It feels like the amount of both, divisive posts and ghoulish comments is rising again.
One could argue that the world has a lot of divisive stuff going on and lemmy just talks about it. But the way people post about stuff seems more oot and hateful than it has been in the past.
Not saying it is that but if I wanted to bring the Fediverse down or at least keep my customers from going there, I would sow this stuff as much as I can.
I’m blocking ghouls left right and center atm but if I ever asked a friend to join lemmy, I’d hate to think of what they would see that I dont anymore.
Do we need stronger moderation?
- Maybe ban politics from c/memes?
- Become a little more stringent on “dont be a jerk” rules in communities?
One thing that really bothers me is the collapsing “discourse”. Trying to mend fences and keep the conversation between sides going ime leads to nothing but downvotes and shitstorm.
I feel like a little more interaction (instead of intervention, at first) of the moderators would do wonders there.
Thanks for reading this rant. Have a nice day.
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You’re not imagining it. I’m pretty sure you can see regular work from propaganda teams on lemmy. I’d love to see the backed logs to confirm it.
They tend to work in very hostile teams to brigade topics.
I‘m encountering it this exact moment in a piracy discussion where some very abusive people start arguing for IP and excuse the blatant manipulation by calling limited licenses „buying“ and „owning“.
I followed the thread you’re talking about, you might be a bit overly sensitive to what constitutes a conversation on the internet. I don’t find the trolling any worse or better today vs. last week or last year.
You might want to make an account over at beehaw, they like to stay pretty sheltered over there and have defederated from, well, pretty much everyone.
Well, I‘m not a bit overly sensitive I just dont like to be manipulated and insulted. It frankly do not care how people treat their family and friends. Having a discussion without personal attacks is normal and everything else is normalized abuse.
You mentioned them calling something buying and selling. Did they also insult and manipulate you?
Not sure if this is a sincere question.
Manipulative and degrading rhetoric is what I‘m talking about. Bad faith arguments, assuming that someone arguing in a certain way must be naive or stupid, etc.
The question is definitely meant to highlight that I think you may be exaggerating, but in that purpose it is sincere.
Sincere trolling you mean?
He didn’t seem very sincere tbh. Odd
Do you also get the feeling that this might be what we were talking about?
It’s interesting right?
I’m thinking the architecture of the fediverse makes it particularly vulnerable to these sorts of attacks.
I’m pretty sure I’ve spotted bots circle jerking on some subjects also which makes me think there’s a few different sources.
Very interesting indeed.
I‘m starting to report, block and ban accounts from being viewed on my instance that use abusive language but from a systemic standpoint we should find a design solution to make this work.
Reddit had karma for this reason among others. People needed to make helpful contributions to prove they are able to function in the group.
For many reasons this is not implemented in the fediverse but a design solution would be good.
If I was designing an anti troll/bot system I’d implement a few things. Let’s call any bad actor on here a bot/troll or broll for ease.
- Reputation based posting isn’t a bad idea if carefully done
- When a broll is banned any users from the same ip are flagged a suspect and a subsequent ban causes delayed posting from that ip. If a VPN the instance host list has the same effect applied. Exceptions based on Reputation.
- You can check if text is ai/llm generated and an automated api check before posting and immediate ban if found.
- Checks on if a user posts inhumanly fast or is oddly active etc would be sensible.
- Any broll system has to be adaptive and measures taken need to be kept secret (this post for example).
Very good ideas! Any idea if something like this already exists? If not, shall we work on something? I have some experience in python if that helps.
Thanks but not sure what’s currently implemented or even what the code base is written in 😅.
I might have a poke around and see if there’s any low hanging fruit.
Call me crazy but with a 5b ipo about to start I’d be shocked if reddit wasn’t paying some troll farms to brigade the fediverse and it’d be a shame if spez wins
Thats an interesting idea! Thank you very much for mentioning it!
We can absolutely write a bot in python and could try to use it like that. I already made a discord bot so this shouldn’t be brutally hard.
