with heavy downvotes.
It wasn't just that, it was also that they were objectively unhinged when they tried to defend it, instead of just laying out what you just laid out, or admitting "Yes we ban anyone who downvotes because at the end of the day we just don't want our stuff to be downvoted" or something.
It very much is not, because few people see any given community when browsing All. Someone might see one post and downvote it, but they wouldn't be downvoting everything. If they just hate all the content, they shouldn't care about being banned unless they just wanted to keep attacking it.
And you're new to the Internet if you think haters won't go to a community they dislike and downvote every single post. It doesn't even need to be something serious like politics. Console wars, sports teams, or just a TV show that rubs some group the wrong way.
Conservative subs on Reddit used to never be able to use the voting system to sort their own comments because of it. On Lemmy the votes are visible so you don't need to guess who's doing it. If you're not participating in a community in good faith they have every right to ban you.
Certain dipshits do this with every post that mentions "AI," which has been a problem when trying to discuss it in any form, including random machine learning topics, how to selfhost, compsci videos about how the algorithms work, etc etc etc.
~~You must be pretty new here.~~ (Nevermind, didn't check who I was responding to)
There's around two posts a month in this very community where someone is complaining that they're expected to block a community with content they don't like instead of just downvoting everything they see from it.
AI communities are common ones, so are political comms, but there have been some postd where someone just doesn't like the memes of a certain meme community too. You're making a false assumption that people only downvote stuff for any sort of legitimate reason.
Yeah if I made a metal music community, and someone who didn't like metal downvoted everything, why would I allow them to continue?
Let's say someone starts a Malaysian community and they only post in Malay, this annoys people who don't speak Malay (most people), and some people just downvote every Malay post they see rather then block the community.
Is it helpful for the Malay community to get all these downvotes from non-Malay speaking lemmy users who are too lazy to hit the block button?
Or if you prefer a non-language scenario, let's say a community to discuss youtube videos of a specific creator is here, but most people don't care for the creator... same thing
lemmy is a commonwealth of small communities, we won't grow unless we allow niche communities a safe space to gain traction, that means drive-by-chilling is bad for lemmy over all.
It's really in place to be a signal of what is bad for the community like a micro-report, not just personal opinion. It is often used as a personal opinion, but sorting by ratio, auto hiding, auto-mod removing based on votes indicates its real utility as good or bad for the community. The problem is that lemmy is not some monolithic community with the same values and interests for everyone, but if we treat it as such we will end up with just one which isn't great for lemmy at all.
That's a great analogy. So, if the posts are marked as English/Unspecified, so they're cluttering up everyone's feed with posts that practically all users literally can't read, then yes having them sort of "marked down" for the majority of the community to keep the overall feed clean is probably the right answer. It's easily solvable by teaching people to use the language setting correctly on their posts so they're hidden from people who don't enable Malay, and that's probably a better answer than spamming everyone's feed with Malay stuff and mechanically preventing anyone from filtering it out for other users via downvotes, because "it's not fair to me that you don't want this in the feed."
I know that's not quite what you meant. I don't want to argue back and forth about this issue indefinitely, but I think it's just another instance of the same "depends on your perspective" issue, of the average user who wants the algorithms assembling the feed to work right, versus the community creator who obviously doesn't want everything they post to be downvoted. I think they're both valid viewpoints but it seems like you guys keep repeatedly emphasizing the second point of view and not really considering the first one.
Because the role of a small community moderator is to grow that small community, so if the zeitgeist is against that they don't have many tools available to them other then the ban.
Of all the sins that got us booted from the Garden of Eden that was the early internet, I would say "my growth is more important than your good experience, so let me tweak things to boost my growth, and put my stuff in front of you" is probably a strong contender for the top spot.
Again, I get it. A lot depends on the specific details of the community and posts we're talking about. I don't think wanting to grow your small community or insulate it from unfairness is automatically a bad thing, but wanting to adjust things to make sure your small community will grow is not automatically a good thing, either.
Sure, in my philosophy i just want to remove any chilling effects on participation, I don't care about visibility in the overall lemmy all feed.
So yeah, there will be communities I don't like, and I wont think its good they grow, but that is why I have my block button.... but i can't begrudge someone else from having their own little garden on the internet too.