Was recently banned from a whole bunch of DB0 communities for, as best as I can gather, downvoting once when I viewed by All (potentially accidentally while scrolling).
Important notes:
- I don’t use scripts.
- I don’t mass-downvote Communities. If I see a post I generally don’t like when browsing All, I may downvote one post, block the Community and move on.
- Some of the communities I was banned from don’t have any posts in them so I wouldn’t have been able to downvote anything.
- Of all of these Communities, in my history I downvoted one post in one of them. Voting in this manner is not vote manipulation. It’s quite literally a feature of the platform and as a mod of another Community, I would consider it pretty good etiquette.
- One of my bans reads “Appeal Granted, not a brigading member” but I’m still banned.
- I don’t troll.
WTF is going on here?
EDIT - Updated Info from the conversation below: In the initial image, you can see two “ban waves.”
The 10 bans three months ago stem from a single downvote in one Community. It was @Draconic_NEO@lemmy.dbzer0.com See here: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/34853477
I was called out by name for a single downvote and culled from a score of Communities I did not participate in by them.
The other bans from two months ago are from four total downvotes over a 10-month timeframe in one Community.
I have also stated in this thread that I don’t have issues with AI-gen images, but there are shoddy ones and well-done ones.
EDIT 2: Now unbanned from the ten Communities listed as “3 months ago” in my initial image, but have been banned from three more because of this thread with the reason given being “self-proclaimed anti-AI brigader” which are two things I didn’t claim to be. God dammit Lemmy…
I don’t have an issue with this instance being pro-AI, but I find it weird as fuck how harshly skeptics are treated
I find it weird how harsh AI haters treat people who use it.
People are assholes to people who disagree with them, no matter the topic.
You can find examples of people on each ‘side’ being assholes. Social media teaches people to be outraged, not to have any empathy.
As a Mac guy since the 90s, I can tell the hate and bile against AI is on another level, though. Relatively speaking.
I also recognize that the environmental and societal impacts of AI are why it’s so different from your typical fanboy/platform/lifestyle argument.
Like, that guy commenting about AI here does not really deserve the -4 votes his comment had when I started writing this.
I also think r/singularity types are off the deep end too. The way they are frothing at the mouth for societal collapse/UBI/etc is wild.
You can find examples of people on each ‘side’ being assholes
Very true!
A lot of peope consider it immoral.
Those same people probably find intellectual property moral, so immoral people themselves.
Removed by mod
Thats a capitalism problem, not an AI problem. AI is just the most recent example.
They shouldn’t have to rely on maybe getting paid so they can have food, shelter, and other basic things for living.
Right… but they do… so…
Irrelevant until we fix that problem. And guess what? Advocating for AI in the meantime is only going to give more power to corporations :) so great job, bud!
I dont advocate for corporate AI.
I’d also mention most users on db0 are far more likely to be using fully open models and models they’ve trained themselves (which is what I do, mostly log/error eval stuff).
That said, “fixing” AI will solve nothing, because capitalism is going to find yet another way to screw them over. Banning AI tomorrow isn’t going to provide job security or a stable income, it wasn’t before and it isn’t now.
I work with a lot of creatives, and so many are contract based and struggle between them. Several of them have been finding work cleaning up (as in, creating new) materials that were AI generated and look terrible.
So again, the issue is capitalism, and AI is just the most recent conversation piece. AI isn’t the root of the problem, nor is the problem “solved” without it.
Congratulations you’ve discovered capitalism is the enemy.
No reasonable leftist will ever take you seriously if you want to fight for the status quo.
So go fuck yourself :)
Yes, capitalism IS bad. Labor is stolen and exploited for profit by people who added nothing or next to nothing. Sound familiar?
No, you absolute child, it is LAUGHABLE for you to consider yourself a “leftist”.
Real leftists advocate for harm reduction, meaning that defending individual creator’s IP rights are a MUST, at least until capitalism is abolished.
In other words… got anything intelligent to say, or just going to keep saying stupid shit?
