this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2024
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Ye Power Trippin' Bastards

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This is a community in the spirit of "Am I The Asshole" where people can post their own bans from lemmy or reddit or whatever and get some feedback from others whether the ban was justified or not.

Sometimes one just wants to be able to challenge the arguments some mod made and this could be the place for that.

Rules

Expect to receive feedback about your posts, they might even be negative.

Make sure you follow this instance's code of conduct. In other words we won't allow bellyaching about being sanctioned for hate speech or bigotry.


Some acronyms you might see.


Relevant comms

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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]

i genuinely do not understand your point

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

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[โ€“] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I think that many people here would benefit from you going further into why it is harmful to society, since people seem to be nonchalant about this issue, or worse, are dismissing the post as an opinion piece.

[โ€“] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago

OK! Short version:

  1. Idiocy and misinformation are a vicious cycle: idiocy breeds misinformation, and misinformation makes people more likely to accept idiocy.
  2. Misinformation can harm people - both the individual accepting it, and the ones interacting with that individual.
  3. The community in question promotes both things for a specific topic, and because of #1 it's encouraging that vicious cycle.

Long version:

What I called "idiocy" and "misinformation" there can be rephrased as "not thinking rationally" and "incorrect and/or harmful beliefs" respectively.

Thinking rationally is doing things like this:

  • asking yourself "is this true?" before you believe in some claim;
  • acknowledging that sometimes you simply don't know, or you are not certain of something;
  • telling apart what you want to be true from what you think to be true;
  • not oversimplifying situations;
  • not accepting fallacious reasoning as if it was valid; et cetera.

Thinking rationally is essential to prevent you from holding incorrect and/or harmful beliefs - because, if you have access to good and true information, and use rationality on it, your conclusions will be consistently good and true too. But only if you think rationally.

(Programmers' analogy: if your algorithm is rubbish, then no good input saves you from getting rubbish output.)

And what you believe on has a huge impact, on both you and the people interacting with you. In some this is clear; for example, someone who believes that "all white mushrooms are safe to eat!" might get someone eating a death cap, or even eat one themself. Or, for more realistic examples:

  • The peak of the COVID pandemics had people touting ivermectin as a cure for COVID (it is not) - and plenty people didn't seek actual treatment because of that, making the disease worse for themselves and the pandemic worse for everyone.
  • Political beliefs affect whom you vote on, so they'll affect public policies, and you might end with a muppet in power that will do everything to make your life miserable (and their pockets full).
  • Some people are literally persecuted and killed due to this sort of belief. Cue to the historical witch hunts.

Someone might say "isn't this overblown in this case? It's just a community against Looniks and freewarez!". Well, no, it isn't overblown. Our lives revolve around software in the XXI century, like it or not - it's a data centre used by the hospital, it's your morning news, it's someone spying on you, it's a country spying on another... all those involve software - sometimes libre software, always some sort of operating system.

But even if we disregard the above, the fact that someone is promoting lack of rational thinking (what I called "idiocy") and incorrect beliefs (what I called "misinformation") is bound to get people used to those things as if they were OK. Thinking rationally is not just an "I did it once, so I'm good to go". It's a lot like brushing your teeth - you need to create some habit to avoid the associated [mind / mouth] problems and have good [mental / buccal] hygiene.

As such, I do not think that we should give this community a free pass. Even if it's a troll community, as both DraconicNEO and me believe it to be, it's still promoting misinformation and idiocy, and should be handled as such.