Hello I'm not a person who is affected by this community moderator but I'm posting on behalf of people who are, since they don't seem to know of this community yet. I attempted to reach some via DM but I'm not sure they'll respond. So I'm making this post since I feel this needs to be addressed.
Recently I was made aware of a community that appeared randomly on Lemmy.world. It seems to be a troll community given the type of content, but the reason I'm posting about it here specifically is that this mod seems to be banning anyone who points this out or goes against his narrative. Furthermore he is only using the autoremove on ban function, not removing any content the users have posted, which I believe is deliberate in attempt to prevent the content from showing up under the modlog and revealing the hypocrisy.
Some samples of comments:
Comment from: @[email protected]
Everything else you posted has been pretty cringe but what he fuck is up with this one, dude lol
comment from: @rain_[email protected]
free software is SLOWING DOWN tech advancement??????? WHAT???????
comment from: @rain_[email protected]
comment from: @the_[email protected]
First off, nice new community. I look forward to days of quality posts such as this./s
Second, how many Linux distros have this level of data collection, and what is their estimated market share?
Original comment link
All of these were retrieved from the API, even though they aren't included in the modlogs, I could've included more but it's kind of a time consuming process to look for them and retrieve them. Viewing removed comments is easier on Lemmy than it is on Reddit but it still isn't easy.
What do you guys think, does this seem like power-tripping? Also does this person's content seem like blatant troll content?
CC: @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected]
People who's comments I mentioned, I CCed them so they know I did this on their behalf
I unfortunately am starting to lose faith in Lemmy's desire to reduce toxicity. They just now finally banned Linkerbaan, but it took 11 months of extreme trolling in support of Trump for it to happen. Days before the election, they finally took action. The user is probably laughing his ass off, having already reached 99.9% of the users they were hoping to.
Their cherry on top is they got away with accusing people of supporting/loving genocide hundreds of times unscathed. Most of the time where I witnessed that behavior, the person they attacked hadn't even expressed any form of support for Israel.
Glad to hear they're gone
Yeah, only downside is at this point we won't know if what many had speculated would happen. After the election, a lot of us expected them to vanish.
Sure, we lost a prominent one. But we will always have plenty of MAGAs cosplaying as leftists just from federating with .ml.
That account. I doubt they are gone.
They have two other accounts, one on .ml and one on discuss.online. Wouldn't surprise me if there were sockpuppets as well, it always seemed like the same few users would always show up to agree with whatever they posted.
If you hang out in politics communities they are gonna be toxic. I don't think that's a fair characterisation of lemmy in general though tbh. There are plenty of wholesome communities.
Yeah, I've noticed that very often admins are very slow at dealing with these kinds of problems, also many community mods seem to protect users from receiving admin action. Which really is not good, it leads to people like Linkerbaan and CookieJarObserver being able to thrive and troll for months without issue, and only finally being banned after they've caused the harm months later.
What would be the alternative? As you pointed out, it's the admins who can be slow to act
What would be the alternative?
Good fucking riddance.
They finally banned them? It's about time, they were insufferable.
Unless I’m missing something this seems like a significant misrepresentation of that user’s behavior. I found them to be an annoying ideologue but having strong views and a focus on a singular topic isn’t the same as trolling.
Okay well they were banned from the instance for trolling. I think many people thought they clearly were doing so.
Certainly. But I never felt that way.
Technically, they were banned for: “constant attacks on other users, sealioning and general bad faith discussions and baseless accusations” which might be adjacent to trolling but I think is a more fair and objective description of their behavior.
The problem with trolling is that it’s usually not possible to identify with certainty because it depends on a person’s intent and state of mind. In your judgment Linkerbaan was trolling. In mine they weren’t. But who is right? There’s no way to be certain, it’s just a guess based on their behavior. That’s why I don’t think it should be used in moderation decisions. It’s just too subjective.
A user who constantly accuses anyone who disagrees with them of holding horrifying offensive views is a troll in my book. I think that's pretty reasonable.
But that's not what trolling means. Frankly, I'm starting to think this term is doing more harm than good in building more positive, informed, and respectful online communities. Trolling can theoretically be any type of behavior that another user doesn't like--but it has to be intended to cause those feelings. But as I said, we can't know each others intentions, and of course, bad actors are likely to lie about them. It's better to describe things in terms of objective actions a user took. The description you give here is a fine basis for a ban--but it's still not possible to say it was trolling.
The reason this bothers me is that many tightly regulated echo chambers, including some highlighted on this community, accusations of trolling are levied against anyone who doesn't toe the party line. Presentation of inconvenient or disliked facts may cause a negative emotional reaction--but that's not trolling unless the emotional reaction was the purpose of the interaction. I think at least some of the backlash against Linkeraan was due to their treatment of other users. But at least some was also because they were not willing to let people ignore the complicity of the US and the Democratic Party in the mass killings in Gaza. I think that's an important truth that risks being drowned out or silenced, but obviously it should be voiced in a way that is more respectful.
You cannot force me to adopt your definition of trolling, not that it would even matter what you called it.
Do you think we have a different definition? I honestly hadn’t considered that. What is your definition then?
Scroll up. I won't argue or defend my position as I think it's pretty reasonable and obvious to most
An example isn’t a definition but it doesn’t seem like you’re too interested in this conversation so I’ll leave it at that.
Any review of his post history would show that above all, Linkerbaan was pro-Palestinian.
Many users on lemmy.world seem to think any criticism of the Biden Administration's support of Israel's Genocide in Gaza and deliberate war crimes (which Israel often brags about) is somehow supporting Trump.
One of the reasons I left reddit was the circlejerking that went on there but Lemmy.world is giving reddit a run for it's money.
Yeah it’s an issue. But I find the leftist instances as bad or worse than LW in terms of the group-think. As long as you’re polite, at worst you get downvoted or insulted on LW but on Lemmy.ml you can be banned from the whole instance just for stating certain historical facts. The issue with Linkerbaan was they were quite rude in presenting their views.
Unfortunately, I’ve come to believe it’s a direct result of the nature of these platforms. I think we need innovation to create more positive and pluralistic communities. The platform itself incentivizes bad behavior, but what if it incentivized good behavior instead?