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imaqtpie

@ imaqtpie @sh.itjust.works

Posts
2
Comments
192
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • Some thoughts after 3 years on Lemmy

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  • Great post. I'm frequently reminded that 40k people is so much more than it seems as I consistently encounter users who have been here and quite active for 3 years and yet I don't recognize them.

    That ban from c/Europe is a badge of honor in my book. One of the nice things about the modlog is that anyone can quickly verify whether bans or comment removals are justified according to their own perspective. It shouldn't always be as necessary as it currently is, but with people on Lemmy constantly throwing around accusations of bigotry, nazism, genocide denial, etc, its quite useful to be able to quickly view a user's moderation history. Honestly that might be the most useful feature that Lemmy has, aside from the ability to federate.

    However, I do have one minor quibble with your post.

    for me this was quite a shocking confirmation of the intolerance of a certain section of the (mainly US) left.

    To ascribe your banning from a European community on a European server because of an opinion on a European situation to the US left is quite unreasonable. Also, the mod who banned you appears to be German. This is one of my pet peeves about Lemmy, that Americans always seem to take collateral damage in the most random threads lol. The Lemmy user base is significantly more international than the reddit user base in my experience, and thus the anti-American attitudes that seem quite common outside of the US are frequently exhibited here.

    I don't know that there's anything that can be done about it, but I do know that it's unproductive to blame Americans from the outside looking in. I mean it's unproductive to blame average people for the actions of their government anyway, but it's especially annoying coming from people who don't even live here and often lack a lot of context and empathy with their angry rants. None of this applies to you personally btw, but I'm just saying it for the record.

  • Threadiverse Major Defederations Graph

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  • It's actually impressively clear, I did not think it would be possible to represent all of the details in such a simple graphic. Very nicely done. But I guess anything can be improved with a bit of iteration.

  • Beware of lemmychan.org: it’s exactly what you’d expect.

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  • Yeah totally, but that's why it links to the threads with the full context if you click on the modlog

  • Beware of lemmychan.org: it’s exactly what you’d expect.

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  • I guess on the bright side at least it shows the text of the comments that got removed right there, and links directly to the thread. So people can easily verify for themselves whether they would agree with the ban or not. It's more of an annoyance than anything, they can put whatever reason they want for banning you, but they can't edit your comments or control the words you actually wrote down. So if you stand by what you wrote and others agree with your perspective, it just makes the mod look bad and they can also get removed for abusing mod powers.

  • Canadian fiddler sues Google after AI Overview wrongly claimed he was a sex offender

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  • Ah, the ole' fiddler/diddler switcheroo.

    The Diddler on the Roof does sound like it'd make for a captivating musical though. Shades of The Nightman Cometh.

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    When your parents are on the phone, how often did you just start staying stuff for attention (or because you're bored)?

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  • Indeed, sorry to hear that

  • Beware of lemmychan.org: it’s exactly what you’d expect.

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  • I’ve always wanted to see a mod list that breaks down “local”. Like, you look at .worlds modlist from the main page, and it’s every mod action from every federate instance.

    Yeah that'd be nice. Modlog has always left much to be desired. Although the core concept is great, it's not fleshed out enough to be as useful as it should be. Sometimes it can even be weaponized by rogue mods to slander certain users. Because when you ban someone, that mod action is permanent and you get to put whatever text you want as the ban reason.

    It definitely needs work but I can understand other things taking priority, considering most users will never interact with the modlog anyway.

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    When your parents are on the phone, how often did you just start staying stuff for attention (or because you're bored)?

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  • I think they were joking but they might just be old. Smacking the shit out of your kids used to be normal not so long ago.

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    When your parents are on the phone, how often did you just start staying stuff for attention (or because you're bored)?

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  • I feel you homie. But honestly 50-100 years is plenty, that's a long time to be alive. Based on what you said, you understand that this shit gets exhausting after a while. But then again, sometimes memories can be more enjoyable than the actual experiences. It's very common that we experience things in life and don't fully appreciate them until we look back in hindsight.

    Mainly if you are physically healthy and able to live comfortably in society, you should enjoy it as much as you can, because most other people don't have it as good and they still find a way to make the most of it.

    To answer your question, never. I just wanted to do my own thing and read or play video games, it seemed better to avoid my parents' attention rather than seek it out.