Liberals advocate for harm reduction. Leftists advocate for revolution.
This just in: Technology makes some jobs obsolete. More at 11.
Right, did you miss the part where the AIs are usually trained using stolen data and also consume huge amounts of energy? Why are you defending AI rn? 🥱
Did I miss the part where you made a terrible argument and are now pivoting to something else?
Nope sure didn’t.
well how are you supposed to treat people who roll coal?
Like you’re doing right now?
Did you not know that data centres use a huge amount of electricity, or did you think your posting was environmentally free?
Have you ever gone on a vacation? Because if so you’ve polluted more from one trip than all my years of AI art.
On an individual level generating an image is barely more any more resource intensive than a Google search. So don’t try to pull that shit when you’re just as guilty as using computers, the internet, and electricity for your personal enjoyment.
Then you check some of those communities and there’s like less than 10 posts in them.
There’s more banned people than content.
If they are such tiny communities then the question is why do so many trolls go out of their way to find them, downvote everything, and harass/bully the mods? Not saying that was the case in this instance, but it’s been an ongoing problem, which is why the mods are a bit twitchy I guess.
the whole “if you don’t like the content, don’t downvote, but just ignore / block it” is really cringe
I don’t use upvotes to express my support, I upvote when a contribution was insightful, interesting or funny and downvote when I find the contribution off topic, not helpful or diverting/trollish.
If I personally find something uninteresting, I block. And report if something is against the communities the rules/TOS/law.
To each their own I guess
Downvoting posts in the All feed isn’t that bad, as it reduces their visibility if you believe it doesn’t interest you at all and probably
mostwon’t interest many other people, so you let a chance to other posts to show upEdit: typo
Yeah I think big level at the feed, down votes help control what is interesting conversation pieces and not and then in the comments it should be related to how on topic or useful or fun to the conversation presented by the original item.
There is some extremely childish behavior on Lemmy in regards to downvotes and in response to them as well.
Removed by mod
Right but if you disagree shouldn’t that be vocalized otherwise the downvote doesn’t make sense and people don’t know what the countering opinion is?
I get it’s not everyone’s responsibility to respond but… It doesn’t really make sense as just a tool to show disagreement and provide diversity in the comments.But someone making an opinionated statement, sure at the top level the votes just act as a miniature poll but beyond that I’m not sure I see it’s usefulness as a conversationary tool.
Removed by mod
I do not find upvotes and down votes to be very guaranteed to match facts and using it as a checking tool would require a very different user ase that would likely not be human. But I understand you said to an extent. I just… Give it less slack. But hard down voted, sure, needs way more reservations.
I am just saying the point of these forums is more the conversation and less the voting and it’s really not very useful as a tool, while not being useless.
Imagine a substack post, as these forums were based on, where someone asks for support with a batch script and someone suggests using a sticky note taped to the monitor. It gets downvoted but no one offers any countering support.
No one would use the site for support anymore. It’s clearly not with helpful information, and the person looking at it would not know but just see what looks like an unkind user base.
Removed by mod
It depends. If there’s certain types of content you don’t like that a community mostly deals in, you downvoting it effectively means you’re downvoting almost everything on there - and at that point, it’s just little more than a very crude attempt at community vandalism.
Your voice matters. Downvoting can be useful to prevent echo chambers (ex: downvoting lemmy.ml bs)
Now if the thing is just not fundamentally wrong like it’s just subjective and you don’t like it, yea it could harm, but the most likely is that less people will do it than people liking this type of content will upvote
Its only really problematic on smaller instances or if you do it continuously for every single post without a good valid reason
Its only really problematic on smaller instances or if you do it continuously for every single post without a good valid reason
And that’s closer to what I am referring to. If someone just hates movies or TV and doesn’t want to see it on their feed, they should block it rather than downvote every post from movies and television communities. They aren’t somehow mitigating an echo chamber by signifying how they hate movies and TV content. They’re just vandalising it.
