This one is both upsetting and weird.
So there was a user on ponder.cat who's been spamming posts. Like a lot. 58 per day, on average. Not 58 comments. 58 posts.
I started seeing a little scattering of reports about it, mostly just figured it was the mods' business to deal with, and then finally today I actually really took a look at what they were doing and realized it was way over the top. Pretty much everyone in the comments agreed when someone brought it up.
A 25 day old account with 1,400+ posts? What the actual fuck? My entire goddamn feed is this one account...
Touch grass. Good lord. You're carpet bombing multiple communities with repeats of the same crap.
The user was not receptive.
lol.
I guess people here do not know how to block an account.
:)
Is that a compliment or a rant?
May I introduce you to Lemmy block function.
If you don’t like my posts then block me and you will never see them again. As simple as that.
That's a bunch of bullshit. The voting was about as you would expect. I said to the user:
That's not how it works. If you're interfering with the average Lemmy user's experience, you don't get to claim it doesn't count because each individual person would be able to block each individual problematic account, if they wanted to have a good experience. Honestly, these people have a point. You have been posting an average of 58 posts per day. That's too much. I post a ton, and that's about 10 times more than me, and I've gotten multiple complaints about posting too much in particular communities. The handful of times it's happened, my reaction was "Oh my bad what sounds like an acceptable level" and then to more or less stick to an acceptable level. Getting snarky with people who are asking you to cool it is very bad. Please stop posting so much. Anything about 10-15 posts per day starts to feel really excessive to me. Definitely don't be dismissive about people's complaints to you about it.
They rejected my suggestion, so I sent them a DM that was a little more direct about it: Stop doing this if you want to keep your account on my instance.
Then, for some reason, they deleted their account on their own.
Well, that was weird, but at least it's all resolved and we can all get back to what we were doing. Or wait... what's happening now?
I wasn't expecting "making sure we make a safe space for the spammers by banning people who complain about spam" to be an important moderation duty, but I guess in the bizarro world that is [email protected] moderation philosophy, it makes perfect sense.
By the time we received complaints about your comments, the user in question (
cat) had already deleted their account.I don't have time to track down every post of theirs to check for sources. We tend to do that when people report posts.
The post that was reported that was submitted by
catwas this one:https://a.lemmy.world/lemmy.world/post/25907073
Nothing wrong with that post. The reason given in the report:
Again, prolific posting isn't against any rule. The post didn't break any rule. Why would I remove that?
Now, on to the reason I gave a temp ban.
Comment:
Attacking the user for posting? You may not like them, but again, we only received one report on that user. Apparently their content, while aggressive, broke no rules, and upset nobody until today, according to my reports and mod logs.
Next:
Another personal attack against the user.
Next:
Another person attacking them for posting. Do we attack Flying Squid, Admiral Picard, MicroWave, or others for contributing more than other users? Again, they broke no rules, and we received our first complaint about that account today.
There were a lot of people attacking that user, and a lot of reports on the comments attacking that user. Those are just a few examples.
Yes, I moderate, but I have a ton more going on in my life, so I'm not always on Lemmy to see what's happening, and I do rely heavily on reports to find points of pain in the communities I moderate. I also rely heavily on the rest of the moderation team, as well the great tools that people like @[email protected] make.
If you go through the posts in this community, you'll see tons of places where I personally have worked with other users who had complaints. We try to be fair, but attacking users is a violation of our community rules.
I don't see why Ghyste should have been punished here. Their comments were critical of the actions of Cat, and encouraged skepticism for their motives. Ghyste had inflammatory wording, but that doesn't seem enough to warrant action. For the record I don't think posting a bunch should be something that needs correction even if it does dominate a community 's feed, but complaining about one person driving discussion by themselves is certainly reasonable. If a decent portion of those posts do end up having problems like misleading headlines or bad sources, then maybe action should be taken, but that should be up to mods to judge. I'm more concerned that it sounds like they regularly delete accounts as soon as people start calling them out and pick it back up on a fresh one, since that sounds like ban evasion or legitimate bot activity.
For me, not the case. I absolutely hate coming in to a comments section and all the discussion is relegated to inflammatory comments about OP. Just discuss the content, people. I do not go into news stories to see the users’ personal preferences about how often they see each other.
I’ve said it before: It’s trivial for me to block one inflammatory user. It’s not easy for me to block like thirty people complaining about that one user instead of them just downvoting to oblivion and moving on.
Or make a meta petition thread. Like there’s so many other options that actually keep the utility of the community and its discussions intact.
Yeah, I don't like seeing people be rude to each other either. That doesn't mean such comments should be removed though. As long as it stays civil, I would expect mods to let people say their piece. News communities especially are likely to stir up reactions in people, so mods should be cautious about what's considered rule breaking, lest they be accused of censorship or being partisan.
I get that, but I also think a lot of people having the same complaint about one particular user suggests it may be worth paying attention to.
I agree that a meta post is a good idea for something like this. Normally reporting should be enough, but this is something difficult to describe in individual reports and should be shown to the community as a whole, not just mods. But I would still say meta discussion about a community's content seems fair game for a comment section under a post that serves as an example of your complaint. Comment threads are conversations, and this is the sort of thing that will come up naturally.
i went ahead and made the meta post so the discussion can be had lol: https://lemmy.cafe/post/13543724 mods have even gone on record that they will leave it up which is excellent.