PieFed is an open source lemmy alternative (written in Python) that makes good use of karma/reputation, as shown in this video:
Try the demo site at https://piefed.social and check out https://join.piefed.social. Also see https://piefed.social/c/piefed_meta for recent feature announcements.
Thank you very much for sharing, I’ll keep an eye on it.
I‘m not searching for another thing to start but a way to make the current thing work. But thanks.
You can check if text is ai/llm generated and an automated api check before posting and immediate ban if found
If this LLM-detection function ever results in false positives, this system will be banning innocent people.
Also there are many, many cases where a person openly displays results from an LLM, without it being in any way antisocial.
The odds of someone coming up with the same sentence as an llm within common sense bounds of time far exceed winning the lottery or getting struck by lightning.
Your second point is straight up nonsense. This platform is for humans to interact. The use of bots is inherently deceptive.
Fascinating to have someone argue for them. I think the backend logs will be pretty illuminating.
I don’t know what a person “coming up with the same sentence as an llm” would have anything to do with this unless the LLM detection is based on direct string comparison.
The use of bots is inherently deceptive
Nope. I can say:
Here’s what GPT-4 generated when I gave it that prompt: “[some LLM output that would get them banned by the machine we’re proposing to build]”
That is not deceptive. But it would be detected by this system and result in them being banned. Because you guys are gung-ho to build a powerful head-cracking machine and didn’t think of an obvious edge case.
So these trolls’ tactic is to disagree with you about semantics?
No, not really.
Okay here. Since you want to mark me as a troll now, I’m just gonna stop being polite about how I do this. Because the polite way Om trying to do this is coming across to you as inauthentic, and the inauthenticity is coming across as trolling, and now you’re talking about applying this proposed mega ban hammer to me.
I don’t believe that you’re capable of seeing this clearly, and I won’t believe it until I you have linked to at least ten comments, in other threads, that you think represent this particular type of toxicity you’re complaining about.
Whatever you think mate. Feel free to imagine anything you like.
If you have arguments, feel free to argue. If not, just go somewhere else.
Here’s the thread. The readers here can judge for themselves how much abuse haui_lemmy was receiving: https://lemmy.world/comment/7230392
Do you have evidence of this? Same users showing up at the same times, that sort of thing?
Politics is banned from c/memes@lemmy.world
And speaking as a mod, report things. The vast majority of things I’ve dealt with as a mod were ones I saw myself or things friends sent on discord. People need to utilize the report function more often if they want moderation on things. We’re not psychic.
As for being more stringent on the not being a dick rule, no. There’s a base level of civility we expect but if we start getting super stringent on what constitutes being a dick, that’s imposing moderator will on community and its what most of us left reddit to get away from.
Lastly, it’s the Internet. Assholes exist everywhere. You are not going to escape it, ever, if you’re using public servers. It’s pretty much required to accept that fact just to use the Internet. Moderators do not exist to prune and preen social media to make it more comfortable for people. We remind people to follow the rules and act upon those who do not. If you’re not breaking the rules then we’re not going to “interact” because we have our own lives and our own posts we are interested in.
imposing moderator will on community
Rich, coming from the mod that banned me because I called him out on a shitty joke.
Stamets is the worst kind of power user. Spams garbage everywhere, argues with everyone. Fragile as glass.
Ok honestly thank you for that. I kind of gathered that from his pretty much only shitposting and attitude in his comments. Idk why but being banned because of him really bugged me.
Yeah you’re not crazy. He is provocative and cries transphobia when called out for it. Then deletes the comments that make him look bad.
I don’t remember you but the modlog says you were banned for homophobic comments. So I’m gonna go ahead and say that nah, you weren’t banned for calling someone out on a joke 👍
You posted a misogynistic meme, I said “i thought we left that in 2023,” and apparently you didn’t like that so you called me a bigot and banned me. None of what I said was homophobic or bigoted. I just didn’t like your meme because it seemed like the millionth time one of us has made an “ew women” joke and it’s tired and shitty to women. So you said I’m homophobic and banned me then told me to fuck off basically.👎 Which cut me off from participating in the largest LGBTQ+ safe space on Lemmy. So yeah.
