Edit 2025-01-13: LW has indicated they will be clarifying these rules soon. In the mean time, the community will remain locked until those are updated and deemed acceptable.
So the LW Team put out an announcement on new, site-wide moderation policy (see post link). I’ve defended, to many a downvote, pretty much every major decision they’ve made, but I absolutely cannot defend this one. In short, mods are expected to counter pretty much every batshit claim rather than mod it as misinformation, trolling, attack on groups, etc.
My rebuttal (using my main account) to the announcement: https://dubvee.org/comment/3541322
We’re going to allow some “flat earth” comments. We’re going to force some moderators to accept some “flat earth” comments. The point of this is that you should be able to counter those comments with words, and not need moderation/admin tools to do so.
(emphases mine)
Me: What if, to use the recent example from Meta, someone comes into a LGBT+ community and says they think being gay is a mental illness and /or link some quack study? Is that an attack on a group or is it “respectful dissent”?
LW: A lot of attacks like that are common and worth refuting once in awhile anyway. It can be valuable to show the response on occasion
I understand what they’re trying to address here (highly encourage you to read the linked post), but the way they’re going about it is heavy handed and reeks of “both sides”-ing every community, removing agency from the community moderators who work like hell to keep these spaces safe and civil, and opening the floodgates for misinformation and “civil” hate speech. How this new policy fits with their Terms of Service is completely lost to me.
I’ll leave the speculation as to whether Musk dropped LW a big check as an exercise to the reader.
For now, this community is going dark in protest and I encourage other communities who may disagree with this new policy to join. Again, I understand the problem that is trying to be addressed, but this new policy, as-written, is not the way to do it.
Just unlock it already, no one gives a shit about your drama with the admins. If you can’t deal with it, move to another instance.
[email protected] Guess I’ll switch to here. Better a dead community than one held hostage by some power mod.
Better a dead community than one held hostage by some power mod.
Ironically, that’s probably unpopular
nice job OP genuinely appreciate your expression of discontent and it seems like it might be successful too
Your opinion seems valid. I’d be fine with leaving a flat earth post up, locked, with a comment that OP has turd brains.
The “different sides” argument is a fallacy. If 100 geologists say the planet is round, and one geologist says it’s flat, both sides don’t deserve equal amounts of space to discuss it.
What happended to “Don’t feed the trolls”? I thought it’s shared expirience that giving attention to trolls like that only gives them motivation to keep on going. Ignoring them is the only way to stop them from spamming.
Well I suppose it’s a good thing .world isn’t the entirety of lemmy.
It is particularly egregious that they decided the flat earth thing was the example they were going to run with. We don’t need to refute it every time a dunce brings it up and it’s nobody’s job to attempt educating the willfully ignorant. If the counter opinion is a thoroughly dead horse that’s been beaten into paste, we collectively expect that to get downvoted and or moderated if it’s actively harmful.
True the admin should’ve used a different example
As somebody running a cryptography forum elsewhere, if I was forced to accept lies that endanger people I’d rather shut down the forum instead.
I can imagine lots of other moderators in science and medical forums would hold the same opinion.
Holy shit this is such a bad policy lol. World is known for being too aggressive at deleting a lot of content they really shouldn’t be deleting, but this policy really doesn’t seem like it will improve that. The issue is most of the time if they want something removed they do so and then add a policy after to justify it, meaning that regardless of this rule people can’t “advocate for violence”, but they will be able to post misinformation and hate speech since apparently “LGBTQ people are mentally ill” hasn’t been debunked enough elsewhere and a random comment chain in Lemmy is where it needs to be done. Never mind the actual harm those sorts of statements cause to individuals and the community at large.
All I can see this doing is any actual types of that get wrongly overly censored will still do so since the world admins believe they are justified in doing so, while other provably false information will be required to stay up since the admins believe the mods aren’t justified in removing it.
This policy seems to only apply to actual misinformation too, not just subjective debates. So if there’s a comment thread about whether violence is justified in protest would likely have one side removed, while I guess someone arguing that every trans person is a pedophile would be forced to stay up and be debated. Its like the exact opposite of how moderation should work lol.
Oh also something I just realized, they basically want to force mods to debate misinformation, which is literally a tatic used to spread disinformation in the first place. By getting people to debunk a ridiculous claim it lends credence to the idea as something worth discussing and also spreads it to more people. I feel like the intentions behind this are noble, but it’s been proven that presenting evidence doesn’t really get people to change their opinion all that often. The whole thing is super misguided.
“Communities should not be overly moderated in order to enforce a specific narrative. Respectful disagreement should be allowed in a smaller proportion to the established narrative.”
It looks extremely reasonable to be honest
Move the community to a different Instance?
It’s an option, sure. But (at this point anyway) it’s more about making a statement and trying to bring visibility to the horrible side effects of this new policy.
I’m not trying to burn bridges, lol, merely shine a light and hope the LW Team sees it.
They’ve made some… curious decisions in the past which diminish my faith in their ability to navigate this one.
I think the policy is too heavy-handed. Forget who’s right and wrong, keeping a discussion topical to the post is really helpful to help the community grow.
On a more practical level, enforcing this at the admin level is going to require a lot more oversight and work from the administrators.
