this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2023
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This doesn’t surprise me. I’m more of a lemmy person than I was ever a Reddit person, but I’m in the same boat.
Along with some of the cultural issues that have happened over on masto, I’ve come to suspect, somewhat controversially, that there is a major difficulty in founding a new and niche social media platform off the back of discontent with a major platform. And that’s because unless the discontent and migration is widespread, but instead marginal, those inclined to reject the mainstream in favour of something niche for some reason will often enough include people who aren’t the most naturally social people and can create and establish somewhat unpalatable cultures.
I hope I’m wrong, and hopefully it’s clear that I’m speaking statistically. But it makes some sense and could be real, both here and other Fedi places.
I really like your explanation! Thank you very much. Would you mind helping me make some kind of community with the idea of bringing some anti bullying standards to lemmy?
I have moderation experience both on reddit and on lemmy and I‘m pretty surprised at the passivity of mods here. It’s not that surprising considering that reddit is a single (sueable) entity.
I mean, those in Ireland can already sue for cyberbullying and the rest of the eu hopefully soon follows.
We might find more of our kind and actually get good content on this place as not every sane person leaves after being shit on 3 times a day.
I moderate a couple of light hearted communities pretty strictly. Name calling is not allowed, neither is arguing. Discussion is fine, but the second I see it become unpleasant, I shut it down.
That said, I’m the main contributor to the majority of my communities and I’ve dramatically decreased the amount of posts I make over the last couple of weeks. There’s a lot more criticism and negativity lately, and some of the abusive messages I receive after asking someone to abide by the rules are straight up unhinged. I have to moderate closely to keep it enjoyable and honestly, I don’t have the time or the inclination to deal with the nastiness at the moment. The crappy mod tools don’t help, and neither does me living in the UK when the majority of commenters are in the USA.
But anyway, check out the community rules and the stickied mod post in [email protected] They might give you a starting point to create a nicer community.
The others I moderate - [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] and [email protected] - all have similar rules, with varying degrees of success. !badrealestate is definitely the “nicest” community I moderate - it’s pretty hard to get worked up over estate agent photos.
ETA: [email protected] is my mod account, I forgot to switch.
Fixed links.
Hi! Just meant to check out some of your links, and they are not working for me. Perhaps some formatting issue?
I’m useless at links 🤦🏼♀️ try these:
[email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected]
I'm no better at them- thanks for fixing them, they work now!
No problem - thanks for letting me know!
Wow! Thanks for this awesome explanation! It seems like there are a lot less people on lemmy than it seems. :)
I think there would also be people who benefit if stuff here got a lot more vile. That’s something we shouldn’t forget. Reddit and Twitter for example have ample motive to spread hate here.
There are bad actors for sure, but I think my naivety is partly to blame. I really enjoy discussing all sorts of topics and hearing all sorts of views - it’s an essential part of learning and growing imo. So I haven’t shied away from posting screenshots in my communities that touch on “controversial” subjects. Lemmy seemed so much nicer than Reddit at first, I truly thought I could help develop communities that discussed any topic in a calm, informative, respectful manner - particularly because these are light hearted communities. But it’s not to be. I wasn’t expecting an online utopia, but things have definitely shifted from “I disagree with you because XYZ” to “go fuck yourself you wanker” and it’s really disheartening.
I haven’t been a mod before and I really dislike the automatic mod = power hungry narcissist stereotype. I’m so careful to be polite, transparent and understanding when I act in a moderator capacity because I’ve had to deal with the less scrupulous Reddit mods in the past too. But honestly, the majority of people I have to remind to follow the rules are just so horrible that I don’t want to do it anymore. It’s like they’re stuck in the Reddit mindset of “everyone’s a dick, so you might as well be one too” or “it doesn’t matter what I say because this is anonymous”.
Shout out to the person who called me a “sycophantic child molester” after I gave them a warning for insulting 4 separate people. And the one who said I had “a personal moral failing” when I wouldn’t ban another user who hadn’t broken the rules. You suck.
Jeez! You're kind of the person I would like to associate with. I really feel you and it means a lot that you put yourself out there like this.
I'm a little different in parts but also the same in a lot of ways. Most notably, I'm autistic and I know it. Also, in my specific case, I tend to be brutally honest whereas honest is bold and brutally is the part I try to keep low because I really don't want to hurt someone. The interesting part is that I don't abide by social rules, mostly because I don't understand them or don't even see them.
This leads to very interesting situations. My strong sense for right and wrong (pretty binary, as well) leads me to look for the person who started to insult the other one because had they (for example) stayed constructive, the situation would have gone differently. But obviously I have a sence of nuance (after 36 yrs on this planet, even my autistic head does let in outside influence). So I don't just crash into someone I think has done wrong but my understanding of this right or wrong is very strong and a bit thickheaded. I mediate myself to not make people miserable.
What this also means is that if I tell someone my honest opinion, they often can't see how I got to that conclusion and I have no idea that they don't, so I'm shocked when they call me names (psychopath, narcissist, cruel and others) while I ask them to just explain to me why they see it different. Then (recently more on lemmy) they pile onto me like a gang of rabid dogs when I'm the only food available.
