southsamurai

Well, calling it misogyny isn’t a directly accurate issue, though if you step back a ways, the connection is there. Part of why Hillary caught so much shit was the fact of her being a her in the first place.

However, the joke has existed for decades, long before she was a relevant name in the public consciousness. I’ve heard or seen it applied to politicians since the eighties at least, sometimes with long ex presidents. Hillary wasn’t the first woman to catch that kind of generic joke, Geraldine Ferarra (spelling?) was the target of pretty much every cookie cutter joke like that, and she was nowhere near the hot target Clinton still is now (even after the collapse of her public influence). So there’s room for debate on the joke itself being misogynistic.

But the mods in question definitely nailed that it’s a stupid, unfunny, cookie cutter joke. It’s the kind of unfunny crap people complain about being subjected to at holiday gatherings by an asshole relative that can’t drop their identity politics long enough to be decent company at fucking Christmas.

Also, backhanding the back of someone’s head is an awkward movement when both people are seated close enough together to talk, and it makes this specific use of the joke format fail hard because it engages the logic filters, so if you’re going to use it in the future, consult a professional joke crafter.

Well, I gotta point at PTB on this one, despite generally being okay with preemptive bans.

I’m not saying that an admin shouldn’t be able to do this; they take the risks and hassles of making the fediverse function, so they get some leeway before PTB can be fully applied.

But there is still a range of ways to execute this kind of decision that aren’t cool. Making it personal is right at the PTB side of that range.

As an example, if I wanted to ban you from southsamurairocks.edu because I didn’t agree with your beliefs, and the hassles that might come from them, or your reputation, I think it would be my obligation to give that as the reason, not just the fact that it’s you. It crosses the line from making a measured policy decision into just being a dick without the guts to just be a dick outright and honestly.

Like, if we had beef, and that’s why I ban you, I’m going to publicly state that I don’t like you, and thus don’t want you in my instance. Not just be snarky by using your name as shorthand for it.

It’s the smugness of it that makes it PTB instead of a legitimate preemptive ban. Nobody has to let anyone onto their instance if they don’t want to. But you gotta be up front and detailed about it if you don’t want to be the asshole.

Yeah, that’s more or less where I stand too, though the exact amount of effort a mod needs to put into contacting the user may be lower in my stance than in yours.

But I went further back and edited in a revised take. I think you’re right that OP’s account that the ban was issued on made a news post in a news community, and didn’t engage in any fuckery in comments that merit the ban for that reason.

Edit: I went back further. Based solely on this account, your @pro@reddthat.com account, I lean PTB on this specific preemptive ban. I don’t have the level of patience required to dig up your main account and see if anything there would justify you the user behind the accounts being banned based on a pattern of behavior. I will say that using the ban reason as given is what pushes it back over the PTB line. Your Pro account didn’t make comments or posts that indicate intentionally breaking a rule regarding the israel situation, nor making comments that did so. And I went back 3 weeks.

So, I’m leaving the previous comment made here instead of deleting or overwriting it, since this edit wouldn’t make sense without the original context.

Eh, it’s generally a divisive issue when preemptive bans occur, and I didn’t see recent posts on that community, only elsewhere. Same with comments over the last two days. So I suspect this is a preemptive ban rather than one for immediate cause.

Keep that in mind during the rest of this.

I’m not certain this is power tripping, but I can’t say for sure that your account that you posted this with fully deserved a ban purely on the reason given. There are reasons based on behavior in other ways, but that comes back to whether or not any given individual believes preemptive bans are a useful and acceptable tool, and every time it comes up, the community tends to devolve into arguing about that rather than whatever an OP did.

Now, I’m in the camp that believes preemptive bans can be a useful tool. I just believe they need to be used rarely and surgically.

In this case, it comes down not to the post that started the whole thing, but how you handled everything after that.

The removal reason shown in this post doesn’t match what you did. Again, I only went back a little through the user history of this account, not any others you may use or have used in the past.

From this side of the screen, your comments are on the borderline of justifying a preemptive ban. I wouldn’t have done one, not without more than what’s visible in the last two days. If I had, I wouldn’t have used that reason at all.

