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.
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.