…riiiiiight. Or, and this is way more likely, you were banned for saying homophobic shit. Which is why it says banned for homophobic content. I’m going to go with the modlog reason 👍 I’ve yet to see someone on Lemmy who had something like “homophobic comments” added to their modlog ban be for no reason whatsoever.
You were cut out of that safe space because you inherently made it less safe. Of course you’re not allowed in if you’re going to go ahead and make it worse for everyone else. What insane arrogance.
I’m going to go ahead and go back to forgetting you exist now.
Edit: oh wait no I do remember you. You kept insisting the meme was misogynistic and then started making generalizations. The meme in question? A dude gagging with the text “When the gay porn shows an ad of a woman masturbating”. Yeah. Not even remotely misogynistic, which other people pointed out to you and why you were downvoted. You then doubled down and made homophobic generalizations. That’s why you were banned. Because you were actively stirring shit and making a safe place inherently less safe by slinging generalizations at the entire community.
Wouldn’t have remembered if you didn’t double down on that misogyny accusation.
I mean, I have screenshots, but k. Funny how I’m now at least the 3rd person to take issue with you and your temper tantrum mod style.
And please, show me the comments where I made “homophobic generalizations” and "doubled down. I made literally ONE comment. Was it snarky? Yes, but it was in no way what you’re characterizing it as. It’s also funny how none of that appears in the modlog.
I’m going to go with the modlog reason
That you chose to purposely mischaracterize what I said.
And finally, feel free to check my history, I think you’ll find it pretty damn spotless, which is a hell of a lot more than I can say for you.
Hello again Mr. Stamets! ❤️
<3
that’s imposing moderator will on community and its what most of us left reddit to get away from.
Now I’m curious how common this is, because it’s not at all why I left. I left to get away from Reddit the company. If anything I think Reddit subs tend to be moderated too leniently (which is good for Reddit, because hate is engagement)
That’s fair. It depends on the communities. Places like Tumblr and Pics had effectively no moderation which left the entire place just a shithole. But then you had places like WorldNews and StarTrek where the mods became specifically known for stirring shit and causing a boatload of problems. Hell, one particular moderator of StarTrek is the reason that so many other communities splintered off.
For me it was a lot of heavy handed moderation. The lack of moderation was frustrating too, don’t get me wrong, but I guess the communities I was most active in were ones where people were constantly pointing out how the moderators were terrible people.
Thanks for elaborating. I didnt know the report button is not used often. Good advice. Will do just that.
As for moderation:
I‘m a mod myself (both here and on reddit) and I don‘t necessarily agree that its imposing to ask people for civility if a discussion gets heated and kneejerk reactions start popping up. But I‘m thankful for every mod that does the good work and even more so for you openly commenting about it. You’re doing important work.
Then there is „the internet“ which I think is like the world. If we were in a postapocalyptic hellscape, we‘d have no rules, no communities. Only fight to survive. But we aren’t and we do have communities and rules. Therefore, I‘d say we‘re still responsible for the stuff that happens in our tavern (for lack of a better analogy). Are we to keep the guy in the corner from saying things we dont like? No we shouldn’t, but we definitely should keep him from starting a bar fight.
This is just my opinion. Feel free to debate me on it. :)
I’d love to debate you on it, but you’re not giving me much to work with.
Generally, a mod willing to debate me is a mod I want around
Trying my hardest not to make others regret opening the app. Both for my answer and stuff that I could have moderated.
Election year in the US and EU while Russia is invading a neighbor and China possibly preparing to do the same. There couldn‘t have been a worse time for LLMs to be so accessible, capable and fairly unregulated. The perfect conditions to make this year the worst for internet content we‘ve ever seen. By a landslide. We will look at the last 10 years and feel nostalgic on how good these years were with their little bot armies, cute clickbait and adorable fake news.
