this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2024
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politics
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I think the bigger issue here is the indiscriminate obvious trolling.
The fact that it took "bad judgment" and not the reading between the lines for their sealioning and bad faith arguments and faux "friend" comments points towards the need for strengthening our community standards.
Allowing people to come in and troll under the guise of "I'm following the rules lolololol" makes the mods look like rubes.
When it comes to moderation, I'm of the opinion that it should never be a "read between the lines" interpretation. If we're going to take action as severe as a ban, it should not be open to interpretation.
For example, I remember a comment that was reported and removed for referencing the whole disingenuous question "when did you stop beating your wife?"
Reported and removed for call to violence, and I had to explain to the other mod that "no, no, they're making a point about asking disingenous questions..."
Post was restored.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loaded_question
Yes, but when there's literally thousands of posts and comments to build the "between the lines" data within a 30-day time frame what excuse is there?
When somebody is trolling so hard that it's causing strife within your community it should be addressed. Identify the behavior that isn't desired and enforce existing rules around it or create a new one and warn the person that they need to operate in good faith within the rules or they will be ousted as an antagonistic troll.
In cases like that the default position is to allow the downvotes and individual user blocks to do the job.
I think that would carry more weight if downvotes had some kind of meaningful effect on the user's engagement with the platform. As it stands they're purely symbolic.
Additionally, deferring to user blocks does two things: 1) It decreases the chance that the problematic behavior will elicit meaningful criticism or pushback from more engaged participants, which amplifies its unchallenged visibility/effect on marginally engaged lurkers, and 2) it puts control of the dialogue squarely into the hands of committed trolls, rather than the community or the community's moderators. Blocks don't do anything to change or improve the community, they just allow people to filter their own version of it.
Pyfedi / piefed.social has a take on this that you might find interesting.
For example, pyfedi allows for anonymous voting, but I believe there's a planned change (if it isn't already implemented and live) so that folks with a low reputation (from too many downvotes) can't use it. By default, comments and posts with too low a reputation are also hidden. This is handled automatically by the software, so no human moderator or admin has to do anything - if enough people downvote, the system enforces the consequences automatically.
That sounds promising. I think Lemmy is young enough that we don't have simple functionality like modmail or karma-type troll throttling, but I'm optimistic that we'll start having improved tools very soon. Thanks for the heads up!
Which makes your community toxic and your job harder.
How many reports did you get and have to filter through and ultimately ignore? If that's not an indicator from your community that something needs to change you're not listening to our needs.
My default is to be more lenient because I saw how badly heavy handed moderation can go from 15 years on reddit. ;)
Too many times what's "toxic" or not was decided by... well...
https://youtu.be/hYTQ7__NNDI#t=12s
People are commenting about one glaringly obvious troll with a long history of baiting in comments, not calling for widespread bans based on a few posts per user.
I appreciate both the lenient approach and the transparency.
If we wanted an echo chamber, we could have called this /m/VoteBlue or similar and established only pro-Harris posts and comments as a rule.
I guess, despite the name, it can still become VoteBlue (after all, on a different website world politics used to be discussed on a sub called AnimeT... ) but I think it's worth asking - if a genuine and civil commenter of a conservative persuasion joined the sub, how willing would we be to actually engage with that person?
See this example - a liberal who once clerked for a conservative Supreme Court justice (Scalia). https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/02/17/im-a-liberal-lawyer-clerking-for-scalia-taught-me-how-to-think-about-the-law/ (or https://archive.is/KauGu )
Just because you have vastly different views and many disagreements with someone, doesn't mean that you can't engage in good faith with them, or have both sides get something meaningful from the engagement (even if part of the resolution is to continue to agree to disagree on some of the more salient points).
This very much appears to be a case where it would be reasonable to break from your default. This is not a typical user doing typical things.
Well, yeah, and I did that when I raised the issue with the other mods and admins multiple times. ;)
The problem with individual user blocks is that if someone submits enough of the links in a community, blocking them means blocking most stories and discussions so you can't really read or participate in the community without leaving them unblocked.