Yea for sure
I believe most “vote manipulation” bans aren’t really on that case though
It’s mostly “you strongly disagree with us? Fuck you!”
Yeah, I mean I wouldn’t call it “manipulation”. Just vandalism in this case.
That mods/admins can even see who is downvoting is, by far, my least favorite thing about Lemmy.
These comments are an eye opening experience for me; and I’m not sure I like that feature. It seems whatever the good it does, it’s open for endless abuse because at the end of the day, we are all human and petty at times.
Yeah I would like it if it weren’t the case, but I’m not sure it’s actually technically possible given the design.
It’s incredibly helpful and helps cultivate a high-trust culture. On Reddit, many posts get swarmed with downvotes right off the bat, no matter what they are, due to voting anonymity.
They should really just remove up/down -votes.
And how would content be organised and curated?
lets just do forums where everything is sorted by recency of comments and instead of bitching about voting people bitch about 25 year old threads getting necroed
It could be organized by community and I don’t believe curation is necessary.
Edit: Posts. Posts could be organized by community.
How would they organise it?
What do you mean by “how”? Maybe by time posted or by last reply in that community, that sounds like an okay choice.
BUMP
SAGE
THIS
NECRO
It’s a shit choice, many of us have grown up experiencing it via forums and boards. The community curated stuff is so much better than the ‘last rando to spam something’ system.
yeppers, the whole original appeal of reddit (digg) was the voting system lol we wanted community curation instead of BUMP
That would mean there’s zero quality control and larger communities new posts would flood out older posts. No-one supports this idea.
Yeah, you’re right about the larger ones. But smaller ones don’t really need quality control, in my opinion. So perhaps they would add a toggle?
Beehaw actually does remove down voting, so that you are forced to actually find things you agree with and upvote them to curate.
My first interaction with davel@lemmy.ml was him threatening to ban me over downvoting his comments.
One of the first things which made me look into what this power tripping bastard is and yeah, a Russian pretending to be an American who’s since been avoiding any communities they’re not a mod on.
Dude says things like “reality has a well known Russian propaganda bias” while pretending to be American while supporting Putin.
Lemmy is infested with Russians
Lol same. It was my first and last interaction and the most pathetically sad threat that’s ever been directed at me.
“Stop calling me out on my bullshit or I’ll… I’ll… ugh… I’ll… …”
The continuation is meant to be “or I’ll ban you,” but since you’re not on his server and he has 0 social capital outside that little environment to leverage against you, he is impotent.
https://snyder.substack.com/p/the-weak-strongman applies equally well to Trump, Putin, and the Lemmy.ml mods. I wonder why the similarity.
Tbf, they’re pretty easy to spot and they’re much less over here than the bad place. They’re on a schedule too, so you can kind of be ready for them.
Some are super easy to spot yeah, others less so. And seeing how they obviously wish to pretend they’re something they’re not, you can’t assume you can “always” identify them.
That’s kinda like saying “I can always tell a trans person”, just because you don’t notice a person being trans when they are passing.
Whenever I’m suspicious, I like to just ask people to confirm that Putler has an ICC warrant out for him for his war crimes. Their reaction to that is often very telling, but sometimes they’ll go with something like “well, Putin, like all world leaders are inherently blablablabla”, sort of faking out admitting to Putler’s bullshit while similarly not criticising him personally, but also pushing ideology that is not opposed to Russian goals (ie basic whataboutism)…
I post this because it makes me laugh every fucking time and watch the downvotes pour in: https://youtu.be/TlUsMuz9_RU?t=37
To be fair, at least the guy actually performing is possibly ‘one of the good ones’, along with a bunch of other members of the orchestra, insofar that 1) they’re not fighting, they’re singing, and to do that you got to apply to the musical company in the military and 2) they’re singing western music, and they probably listen to quite a lot more than they’re singing.
Idk they may have actually bought the propaganda, who knows, but like if you’re just wanting to do conscription as it’s kinda hard to avoid, going to the music companies would allow you to avoid actual fighting usually and western music historically was listened to by progressives in Russia.