That’s why I think this specific ban from the gaming community is really on the knife edge. Unless there was more to see that I didn’t scroll back far enough to see, or there are factors I’m unaware of, it does lean a little closer to PTB, but you really gotta recognize that you were either crossing civility line, or walking right up to them and spitting on the other side of it. Yeah, some of what you were responding to did as well, but two wrongs don’t make a right.

That’s my take on it. I suspect there’s more going on with the decision to ban you like that, or I’d lean heavier to the PTB side, but there’s a limit to how far back I’m willing to scroll looking for a specific comment that may or may not be relevant. That’s another personal peeve for me with the mod log; there should be more than an accusation in it when it’s a preemptive ban, and that’s not a one click process to make happen. So it doesn’t happen often.

Makes guesstimating for this community a slog.

How is this related to power tripping admins/mods ?

Definitely clueless mod.

Not that I can’t understand the confusion if you don’t pay attention, but that’s kinda the work part of being a modk taking a look past the initial reaction.

If my presbyopic, dyslexic ass can parse what you threat meant on the second pass, anyone can if they take the time

Exactly!

Why you don’t seem to get is that your opinion isn’t incontrovertible fact. Saying it a dozen different ways doesn’t make it more important, more valid, or even just better expressed.

I’m not missing a fucking thing, I just find your opinion weak and pessimistic.

Now, you don’t have to like that. But repeating over and over that I’m “missing” something is an even weaker rhetorical gambit.

So, bugger off mate. You’re crossing the line into inanity as well as rudeness

I’m not missing the point, I’m disagreeing with you.

You’re welcome to disagree :)

It isn’t like there’s only one right away that applies everywhere to everyone all the time.

That’s only a problem if abused.

And it isn’t. The nature of the beast is such that there’s always admin oversight.

More importantly, nobody can own a topic here. It doesn’t matter if one asshat abuses their position, there’s still 5 other c/bogantalk communities, or there can be.

Having mod positions in multiple communities isn’t inherently abusive. Reddit conditioned us to think so, but it really isn’t the case.

Nor am I personally willing to indulge my misanthropy to the extent of defaulting to the assumption that anyone moderating is on an inevitable path to douchebaggery. Which is separate from there being a severe lack of effectiveness to it when people have tried to go all god emperor over the last couple of years. Power mods that try it, fail, and become power mods over emptiness.

If a given mod is both fair and effective, it doesn’t matter how many communities it is at all anyway. You’ll never know how many they moderate because there’s nothing to see but stable communities.

It’s hunting for a problem that just isn’t here.

I mean, BPR, since you even admit you were blanket voting without any other criteria, then went back.

That’s separate from the mod in specific power tripping though. Yeah, you got the reaction you wanted, but that particular mod is already well known to be batshit.

Look folks, there’s always going to be edge cases where one of us is going to down vote persistent types of posts. I’ve done it, I’ve seen people that I know are reasonable, decent folks do it. But at some point, vote blitzing ceases to be a useful form of action and turns into just wagging dick to feel good about ourselves.

So, yeah, now that mods can see blitzes easily, we can all expect to see more bans for it. And, inevitably, there’s going to be cases where it looks like a blitz, but wasn’t intentional. So we can look forward to posts here because of those errors.

What’s the answer though? You can’t tell at a glance what a user’s intent is, or if they’re paying enough attention to realize they’re even voting on things in the same community. But, that kind of vote manipulation is also a fucking problem. Mods need some ability to keep their communities rolling along as intended. Lemmy, and even piefed, are pretty damn sparse with mod tools. Limited options to shape how a community is guided and help keep a vibe beyond just banning people.

Having something other than gut instinct to use as a metric for keeping out bad actors is necessary. And the truth is that most people down voting multiple posts in a row aren’t there to participate in the community at all. They’re just reacting emotionally to titles and thumbnails.

Which is fine! Nothing wrong with that, and it’s the best argument for down voting being an option because it’s great at filtering out people that just want to gripe about the surface of things. A down vote makes it so that less of them come in and grump at other people.

But it does mean that mods are going to have to judge you based on that alone. Nobody has time to chase you down and ask your motivation.