Election year in the US and EU while Russia is invading a neighbor and China possibly preparing to do the same.
Interesting you don’t mention Israel doing a fucking GENOCIDE and the USA supporting it.
This is the kind of commitment the post is taking about.
They event, while deplorable, doesn’t really generate new bot flow. The same conservative and Russian style bots are already up and running.
You don’t think the US and Israel have an online presence pushing propaganda? I’ve noticed some odd voting patterns on some posts relating to the genocide and recent bombings.
I never said that. Of course they do. But they’ve always been here.
Israel ramping up their genocide so significantly and a new US military campaign in the Middle East seems like a great reason to increase propaganda activity. I have a feeling it will only continue to get worse as the conflict spreads.
A fair consideration.
Give it a rest.
No, the US is not supporting genocide.
When the Jewish people took the motto NEVER AGAIN what, exactly, did you think that meant? Did you think it would mean “oh please, Sir, don’t hurt us please?”
Hamas, seeking the elimination of the Jews of Israel decided to find out, and used their own population as shields.
You reap what you sow.
Hamas seeks no such thing and your blind acceptance of what is inherently a racist perspective based on Islamophobia is extremely telling.
Yeah, it’d be real fucked up if Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis, all allied and interconnected Iran-backed terrorist groups, had direct calls for jihad and genocide in their charters and mottos, or founder and leader quotes saying they are glad Israel exists because it saves them the trouble of hunting the Jewish diaspora
OH WAIT
THEY DO
If you want to talk about violence, any level of violence, as a legitimate response to colonialism, especially when it enters the ethnic cleansing stage, fair enough, but don’t pretend they’re not genocidal fuckwits themselves with plenty of proof for their intentions.
If you want to know why Lemmy is full of pissed off people fighting in the comments it’s because half the people who comment on Lemmy have the fact checking ability of a mentally incapable squirrel and they’ll repeat any damn thing they hear.
- Hamas affirms that its conflict is with the Zionist project not with the Jews because of their religion. Hamas does not wage a struggle against the Jews because they are Jewish but wages a struggle against the Zionists who occupy Palestine. Yet, it is the Zionists who constantly identify Judaism and the Jews with their own colonial project and illegal entity.
The leadership explicitly refuses to repudiate the old charter that called for genocide, and has directly said they can’t do that politically, or even call it a replacement.
It shouldn’t be too hard to figure out why, you sure as hell wouldn’t be pretending you don’t understand why MAGA leaders won’t criticize the Confederacy or the KKK.
Why are they atacking Jordan then?
A lot of it depends on the instance. I think there’s a little bit of a smartest bears type of problem going on, with a lot of the bad-faith content coming from just ignorant and abrasive people being sincerely ignorant and abrasive, not anything that’s a bot or a deliberate troll.
Personally, I’ve done some rounds of unsubscribing from tech and politics subs on lemmy.ml and lemmy.world, and when I’ve done that my amount of toxic content and interactions went way down. I think the prevalence of the exact same thing on the tech subs points to it probably being just a bad-person problem in large proportion, although I’m sure deliberate malfeasance is at the root of some of it also.
I agree that some people just are original jerks. But those still cant roam free in a community. Its like making a bar and knowing that people are getting mugged in the restroom. The bar owner or personnel (even if its a coop) need to intervene.
Well… that’s why I used the smartest bears analogy. I’ve noticed the mods are usually pretty on top of removing content that’s genuinely personally insulting or racist or what have you. But there’s a wide, wide grey area of someone whose post is discussing “the issue” in a technical sense, but just comes at it from a perspective of “here’s why I am right and you are wrong and not only that you’re clearly not smart enough to see my side and I can’t believe I need to explain it to someone again” with 0 interest in learning anything on their side. IDK if it’s reasonable to try to remove comments or ban people for that behavior, but it definitely doesn’t lend itself to a good discussion, and it’s common (probably majority) particularly on lemmy.world and lemmy.ml.