But like yeah, it is funny. Especially those old guys in the back.
It’s amazing and never fails to lighten the mood.
This guy especially:
Man’s looking tired, bruv.
Those sacks under his eyes looking like a hog’s scrotum.
I have a backstory for him that I’ve made up. He went along with all this because his grandson is the lead singer. He’s proud but unhappy because he doesn’t understand why they like this song. He also has no idea of what anyone is saying in the song, but his grandson seems happy enough.
So, is this legit, or a very well done pisstake?
There’s also a similar video of them covering “sixteen tons”, featuring a man with the deepest singing voice I’ve ever heard.
It’s real. If you look around, they preformed it for one of the morning shows.
I couldn’t find a video of the sixteen tons, that sounds great too. I need to expand my repertoire.
Different event at better quality https://youtu.be/Pdm4YF9A7QM
thank you, thank you, thank you. So. awesome.
Can this admin see these votes without diving through the database because he’s an insecure douchebag? Like Mastodon only shows some things even to admins without being gross and unethical by digging into the database directly.
any instance admin can see all upvotes/downvotes on any message from the web UI
That feels gross, like if I could see poll voters on Mastodon.
Makes it feel like Lemmy was written by some insecure folks.
It’s not lemmy, it’s just how the fediverse works to prevent double voting
Mastodon also being on ActivityPub, that’s really likely the same thing, except maybe not implemented in the UI, but that could be accessed by the API or in the DB
I’m well aware, I run an instance and know it’s in the DB. But on my instance I’d have to trawl the database for it instead of getting a nice UI look. That’s what I meant.
lemmy devs probably thought it was important enough to add then
It’s easier to
censormoderate lemmy.ml this way
Mastodon shows you the votes just by clicking and seeing who liked the thing. No admin access necessary.
This is one among a few different reasons why hoping for votes to be private on Lemmy is a lost cause.
Is that a fork? Or just the newest update? The instance I run doesn’t have that.
What? Sure it does. Upvote a comment from Lemmy, then go to Mastodon and look at the same comment, and you’ll see a “like” from the Lemmy user that upvoted it. Right?
I think what seals it for me is that mods and admins can see how you vote, but the mod log just says “mod”.
Mod log shows admins which mod was involved in the decision.
I will agree that the whole dichotomy where some information is federated freely across the network, but then hidden from some users because they are not very special people in our very special club of special people, is ridiculous. The thing is though that it’s hopeless trying to keep “who voted on this” or “which moderator moderated this” secret in any genuine sense. And so, I think it should just be shown.
The whole “moderators act in secret” “votes are secret” thing is just an inheritance from Reddit, and emulating Reddit was always a terrible decision done by people who apparently dream of running a little fiefdom where the users have no power. There just shouldn’t be an informational gap between the virgin user and the chad admin. We can all just be people, sharing the network.
I agree completely.
You can see the details if you use the Tesseract front end for Lemmy when you check the mod log, if your instance supports it.
Ah, that’s good to know thank you.
Unfortunate follow up: the dev of Tesseract just announced today that he’s quitting and it’s not going to be supported any longer 😔 I imagine instances that already support it will continue doing so for a while, but unless there’s a fork it’ll probably eventually break.
No idea.
Pretty sure Davel is just a mod, so that’d be a “no”, but again, “no idea” is my more reliable answer.
I did downvote several of his comments, but not like “spam downvoted”, but from honest disagreement. Not my fault everything he writes is bullshit. So after I downvoted a few comments while replying to him, he replied "oh see, here on ‘whatevercommunity’ we ban people who downvote others for no reason’, as if I had no reason.
They’re just extremely silly and see through and you ought to question everyone on Lemmy about it. Because while opensource open platforms are great, they’re also super easy to infiltrate.
Honestly. Doing this when someone makes dozens of downvotes is ridiculous and stupid. Doing this with a single downvote is… I can’t even begin to fathom how unimaginably stupid and ridiculous that is.
