I tend to browse /All and by New on Lemmy. I went to respond on a thread on !vegan@lemmy.world to thank someone for a recipe that looked good, and found out I had been banned.
Odd, considering I hadn't posted to that sub at any point in the past. I checked the modlog to find that "Mod" had banned a bunch of people citing "Rule 5."
Their Rule 5 states: Bad-faith carnist rhetoric & anti-veganism are not allowed, as this is not a space to debate the merits of veganism. Anyone is welcome here, however, and so good-faith efforts to ask questions about veganism may be given their own weekly stickied post in the future (see current stickied discussion).
I (and hundreds of others) seemingly broke rule 5 of this community without ever posting there. What is going on?
And my apologies if this isn't the place for this, but I had no idea where else to post the question.
I've never posted in that sub either, but I was banned today, and the only possible explanation is that it was for downvoting. A lot of their posts are self-righteous and needlessly confrontational, so I've downvoted a lot of their memes when they wind up in my feed, but I've never commented on any of them.
This moderator isn't trying to remove hostile comments or stop rule violations; they're trying to artificially lower the number of downvotes their content gets to make the community look less unpopular. You can actually sort posts by recent and see how the percentage of downvotes suddenly dropped off after the ban spree. This is a blatant attempt to manufacture consent for their community by gaming the system.
That would violate lemmy.world's terms of service, specially 3. (system disruption) and 5.1 (community manipulation).
Perhaps you guys could/should elevate this issue to the lemmy.world admin team.
That was kind of what I was attempting to do here. Is there another way to do that?
I suggest you (or anyone else here, really) to direct message !lwreport@lemmy.world, the account is a relay to the admin team. Be sure to mention:
Done! I appreciate the pointers as I would have never known about this on my own.
Since I wrote this, things have changed a bit. The mod in question seems to have become extremely unpopular, even in her own community, and she's gone on posting spree on /c/vegan that's getting downvoted. I still think you can demonstrate that she was trying to manipulate the downvote numbers, but it the evidence is less clear.
I honestly thought the vegans had moved to a different instance since the drama. I thought the .world comm would be killed but looks like their sticking around and doing some sus modding of their own. I mean, one good turn and all that. 🤷♂️
There's a vegan community on vegantheoryclub, they spat the dummy and defederated from .world. Maybe that's what you're thinking of.
That + this is exactly why I just blocked them. They don’t want downvotes? Fine, I don’t want to see their posts. Win win.
I mean, the flipside could be just as true. I would be surprised, if there's not some right-wing twats, who felt attacked in their manliness by the concept of veganism, and then started gaming the system by deploying tons of downvote bots. If you regularly downvoted posts without commenting, you might've looked like such a bot.
It could be, but it's really not. This community posts shit insulting, "carnists," all the time, then suddenly claims they're getting attacked or brigaded when these posts get negative responses. I get not wanting to have to debate random assholes every time you share an article about veganism; I even get banning people for being hostile to your insulting memes; but banning people for downvoting a meme is messed up, which is why the other mods on /c/Vegan just removed Mod the responsible for this..
Welp, I guess that's that then...
More or less. A quick skim of the comments shows that there's going to be some internal fighting over this, but I don't really care. As long as it banning people for downvotes doesn't become normalized by Lemmy Mods, this doesn't affect me.
Indeed
Ok, I tend to think I'm a decent human being but I don't understand your logic and I can only see your comments as negative. Please help me understand the differences in our thought train.
You're actually acknowledging you've "downvoted a lot of their memes" because of previous un-related content, continuing to abuse the downvote and even pointed out the mod was effective at stopping the vote brigading from people outside the community. I have no clue about the Vegan situation myself, but I thought a mod had completely autonomy to run their community the way they want and the point of decentralization was the ability to move into another space when needed.
No I'm not. I could see how you could choose to misinterpret what I said like that, but I didn't say that, and I'll rephrase it so that there is no question as to what I'm saying; they share self-righteous, antagonistic memes, and when those memes wind up in my feed, I downvote them. There are also plenty of neutral posts (articles, etc.) from that community that I don't downvote, but when shit like this, and this, and this ends up in my feed, I downvote it.