  • TIL 4Kids Entertainment, Inc., behind infamous English dubs of shows such as One Piece, Yu-Gi-Oh!, and Pokémon, traded on the New York Stock Exchange as 'KDE'

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  • I already gnu that.

    I'll see myself out

  • What plants can take care of themselves and are eco friendly in nyc?

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  • There's always Cannabis. I've heard the local wildlife loves that plant

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    Which instances have the most ban-happy moderators? Analysis inside

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  • I wasn't even aware that there was a reason to avoid HDMI. I have always used HDMI for everything. How does that factor into your moral high horse?

    Am I the problem? Am I responsible?

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    Which instances have the most ban-happy moderators? Analysis inside

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  • In short, I subscribe to the validity of modern science, which tells us that an animal is an assortment of cells, the behavior of which is (ultimately) described by the laws of physics, which are deterministic. Philosophically, I would fall into the incompatibilist camp, which maintains that determinism and free will are not compatible.

    This is a succinct explanation of the incompatibilist argument.

    You may also find this article informative.

    When I say going after the end result, I mean going after the consumers rather than the producers. It's similar to punishing drug addicts rather than drug dealers. A futile effort.

    Another comparable situation would be trying to get consumers to stop using plastic straws and expecting that to solve climate change.

    The crux of the problem

    Incorrect, it is both.

    They might both be problems, but only one of them is the crux. The reason why supply side is the crux is because it's the only side that we have some control over. We don't have control over the private behavior of the billions of individual humans on this planet. We can't really control demand without commiting some major human rights violations. But we do have some control over what businesses are able to do legally.

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    Which instances have the most ban-happy moderators? Analysis inside

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  • I don't believe in free will so I can't really hold average people responsible in such a basic way.

    Ultimately, trying to solve the problem by going after the end result just isn't going to work. Even if you want to blame the end users personally, you're not going to solve anything without going after the source of the problem, which is the development of the technology in the first place, along with the availability and lack of regulation.

    You could make similar arguments about using computers or social media in general tbh. The crux of the problem isn't that people are using the tools that are made available to them, it's that tools are being made available without properly considering the long term negative consequences, and only with a view towards short term profits.

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    Which instances have the most ban-happy moderators? Analysis inside

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  • Nah, I'm aware of how many lurkers there are. I'm not assuming that the accounts were created by some shadow organization or something.

    But from the perspective of people who are actually getting downvoted, it just feels bad.

    She said “But I only vote when a post is actually breaking the rules. So I can be punished for voting? Okay, then I just won’t even vote on piefed”. That’s the truth about this stuff: There are billions of people out there using social media in a way you will never be able to relate to. Because everyone is different.

    I get it. But in cases like that, I think it'd be fair to argue that people are using social media in a counterproductive manner. Like for those who only downvote and never upvote, I question that behavior. All of those posts and comments that you enjoy don't just come out of nowhere, people are actually putting time and effort to create them. And the only reward they get is upvotes.

    Furthermore, upvoting is the way that you push quality content to the top, so that other users will notice the better content instead of missing it. It's a critical part of what makes the whole community work. So if you systematically ignore the upvote button, you're not being a responsible user of social media, you're more of a leech that contributes very little and takes the contributions of others for granted.

    And I don't blame people like that at all, because traditional sites like reddit are so oversaturated with content, much of which is made by bots as well. So in that context, upvoting doesn't matter nearly as much. So I think people simply don't understand that even as a lurker, your upvotes and downvotes have consequences. It may seem insignificant for one person, but on the scale of thousands of lurkers, in the context of a relatively small userbase like we have here, it becomes clear that they are playing an active role in shaping the direction of the platform as well, despite not saying a single word. I only came to understand this after spending time on Lemmy, so I don't expect people to just instinctively understand it. Which is why it's important to educate them.

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    Which instances have the most ban-happy moderators? Analysis inside

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  • I'm ambivalent about it. I'm no fan of AI, but on the other hand people were having fun in that community and it seemed pretty harmless to me. I think when it comes to AI, it's probably more reasonable to go after the companies who are spending billions developing it, rather than the common people who are just using it because it's there and it's free.