You mean “dozens of downvotes” specifically directed at a single community?
I don’t even have downvotes on my instance but would that really be unusual? I often see a lot of people on a thread making the same wrong statements. I could see how that kind of thing would lead to a lot of downvotes in the same community and I was never very heavy handed with my downvoting.
In this case I’m referring to the hypothetical of a single account, consistently downvoting almost every post on a community with zero interaction history. And they keep doing it.
I can’t speak for whatever you’ve done or been accused of, but those accounts do exist and it’s completely justifiable that some community owners ban them.
Ok, I guess that it was just “dozens” threw me off. That isn’t that much.
Depends on the time between the downvotes. Believe it or not there are accounts that exist that exist purely to downvote. They do nothing else.
12 downvotes in 5 minutes is normal. 50+ in a day is not.
Only deliberately antagonistic types of posts collect that amount of downvotes that quickly on lemmy in my experience tbh.
That is not normal for innocuous posting
I don’t think votes should be an actionable metric in any circumstance. Bots should be banned, but real people should be allowed to vote as much as they want on whatever they want. Otherwise you’re just cultivating an echo chamber.
Disagree. If I run a metal music community, and someone who doesn’t like metal continually goes in there and downvotes everything because, well, they don’t like metal music. What use are they to it? Why wouldn’t I ban them? All they’re doing is hurting the visibility of the community. This is the context in which I would ban downvoters from my community. Serial mass downvoting by people who never otherwise engage with the community, don’t like the topic of the community, and in some cases - the accounts have zero comment history and purely exist to downvote.
I think this is quite different to just ‘wanting an echo-chamber’.
I also got banned from some communities for “systematic downvoting”. I’d estimate I’ve downvoted maybe 5 or so posts by a moderator promoting a harmful diet, which was apparently enough for being “systematic”. The mod also banned me from other random communities I had never interacted with in the first place. But oh well, nothing of value was lost for me. Just kinda sucks that mods can use this to make it seem like their statements are less controversial than they are.
Lemmy (and Reddit) are a collection of little dictatorships. But dictatorship is bad, I think, maybe.
The true power of the fediverse is that little dictatorships should, in principle, balance out each other
That’s like vodka with a vodka chaser. It’s the opposite of balance.
Often a larger problem can be solved by lots of smaller problems being at cross purposes
Do you think that is the case here?
I think it sometimes can be the case
That’s wishy-washy as heck.
If you want to have a debate about my diet, I’m open to that - but just downvoting every post you see because you don’t like it… that doesn’t work for me - that isn’t the kind of community I want to grow.
I don’t want to debate your diet, just want to add my voice of disagreement to it (i.e. downvote). There was nothing systematic about any of my votes. I came upon your posts without seeking them out, read them and thought they shouldn’t be promoted, so I downvoted them to reduce their algorithmic visibility and voice my general opposition. I upvoted people who argued against your points, as I agreed with them and wanted to promote their viewpoints. In my opinion, that’s quite a normal way to use this platform. Otherwise, do you also ban people who only upvote you without stating why they agree with your points?
That is a fair way to use the platform, since private communities are not yet a thing we have this weird disconnect between small communities and people who don’t like small communities.
My view is I’m trying to create a safe space for people to talk about a thing, but random people keep looking around at all activity and exporting their negativity since they don’t like the small community. So this weird “please block things you don’t like” state is the best option we have until subscriber only communities become a real feature.
Let’s say you don’t speak German, when you see the german posts in the ALL feed do you downvote them each and every time because they are in a language you don’t understand?
Let’s say you don’t speak German, when you see the german posts in the ALL feed do you downvote them each and every time because they are in a language you don’t understand?
That’s not a very good comparison, they were specifically stating they down voted something they thought was harmful and shouldn’t be promoted.
For your example it would be closer to seeing a post written in German but it’s a post saying positive things about Nazis or something.
Then yeah, I would hope people would down vote it.