I could block the instance, but I see absolutely no reason to silence myself and allow their shitty opinions to go unchallenged. Why should I hide from their content and allow their community to insult me freely? I'm using the downvote button, the most passive way to express displeasure online, to respond to someone who is insulting me for my lifestyle. Why the fuck is the appropriate answer supposedly, "well, you should instead just hide from the people insulting you." Why isn't the response to the community, "Yeah, if you insult a lot of people, you get a lot of downvotes, maybe stop posting such hostile shit."
I'm not a vegan, none of those memes you've posted make me feel personally attacked nor do I feel insulted. I'm glad for the clarification, but I was expecting something much worse like a vegan death cult manifesto by the reactions here.
You don't want to silence yourself from a community you're not a part of by your own admission? Do you really feel it's your duty to go into every community and mandate their content and tone to your liking?
I guess you can look at it as "hiding" to curate your feed by removing the communities you're not interested in. I don't think you're really challenging their opinions, just kinda being a douche. I see plenty of shit posted about windows or apple users, we're not pitch forking everyone that posts a spicy meme. We insult the rich and powerful etc, what class of protection are you proposing to secure? The omnivores? Who's going to police what's hostile or insulting? I don't understand what this call to action is trying to implement or suggest besides outside policing of communities which is one of the reasons the fediverse was made to combat that type of control.
What the ever-loving fuck are you talking about? No one's asking for anyone to police the Vegan community. They're free to post as many obnoxious memes as they like, it's just fucked up to block people for a downvote. Yeah, a lot of Linux communities post shit about Apple or Windows users, but if the mods start combing through the downvotes to ban anyone who disagrees with them, I'd like to think we'd recognize that as an abnormal behavior. What is so hard about this?
Edit: It looks like the other mods on /c/Vegan have chosen to remove the Mod responsible for this ban wave, so hopefully we're all on the same page that this is abnormal behavior, and not how mods are meant to operate.
I think I can explain it. I think it's abnormal behavior to downvote outside of misinformation or out of context. I also think it's abnormal to ban anyone who downvotes, but both of you have the right to do so. Neither of you broke a site-wide rule, unless you didn't follow the guidelines in their community sidebar before participating. Them choosing to remove the mod is the communities right and I support that. I look at the form of downvoting you're conducting as a form of vote brigading (socially, not directed by an individual but a group effort nonetheless with evidence by the bans). If bans for non-participation go out and downvotes continue, they can better get a grasp of what the actual community wants. Atm they're just following what the "All" feed tells them without being able to differentiate.
You're welcome to look on that however you like, but that's not what brigading is; actual brigading is a coordinated attack by a group of accounts to affect the vote count of a specific community or user. That's why it's called brigading; you're supposed to be part of a brigade.
It's great that you only downvote things taken out of context or misinformation, but it's not abnormal to use voting to express approval or disapproval for opinions. The vote counts on this thread show that most people are using voting this way.
thanks for ignoring my statement on the difference in brigading so you could brake off into a diatribe -_-. The Jan 6th wasn't a brigade, just ask Trump. Just need some social boogeymen to stir up trouble and it becomes a "natural" problem, not a brigade. "The vote counts on this thread show that most people are using voting this way.", in this space, about lemmy drama and a small echo chamber.
Look I'll be honest and let you know you just seem like a spoiled down-voter after all of our back and forth. You don't follow the communities rules, you don't belong to the community, you constantly downvote in a negative way, and the only people who have broken a rule, is this post with all the people talking about the ban on here (instead of privately reaching out like is spelled out).
You don't care about the community, only your ability to downvote on anything you want
By people who never participate or even belong in the community, who downvotes because of .... feelings. You're the perfect example of the Paradox of tolerance, by allowing your views you will only wish to silence and put down other's who you don't agree with.