It definitely does not seem like a well thought out solution for sure.
If u move instances can i take over this one. Allow people who want to see decenting opinions to choose or do u not believe people should be given that choice?
Why wait? Make your own community right now and moderate it how you like
Why don’t you create your own community if you care so much about giving people a choice?
Cos this one already has a bunch of followers.
Removed by mod
You may have mistaken him with your wife?
Too young for a wife
Removed by mod
Yeah I decided to move off of lemmy.world recently. Seems like they’ve been making a lot of bad decisions.
This is the way.
But seriously, Please! I’m a frequent poster and every time I have to post to lemmy.world, I just assume it’ll be blocked/removed.
Enjoy SJW!
I was waiting for something like this to happen. I’m not surprised it happened to world, mainly because it ended up as default.
Why not just migrate to another instance? Have you forgotten that we are in the fediverse? This is a good opportunity to move communities to other instances.
I explained that in another comment: https://lemmy.world/comment/14408131
It’s not that easy for some of us. I’m using the voyager app on iOS. Otherwise I have no idea or technical knowledge to get on Lemmy. I don’t know how to change instances and keep what I’ve subscribed to
If you go to the settings (on the website, not in an app) there’s an import/export settings on that page. Save your settings to a file. Then, create an account on a new instance and import that file. Note that you will get subs and blocklist and all that, but your comment history will not follow you.
I don’t use the website. I wouldn’t even know where to go. That’s the problem with Lemmy and the fediverse. I’m not some tech pleeb. I could figure it out, I’m sure, but it’s not where I can just open an opp therefore it’s not something I will do and Lemmy will never supplant Reddit because of that
Lemmy will never supplant Reddit because of that
There’s a lot to unpack here.
You don’t need to change the instance of your account to subscribe to any (with the exception of defederated communitys’ instances) community. You simply need to subscribe to the unpopular opinion community in, for example, lemm.ee instead of the one in lemmy.world. You should’ve figured this out by now, with some communities having a
@<instance>at the end in their names.e.g. [email protected]
That’s not how the app works and shows things. That seems more like desktop stuff which is not something to do. I can already subscribe to anything I want, I just don’t know what I can write since I’ve randomly been banned or muted without comment and I understand it’s because of the bullshit moderators I’m on. Someone had to tell me I was on world and now I see it by going to my settings. Otherwise everything looks like and works like Reddit in the app
I’m using Voyager and I’m amazed you’ve managed to get as far as leaving multiple comments while pretending it doesn’t make Lemmy functionality like instances clear
How can one get this far into the fediverse while being so ignorant of it & unwilling to learn the basics so hard?
How can one get this far into the fediverse while being so ignorant of it & unwilling to learn the basics so hard?
Was that really necessary?
Yup
I’d say no if this guy wasn’t here for almost a year. He also didn’t even know what his account’s instance was until someone told him. Apparently Voyager never made the instance of a community or user visible in the app, so he was unaware of instances.
New people are good and all, but I really dislike ones that don’t even try to learn the absolute basics of the platform they are going to use.
My personal motto: there are no stupid questions, but there are many inquisitive idiots.
Maybe the other person was just being willfully obtuse to score a “point” in the debate they thought they were having. It’s weird but you see people double down all the time once they’ve stated decided their argument.
They’re literally just asking mods to wield their power like a surgical scalpel and not a cudgel and actually do more than see a triggering keyword or phrase and instantly dropping the ban hammer based on a knee-jerk reaction.
Someone who is misinformed saying something that is incorrect doesn’t mean they should be banned for spreading misinformation. There has to be intent behind it.
Someone saying they wish so and so would drop dead shouldn’t instantly warrant a ban for “inviting violence” if it’s not an actual, credible, serious call for organized violence.
I don’t really expect that shit to change, regardless. Most people who create a community, volunteer to moderate or even administrate a whole ass server, do so because they want to set the rules and run things their way.
Am I missing something or is this policy change to combat the tankie mods who are just banning left and right for anything that doesn’t match the tankie narrative?
As I understand it, yes, that is the intent of the policy. However, as-written and presumably as it is to be enforced for all mods LW-wide, it has wide-reaching implications with worse side-effects.
Basically, the proper tool is a scalpel and they brought out a machete.
Fair enough. I hear where you’re coming from. Is there an alternative that stops the little fiefdoms that you have in mind?
Genuine, open question because I do feel like something has to be done about the ban happy gang.
My stance has always been keep the server/instance rules generic / non-micromanaging and let the communities do what they do (so long as they’re in compliance with the generic server rules). That’s pretty much been LW’s stance until yesterday.
Re: fiefdoms
Many times I’ve seen new communities spring up as alternatives and people slowly (sometimes rapidly) moved over organically. That’s one of the big benefits to the Fediverse. My experience has been that, letting the Fediverse do what it does, the problems will generally sort themselves out as bad mods/instances are identified and avoided with alternatives springing up to fill the gap.
@[email protected] , seems like the LW admins changed their decision: https://lemmy.world/post/24135976
There will be a new announcement soon to clarify.
That’s good news (hopefully). Thanks!
Will keep an eye out, but community is remaining locked until the clarifications are published and deemed acceptable.
Sounds good!