Thats pretty much how I view it as well.
Being a jerk can have many faces and there are a lot of people right on the edge of getting in trouble but not quite. Those are also the worst people to work with IRL. They fall up the ladder and are usually pretty incompetent.
If they are repeat offenders, I confront them in the places I mod since I dont want them hollowing out the community by this constant low key abrasion.
Others who just have a hot temper I leave mostly alone until they really go overboard.
Thats how I do it and thats what I think is best. Obviously not everyones opinion though.
I have a dream of creating a community where people can argue about factual questions and give citations, with an AI moderator that will award points for things that are demonstrated based on solidly factual citations and no points for things that are someone yelling with increasing firm confidence that their opinion is the right one. My dream is (a) the AI moderator could be made to work and (b) it would cause people to lose the “me and my agreeing-people are right about everything by definition” mentality that’s pretty easy to develop in a forum where you can literally say anything at all without getting any feedback aside from other people telling you they agree or disagree.
Probably my dream on counts (a) and (b) both is incorrect, but it is my dream. In my dream it works.
I’ve certainly encountered a few of them myself. I keep reporting them.
Good idea. Thanks for commenting. Have a good one. :)
Yes, lemmy.world is a mess right now
Yeah we should have ignore and reporting lists that is on an invite only basis, which then can be shared by users of said list. If you didnt get invited then you should be able to copy a users reported/ignored list to make the whole fediverse more palatable. Each bunch of list users can then cross reference each potential bad actors. Then each month each admin could implement a ban of thoses accounts and perhaps try to filter new incomers.
As the fediverse becomes more and more of a feasible alternative to corporate social media, it will be inevitable that trolls and spammers will use our platform for malicious things. All we can do is to get better at moderation, maybe somehow bust these farms.
Absolutely. Working on something to maybe detect bots and/or LLMs. Lets see.
Just so everyone is aware, this is the thread OP interpreted as so abusive it would warrant banning this person across multiple instances.
In this thread, you’ll notice that another user dares to disagree with haui_lemmy. haui_lemmy interprets that as trolling, and goes on a crusade to purge the entire lemmyverse of dissent.
Nice, so now you‘re trying to discredit me somehow for disliking your way of commenting? You need help, seriously.
You’re doing a fine job of discrediting yourself. All I have to do is show people what you said.
And no, I have no problem with you disliking my method of commenting. If that’s where you stopped it would be no problem. But your response to people saying things you don’t like is to start a crusade to eject those people from your world.
That is why you are worth the effort of opposing.
Being a jerk is extremely subjective - someone could brand you much worse than that just from a polite disagreement from your side, that they don’t want to deal with. Aside from anything else, this is a highly “techie-y” space with a ton of strongly held opinions and ideals, and misunderstandings when communicating/discussing them happen. A lot. It will keep happening. People will look like asses without necessarily doing so intentionally.
Now, outright trolling, spamming, shitting on discussions with obvious bad faith participation, consistently derailing unrelated threads with one’s hobby horse, obvious flamebaiting and so on… great. Reporting and removing more of that should be a priority everywhere.
Banning politics from any non-political community that can be persuaded to do so also sounds like a great idea on general principle. Politics is poison (particularly what passes for it in the US), and it would be polite to not shove it down the entire fediverse’s throat. Every geographical sub is politics, every news sub is politics, there are dedicated politics and politicalmemes communities, and still it’s fucking everywhere else also. Asklemmy and NoStupidQuestions are full of thinly veiled soapboxing (which leads to a lot of awfully stupid questions). People who want to JAQ off to politics can easily make their own community for that (that way, the rest of us can block it, as intended), or else keeping it in their pants would’ve been kinda polite, idk. Seems odd to insist on posting political stuff everywhere.