And, OP, just in case, it doesn’t matter what the community was, what the topic of the posts were. I’m not arguing over that side of things; I’d likely have down voted a few before having to decide if a report about the community to admins would do any good, or if I should just block it and move on. I’m talking about the reality of how voting as an aspect of threaded forums works, and the outcomes of it shape the nature of lemmy/fediverse activity.

All of it is about balance. Any tool can be abused by mods, admins and users. The tools’ merits aren’t solely determined by their potential for abuse. The benefits have to be weighed. It has to factor in what other tools are available (or aren’t).

My advice to mods? Use vote records sparingly. If you’re not intending to very rigidly screen for your community as a place of safety, chances are that it won’t help much. You’ll run yourself ragged trying to figure out who is and isn’t engaging in fuckery as opposed to fat fingering buttons, or is voting their conscience and just happen to be opposed to the subject matter, or genuinely think that a post or comment isn’t on topic and relevant/useful and think that about multiple posts.

It’s a sucker’s bet. Save it for when you’re trying to get a new community rolling, or when your community is a vulnerable shelter.

Sure, but what I’m saying is that part of the problem with power mods is that they can’t do the task properly in the first place because the ability to moderate fairly and effectively is Sudbury directly relates to how much work and time a mod is willing/able to put into it. It’s trivial to moderate dozens of lemmy communities both fairly amd effectively when you only run into trouble on a given C/ maybe once a month due to low volumes of users.

A lot of people start with the assumption that a moderator with a lot of subs/C/s under their management is there to fuck shit up from the beginning, and that just isn’t the case on average. Yeah, people can and do moderate to serve their egos sometimes. And it was very common on reddit to see people that didn’t start that way get that way.

But this isn’t reddit. The user base is different, the people running instances are different, and vary in their oversight of mods. The mods are different too, so far. Go back and scroll this community. There’s assholes here and there, but it isn’t because they’ve swept up dozens of communities and hold the names hostage.

It’s impossible to stay a power mod on lemmy for long because once you start being a douche in general, someone is going to another instance and start a new community and people leave yours. It’s happened. Multiple times. Look at ten forward, or the 196 communities.

Even the dominance in numbers that .world has isn’t going to make communities there immune to being abandoned and the mod/s left with the crickets.

Power mods here are an annoyance at most. So until the user base gets so big that even obscure little C/s that see posts maybe once a month are all getting high traffic, workload is a factor in whether or not moderating a high number of communities is viable as a way to abuse the position of moderator.

I respect that opinion, but I’ve seen too many cases where communities het as swamped by assholes that had a long standing pattern of being assholes. Not just reddit and lemmy as far as that goes, this stretches back to the nineties on forums and chat rooms.

You can predict future behavior based on past behavior.

Use the Nazi bar example. The bouncer sees this dude walking around the neighborhood with swastikas on, it doesn’t matter if the asshole is wearing a suit and pays the cover charge when he tries to come in, he’s still not going to be a customer you want.

If I go around trolling vegans, and the mod of a vegan sub bans me only from their vegan sub, that’s legit. If I run around throwing slurs, and I get banned from communities for the groups I used slurs towards, fuck me, I deserve the bans. When it comes to bigotry in specific, I’d deserve to be banned everywhere.

But it does need to be surgical, and appropriate to the degree of douchebaggery involved.

As a tool, refusing to let people into a community/forum that will absolutely contribute nothing is a useful tool.

I don’t disagree about power mods. I’m saying that using an arbitrary number of communities won’t prevent that by itself. It’s a more complicated issue to address. A power mod could have two or three communities and if they’re the right ones, dominate a topic.

That’s the problem, in my mind, that the limit would be arbitrary. No matter what number you pick, unless it’s one, you can’t totally eliminate power modding methodology from controlling discourse. And, like you said, it’s trivial to bypass to begin with.

I disagree.

While I absolutely question the carnivore diet as a general thing, the way the community is handled has shifted from the way it started. Back in the beginning, I was in the same frame of thought you are, and said so directly in the community (eventually).

But jet in specific, and other users, have shifted to better citations, and a more frequent way of presenting their opinions. I do not believe they engage in misinformation currently. If I believed so, I would be obligated by my personal ethical code to attempt to have admins shut it down. Can’t say it would succeed, but I’d have to try.