And it wouldn't be as ironic if the overwhelming conclusion after hours of back and forth and me explaining/asking and them beating me up wouldn't always be "Ok, so you're actually correct and it was a misunderstanding, tough luck I guess." (as said by the people doing the beating, btw.) This accidentally coincides with an old friend from elementary school joking about me getting beaten up all the time for "inventing words" which he much later learned were just very obscure and he learned at the age of 30.
Appreciate the offer, but I'm sorry to say that I'm in no position to take on any sort of commitment like that.
That being said, are you aware of beehaw? If not, you might want to check out their instance and their documentation. From what I've been able to glean, they're pretty dedicated to creating a more humane social media space, with generally more active moderation than anywhere else on lemmy (they, as you might know, blocked lemmy.world, and are rather unhappy at the lack of moderation tooling in lemmy the platform).
Otherwise, if you do find yourself setting something up, let me know. I'll likely check it out and be involved however I can!
Thank you very much for the information and kind words. I will absolutely check them out. I‘ll also try to hit you up if I decide to make a community dedicated to the cause.
Last thing: The reason I‘m so adamant about this is that I feel like we are having this massive problem with people being bullied all around the globe (by their bosses, coworkers, schoolmates, parents, you name it).
When they complain, most people answer with „suck it up“ or „your own fault“ or „bad but can’t do anything“ which leads to suicides, school shootings, cults, political extremists.
All because people are not feeling heard and stuff is not properly explained to them. Instead they are ridiculed, pathologized and beaten into submission by the „normal“ (just larger in numbers) crowd.
And I feel like those of us who have already split from real life because they can’t take it anymore are now bullied even more online.
Sorry for the rant. I just needed to say this. Thanks for reading. Have a good one.
You too!
Any conclusions or constructive ideas to take from this?
I mean we could potentially have all kinds of policies, technical solutions or learnings for future platforms. At this point I struggle a bit to imagine a way to apply what you're saying.
Well it’s probably tricky!
Best I can think of is that open sign ups for a brew and niche platform are probably not the best idea or are at least risky for the reasons I stated.
Sign up by application and approval like lemmy.ml and beehaw, from what I’ve seen, actually work at filtering out bad actors.
For something that scales better, an invite system could work well. An interesting extension of that might be to record who invites and maybe enforce some sort of responsibility for the people you invite. Nothing extreme but just to prevent people from knowingly inviting douche bags.
Beyond all of that, realising, at a moderation level that there are bad actors and actively banning them is more important than you might seem in the early stages of a platform.
As for us, reporting bad actors as often as we can might be best seen as a responsibility for the sake of the platform. Actively willing to then e to let them know they’re out of line too.
Thanks for replying. And for your input.
I wasn't really aware of this. But now that I'm thinking about it, I've also had contact with a few annoying people on some of the more popular and 'open' communities. And usually a nicer atmosphere on the more focused ('nerd') communities. Just to be clear: There are also many exceptionally nice and helpful people here on Lemmy.
I've been critizising beehaw for their way of de-federating at will, a feature that's unfortunately also designed badly. And causing all kinds of trouble for the rest of the fediverse and effectively dividing people. Just my opinion. I get the point but I think this is detrimental to the fediverse as a whole and shows small-minded thinking. But I only know half of the story. Maybe I'm wrong here.
I share your view of things. And I'm not sure about a conclusion. Maybe it's something like an invite system. But that takes away from being welcoming to new people. I like to take pride into allowing people to take part, no matter who they are. But allowing everyone in has the obvious consequence of you needing to deal with the a-holes later, when it's more difficult. And I don't think an application form slows down people who like to be emotional and argumentative or troll.
I've been part of PeerTube for a while. And during the pandemic, there was a massive inrush of Covid-deniers and conspiracy theorists. After some time they got banned from, or got in trouble on the major platforms. And they started flooding PeerTube with re-uploads of their most crazy stuff. To the point where everyone was annoyed and new users immediately been turned away after having a glimpse of a timeline of one of the instances. It's been some hard work, but we confined them to a corner of their own and cleaned the timelines of the major instances. To highjack one of their terms: I think this has been my 'awakening'... Regarding 'free speech' vs 'moderation'. And dynamics like we're just now talking about. We can't directly compare our situation here on Lemmy to the events on PeerTube or Mastodon. But we can (and should) draw conclusions.
For Lemmy, there are a few low hanging fruit left. I mean when it comes to technical solutions. Better moderation tools etc. And things are already been worked on. But I've always been curious about the sociological aspects. It's been mainly one big migration event for us here. It felt like a revolution and a fresh start after Reddit. And people picked up on this. Nonetheless we're often rebuilding the structures we already know. Sometimes including the tone of speaking with another.
I 100% agree on your assessment that moderation in the early stages has an important effect. We're in the process of inventing/defining this place. Every interaction counts. From the atmosphere and tone the users set, to what moderators deem appropriate behaviour, to how instance admins handle disagreements and security incidents.
I have to think about this a bit more. My main takeway at this point is: Next time I want to say 'I wish more people would realize Twitter is a bad place, Elon is making it worse by the day, and they should leave and use the better alternative...'. I'll stop and think about the consequences and if this is really what I want or need.