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    Which instances have the most ban-happy moderators? Analysis inside

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  • Holy mother of God that modlog. It's almost up to 80 pages in 12 months 🤯

    That being said, people who downvote AI content can be quite overwhelming on this platform. Our community !imageai@sh.itjust.works was very vibrant in the early days but seems to have been slowly crushed by the neverending stream of downvotes. It's pretty discouraging when you go through the effort of creating and posting something and it gets randomly downvoted by anonymous accounts that seem to have been created just for the purpose of downvoting. But that's just kinda how it is I guess, I'm not sure if anything can be done about it.

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    Which instances have the most ban-happy moderators? Analysis inside

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  • Well, I think you make good points. But I also think this information that has been posted is valuable.

    Instances and communities are inevitably reflective of the moderators who curate them. Depending on the moderation decisions, the communities and instances naturally evolve as some stuff gets removed/banned, and other stuff gets encouraged.

    If communities have high rates of trolls, then naturally they would have higher rates of banning. But the discrepancy visualized here is of a much greater scale than could be explained by mere variations in user/troll activity, imo. It's fairly obvious that different servers have different standards for moderation, and I think that's a good thing.

    I think the issue being danced around in this thread is the latent assumption that servers with a high amounts of bans are somehow undesirable or problematic. I don't necessarily agree with that assumption. Although I obviously prefer an extremely minimal censorship paradigm for me personally, I actually don't think that such an environment is beneficial or desirable for most users. Despite the fact that everyone likes to imagine themselves as open minded and intellectually independent, in reality most people simply aren't. We seek communities that reinforce our preconceptions and try to protect ourselves from dissenting and hostile voices, because it's emotionally draining to live in a state of constant conflict and argument.

    On a personal level, it does give me great satisfaction to know that my server is permissive and hands-off. But that's only because I'm comfortable discussing opinions that dbzer0 or blahaj users would consider as transphobic hate speech. So if I have to bear the label of transphobe as a result of my openness to discussing and/or questioning certain topics, it seems only fair that the people labeling me as such should have to bear the label of ban-happy. FWIW I still feel that we agree on the vast majority of topics and I prefer to focus on that rather than the handful of topics of disagreement that seem to monopolize the majority of attention.

    But yeah, if you really believe that people are causing harm by posting certain things and you choose to ban them as a result, stand by your decision. Like sure, we banned a lot of people because they were transphobic, or Zionist, or ableist, and we don't allow that here. I can respect that, even if I don't 100% agree with it.

    So idk, I think there is a bit of frustration and competition between different servers at times and that is coming through in this post. But in the greater perspective, the fediverse as a whole benefits from a diversity of moderation styles, so it should be a point of pride for us as fediverse users rather than a point of argument between us as denizens of our individual servers.

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    Which instances have the most ban-happy moderators? Analysis inside

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  • While it's fair to note that this is a pretty raw assessment of the data and could potentially be skewed by any number of variables that aren't being accounted for, it agrees with my anecdotal experience and therefore I choose to believe it.

    Some servers take a more laissez faire approach and others take a more authoritarian approach, and that's fine because joining a server is a voluntary act. No one is being subjected to anything unwillingly, they are choosing an experience that works for them.

    But I think it's definitely valuable for people to recognize and be aware of the fact that certain servers tend to censor dissenting voices and create a walled garden environment. This is not inherently a bad thing, but it can be frustrating when users develop fairly extreme viewpoints as a result of this curated environment, and then react strongly when confronted with more mainstream perspectives.

    It's good to explore different perspectives and see what the mainstream is getting wrong, but if you insulate yourself from the mainstream entirely, you kinda reduce your ability to actually challenge it. Like you can follow your own intellectual path and end up wherever you end up, but that's a solo mission. If you feel like where you ended up intellectually is better than where you started and you want to share that with others, you actually need to walk back down the path, reconnect with the mainstream, and lead others step by step down your alternate path.

    It's not effective to just stay in your obscure branch and yell at people about how wrong they are, you need to actively lead them through the sequence of rational steps that got you from point A to point B. And in many cases, they will nitpick and try to disagree at each step, because there's an inherent inertia where humans simply don't like to change their opinions unless it becomes absolutely unavoidable. Furthermore, the intellectual path that you followed could just be straight up wrong/illogical, and the opinions you are trying to change could actually have been right all along, and you might be the one who is actually wrong. So it's a very scary thing to engage in such a way.