Since jet in specific is very good about putting in disclaimers that people should approach the diet with care, I definitely can’t call it bad faith. Acknowledgement of the diet being limited in scope for the general population is good faith discussion by default.

Again, I definitely disagree with the claims made by some of the people in linked videos. What they recommend doesn’t match current best practices, and is usually extrapolated from data that is specific to limited circumstances and applied generally, which is very flawed. There’s also non medical issues with attempting a pure carnivorous diet, but I doubt those would be relevant to this.

As such, I still maintain that down voting everything willy nilly is a justifiable reason for bans, which is what this community is about.

If you feel that the community is dangerous, harmful, or otherwise shouldn’t be accessible, throwing down votes at everything is not the appropriate method to address the issue. And that’s what the post was about, not whether or not the community should exist. If you genuinely feel that strongly about the dangers involved, you should be contacting the admins of the instance and explaining that to them.

Well, since it seems it was done in error, I suppose the issue is at an end. I would have said PTB though.

I will still say that preemptive bans are a valid tool. They have to be applied surgically to prevent problems, but there absolutely are multiple reasons to ban someone from a community they haven’t yet interacted with.

I’m not sure this one meets the standard though. Even if you had made the comment, or a similar one, seriously, I’m not sure I can see how that would make you likely to go trolling on a vegan community.

Shit, I have actively taken the piss out of the asshole segment of the vegan population, and I don’t go to vegan communities and pull that bull. So I can’t see why a single comment would be enough of an indicator of future risk. And that’s when preemptive bans are a valid tool, when someone is saying or doing something that shows they’ll have a high probability of going to a community and cause problems. Not just because they hold a different opinion (no matter how wrong that opinion may or may not be).

Which, despite it being resolved, that is why I would have said PTB to begin with.

However, I’ll also say that Sunshine is really easy to get along with normally. Everyone has bad days and makes bad decisions sometimes, and I think that’s the case here. An otherwise very sweet person fucking up in a way that’s not the norm.

Nah, lemmy is way less intensive work on the mod side of things still. Most communities, you’ll go weeks without needing to do anything at all.

This community here has a bias towards high traffic communities. The more traffic you get, the more reports you get, the more chances of someone doing stupid stuff that needs mod action. And, with a higher volume of mod actions, there’s a higher chance of even the most level headed mods fucking up in one was or another.

Most of lemmy, one person could moderate a hundred communities and you’d never know that they were there at all.

That’s a major flaw in lemmy. No ban notifications. Or, I’ve never gotten one. Like, rock n roll, ban me, especially if it’s justified. But since lemmy doesn’t let me know, if a mod doesn’t send a “fuck off and die” note, I may not find out I’m banned for months (like your situation, it wasn’t until someone else brought it to my attention).

But I do have multiple accounts, and if you want to ban me instead of just this account, you gotta let me know so I can filter shit out so I don’t vote on an alt or make a comment while I’m piddling around or whatever.

Also, apologies for going off topic since the mod action taken against the OP is the point of posting here, PTB. With no specifics given, and the total lack of anything hinting at racism in your years on lemmy, I can’t see this being a justified ban. Like you said, you’re human enough to put on an asshole hat now and then (less than me most likely, but still), but racism just isn’t something you’ve indulged in even in jest that I’ve ever seen.

Assuming honesty in all that (and that is what I’m assuming, no reason to do otherwise), I definitely call that good faith. Absolutely.

I also tend to think that opposition can be done with respect and decency (with the glaring exception of bigotry that deserves no respect, but that’s off topic and I only mention it to hopefully avoid the watabouts). I think my opposition to some of the posts and comments in the carnivore communities have been done respectfully, I’ve at least tried to be respectful.

Mind you, it’s been a while since I interacted much there, since I’ve pretty much said all I can say without beating a dead horse, which I prefer to avoid.

Also, I really appreciate the way you’ve approached this entire discussion here. A lot of folks just want validation of their emotional response to whatever mod action they’re posting about, so it’s really cool when people fully engage in wrangling with the broader subject of how to approach moderation and user interactions with mods. At risk of going off topic, this community has changed my approach to moderation both on and off lemmy. I’ve learned a lot here about when to act quickly and decisively, and when to take a more gentle approach.