I support you. Stay strong against the serial downvoters and don’t let them bully you.
This was 2 mods that banned you across all the comms they mod, not a site-ban at least, though sitebans look like this too because of a workaround in place to ensure that a site-banned user’s content is purged (or something like that)
It’s possible they hit the wrong button/inputted wrong script command hence the “appeal granted” thing. I would reach out to the mod of those comms
Where do yall get this ban notification stuff do you pay for some kind of lemmy Bloomberg terminal or?
If on the web (not a mobile client), you can click the three dots with the arrow pointing down under any post (including yours) and hit “NAME Moderation History”. It’ll show you what mod actions have been taken on you.
thanks. useful to see how i got banned from multiple communities for one comment on a totally unrelated one. these people are insane.
Thanks, I didn’t know about that
Everyone beat me to it but thank you for explaining!
We have Lemmy+ it’s only $6.99.
I opted for the Ad Free Lemmy Prime $8.99.
People occasionally check their modlogs to see if they got in trouble earlier.
I just block the comms I don’t care about, can recommend.
Including that AI generated low effort crap. I don’t get the point of sharing that stuff, when you can generate your own if you want. But nowadays I don’t get many things anymore.
Haha, just noticed I got banned from 2 communities, presumably for commenting in here (they are both dead communities I’ve never been to). Someone is a very petty and now blocked mod.
Removed by mod
If I get banned for a downvote I dont want to have anything to do with that community anyway.
PTB
I’ve had very inconsistent moderation experiences on dbzer0
I’m sure some were because of this guy.
Removed by mod
Removed by mod
Whoa, I thought only the conservative mods were pulling this
there’s a lot of conservative / AI bro crossover.
ooh downvotes :D think they’re the conservatives upset about being categorized with the ai bros, or ai bros being cranky about being lumped in with the conservatives?
I find it hilarious that they’re ideologically identical but despise each other
Which mods are those?
Here’s a fun read: https://lemmy.world/modlog?page=1&actionType=All&modId=13008854
I would have used their server but lemmy.today doesn’t let you filter by mod.
Wow, I had no idea there was any presence for them on this side of the defederation wall. Thanks for sharing
EDIT: this dude’s ideology is all over the place, it’s like deciphering an alien civilization
What kind of person bans links to Fox News and then posts links to Breitbart - all while advocating empathy in the sidebar?
Well, both of those are right-wing media, so I would think it obvious.
The mystery is why the more more “mainstream” news source (Fox) is banned but the fringe/conspiratorial Breitbart is not only not banned but makes up a good third of the posts that he does.
Mind you, a whole other third is from the New York Post which is also a Murdoch property?
I invite you to propose the ideological framework that explains all of that - the closest I can come up with is libertarian
I dare not gaze too long into that abyss.
I can confirm it stares back
The lemmy.today conservatives strike again!
You think only conservatives mods would want to create safe positive environments for their users?
I don’t think that’s at all what conservatives want to do.
No, they want to control the narrative. This person set their comm to mod-post-only. It’s their private blog. They’re not making a safe place for others, they’re making a safe place for themself.
Well that’s equally as fine as well.
No is fucking not. You don’t make a functional community by banning everything you personally disagree with… That’s LITERALLY just a dumbass echo chamber.
If it’s literally a place only for them, they clearly are not building a community.
And if they were building a community, removing haters goes a long way to making it tolerable.
You seem to conveniently be forgetting the part where they ban on personal preference. It’s in the context of this entire discussion.
Interesting how you defend the echo chamber, though…
It was clearly based on voting, not personal preference.
And why wouldn’t I defend not having to deal with arseholes coming by and shitting on everything? I deal with it so often that I have zero patience for it.
It’d be fine if they weren’t spewing their content across the fediverse. It should be fair game to discuss it no matter what opinion, short of hateful, it is.
I don’t think that’s what these mods were doing either.
They are not so much punishing you as cultivating a vote farm. You are just a weed here.