Totally true. I made a totally reasonable comment about a month ago (stated that women shouldn’t be hit on at the gym by randos), and I got downvoted to oblivion and the comment was spammed by 7 different users who essentially acted like I was Hitler. Then they started spamming my comment history and I had to delete all of my old posts.
Seemed like a real person was behind it, but may have been using bots to spam me.
That sounds insane. No idea if this was just one person but it is totally possible. I havent thought of this yet. This has happened to me on multiple occasions. Where a handful of folks immediately jumped me and a lot more reasonable peeps later chimed in confusing me even more since I though my idea was outlandish at that point.
Yeah, I think there’s a handful of toxic folks on here who are behind the bots or a series or alt accounts. I think Reddit probably had more infrastructure in place to crack down on stuff like that, but it’s happened to me (although less dramatically) in other threads here as well. But yeah, there’s no way my relatively normal comment got immediately downvote spammed and commented on by 6 different accounts. Definitely alts.
Jeez. I cant imagine how shocking that must be. I‘m shocked regularly by much lesser problems. The thing is I often cant see the underlying motives. If I do, its more a pattern that I recognize than a more obvious thing like sarcasm or bad faith arguments. They take a long time for me to show up.
Another place I frequent got rid of the downvote so if people actually disagree with you they have to use words to make their point. Kinda funny how that solves a lot of issues.
I did exactly that but I wasnt allowed to federate with the others until I enabled it again…
I was about to left Lemmy/Kbin for good when some stupid fascists from Lemmy(grad).ml called me names and harassed me, despite the fact that I’m neurodivergent (like that would stop them from doing such actions, but anyway). And then I started blocking every community and user from those places, as well as any community/magazine about US politics or about any US topic because I don’t give a damn heck about that place. And my experience improved really well.
While I sympathize with a fellow ND, I dont think calling lemmy.ml fascist is a great idea. They might be tankies from what I hear but thats the other extreme.
Still, thanks for sharing your opinion.
Well said. Lemmygrad.ml and lemmy.ml are malicious misinformation factories supporting authoritarian governments, namely the Kremlin and CCP.
They’re worse than garbage and I’ll never recommend the fediverse to anyone, or even admit to using it, while they’re so prominent.
I’ve been noticing the same sort of behaviour that you’re talking about. And while I don’t know the cause, I don’t think that it’s caused by trolls or bots. Instead I’m guessing a few potential factors:
- Demographic concentration in general purpose, lax moderation instances, tailored to attract your typical Reddit user instead of more reasonable people.
- Lemmy+Kbin users being proportionally more combative, entitled, petty, and/or whiny, due to how people reached this platform.
- “Powerjanny” mentality being inherited from Reddit, specially given the likely higher proportion of former Reddit moderators here.
- General lack of mod tools, forcing moderators to take sub-optimal decisions on how to handle users and content.
- Normalisation of witch hunting, making people walk on eggs to avoid being confused with witches, and assuming that the ones not walking on eggs fly on a broom.
- Normalisation of stupidity, and subsequent normalisation of oversimplifications, assumptions, genetic fallacies, phobia against uncertainty, decontextualisation, etc.; with those things either making the stupid act in a hostile way, or others act in a hostile way towards the stupid.
- Natural reinforcement of behaviour in social groups.
This is already a rather large wall of text and I’m trying to be succinct, but feel free to ask further reasoning on any of those points.
Disclaimers to avoid replies to this comment that would exemplify it
I’m aware that I’m not exactly “gentle” towards users showing stupidity, thus being part of the problem, and in no moment I even implied to be “above” it.
By “stupid” I’m clearly referring to able people who behave in an irrational way. I am not talking about disabled people. In fact “the stupid” is better seen as a set of user behaviours than as a specific group of people.
Yeah I’ve encountered a few accounts lately who either have mental health issues or are bots designs to stir discord. Their entire posting history is divisive shit stirring.
Funny how every 4 years the internet gets markedly nastier. I wonder why???
