To be clear, not talking about this community, obviously 😛.
What's the point of writing down rules, if mods just do what they want? But I suppose that's the risk you take when you call someone a liar in a small community; they might be a mod.
Edit: I'm not trying to say that mods suck, they perform a useful and often thankless job. Just that it can be difficult for small communities to get a healthy number of good mods, which can become a problem.
I get the feeling you're speaking from experience
Your honor, the prosecution is sullying the defendant’s reputation
Your honor, the prosecution just hit me with a whip
Lol perhaps 😅
It was a small community dedicated to shit talking another community, neither of which I was part of. A few posts showed up in my feed and one had a take I thought was kinda unreasonable, so I commented. I had a nice discussion with one community member, but OP came in hot. After a half-hearted effort to try to defuse, and being blatantly lied to in a few replies, I just told him he was a conniving liar.
A few days later I tried to comment on a different post, but I was banned.
Not a big deal, I'm not invested in either community, but it made me think of the struggles growing Lenny from these small nascent communities, into more more mature communities.
Lemmy is riddled with echo chambers, most of which are people that love calling out people in echo chambers.
Circlejerks. Circlejerks everywhere.
I got into an argument in the main Technology community a couple weeks or so back and while I admit that it got too heated so that both of us broke the "be excellent to each other" rule, I still feel that an immediate 3-day ban with no warning or notification (I had to check the modlog to find out why I suddenly couldn't comment there) in a group where I'd never broken the rules before was ridiculous.
Didn't help any that the mod almost immediately unbanned the other guy who had been equally unexcellent during the exchange and initially got the same ban and left mine in place..
There are potentially 3 different groups of people that may ban you for a comment. If you break a community rule, a moderator may ban you as you would expect from reddit. However, since reports also notify the admins of the community instance and the admins of the instance of the reporter, you may end up banned by an admin if they believe you are breaking an instance rule.
The modlog is great for transparency, but lemmy should also make it clear what group has banned you and why. I haven't been banned before so I'm not sure what that process looks like currently though.
This is my first time. I'm not even sure where to find the modlog in jebora.
And yeah, notifying me that an action has been taken against me and the reason for that action would help me understand that I've done something wrong, what it was, and how to modify my behavior.
My main account got a temp ban for 14 days, the first 3 days I just thought Lemmy is broken, again. My feed was lost, but "all" worked.
A notice or a simple warning would be nice the next time.
It can happen in any lemmy.world community, even if you did absolutely nothing wrong and you wont be told anything, not even that you have been banned or why. You just suddenly can not log in any more and when the ban is over you might even find that all content you ever posted has been deleted and can not be brought back. Lemmy.world admin team urgently needs to improve their banning practice and they should really consider to start answering emails. On the other hand, did I already tell you what a great instance lemm.ee is? They also have a very nice admin team over there ...
People need to urgently stop using Lemmy world so they no longer have any power to abuse.
Often the mods are arbitrary and inconsistent. Moderation can really suck sometimes
Many many years ago I modded a few small reddit subs, and it was a horrible job. You'd set up these rules, and some tween edgelord d-bag would test you to see how much they can push. Some comments deserve an insta-ban with no warning and no debate.
I don't know what happened to OP, and plenty of mods let the tiny amount of power inflate their heads past the point of reason. But I think of modding like I think of parenting. I'm not going to criticize someone else's methods, because I'm sure as shit not going to do it for them.
You’d set up these rules, and some tween edgelord d-bag would test you to see how much they can push.
You can just call those people buttheads and hit them with short bans until they get the message. Really, you can hand out 3-day bans like candy. It's infinitely more useful than any form of 3-strike punishment game or kneejerk permaban.
I think this is good, as long as the user gets informed a) they they're banned and b) what rule they broke.
A warning first would also be nice, especially if it's in the community rules 😛
Reddit's automatic mesages on mod action were a positive and arguably necessary feature.
But if bans are long enough to annoy and short enough to frustrate, they basically are the warning. Less gun-to-your-head, more spritzing a cat in the face.
Arbitrary is fine - there's a reason we have humans do this. But any enforcement of bad rules will always suck.
"Be nice" is a bad rule.
"Be nice" is a recipe for failure, and it always winds up protecting mildly cautious assholes. If you see someone reply 'so you think [insane garbage unrelated to parent comment]?' and the accused shoot back 'shut up,' and you only remove the person brushing off that troll, your forum is for trolls. That is who you've protected. That is what you've encouraged. That is how things will go.
If you think the right answer is to always expend great effort peeling apart that disinformation, you do not know what trolling is.
It's outright insane, in communities about serious topics. If your forum's about knitting - yeah, you can expect and demand televisable language. The vibe is properly casual. But if you deal with politics then you're going to get people being called subhuman, and if you don't come down ten times harder on sneering bigots than their pissed-off victims, you're not preventing abuse, you're enabling abuse.
Trying to enumerate all the ways someone could deserve a time-out is a fool's errand. You can be mercilessly rude with nothing but a thumbs-up emoji. Or "Great Save!" More importantly - some vitriol is justified. Be human, god dammit, and spend thirty seconds figuring out if someone's being a crank or merely dealing with cranks. If you think there's never any reason for one user to tell another where to shove it, then you are wrong and you should quit.
It happens on Lemmy all the time. I've been shadowbanned at least three times, all on the bigger instances.
I really, really suspect that the big Lemmy instances are being run by Reddit admins or spooks or some-such. They're moderating their instances in the exact same way Reddit did minus the profiteering. The censorship is the exact same.
Also, the fact that it's possible to shadowban people and the software itself doesn't circumvent that by auto-messaging you or putting a banner on the top of your screen when you are banned from an instance or community is reason #589238923 why Lemmy fucking sucks ass.
It's because the most insufferable people from reddit all came over to Lemmy/kbin when they got banned for being exceptionally insufferable.
Why? Because internet.
A lot of communities dedicated to politics arent dedicated to political discourse.
They mostly are enforced echo chambers. At best.
I'm a real debate lord and it really annoys me when the person I'm being bickering with gets banned. Ruins all the fun.
Being in favor of free speech means allowing the people you hate to talk and say what they want to say too.
Being against free speech is authoritarian.
Some improvements I'd like to see, but maybe I'm missing something and could be a bad idea
I implement the first two and the last rules in all the communities I moderate. Everyone gets either a message or a comment if they break the rules/I remove their comment/I give them a warning. I also reply to the vast majority of mod reports made, explaining what action I’ve taken and why. All my communities have a one-warning-then-you’re-banned rule, but bans are rarely permanent.
I repeatedly state that I’m looking for moderators, that I welcome all constructive feedback and suggestions regarding the way the community is run and what the rules are. I make it clear I want the communities to be a community effort. I’ve never ever vetoed a suggestion someone’s made - I always offer to let the community decide. What happens? People complaining/criticising but never taking me up on the offer to hold a vote on whatever it is they don’t like. It’s like shouting in the wind and it’s exhausting.