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: @glimse@lemmy.world
Everything else you posted has been pretty cringe but what he fuck is up with this one, dude lol
comment from: @rain_worl@lemmy.world
free software is SLOWING DOWN tech advancement??????? WHAT???????
comment from: @rain_worl@lemmy.world
comment from: @the_toast_is_gone@lemmy.world
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: @glimse@lemmy.world @rain_worl@lemmy.world @the_toast_is_gone@lemmy.world
People who's comments I mentioned, I CCed them so they know I did this on their behalf
Agreed. That's exactly what is killing Reddit. They ban/permaban so many people just for disagreeing with them.
Can you imagine ml or hexbear adopting this rule though? I think it depends on the type of community. If it's a "safe space" type community then I think it's fine to keep out the dissenters. Eg I often remove right wing comments in lefty memes because it's supposed to be a space for memes, not people shouting at each other. Likewise, if someone starts ranting about the evils of piracy in c/piracy then they are getting a community ban. But a US politics community has to be tolerant of alternate viewpoints, because of the nature of the community. That's why it took a while to ban linkerbaan. He wasn't banned for his politics though, more because of the way he treated other users in such a hostile way all the time, even people who mostly agreed with him.
Wouldn't it be great? But yes, it's antithetical to those instances, which are fully intended as propaganda.
My hope is that the best ideas can handle a little dissent, while the ideas that fully rely on memes and echo chambers get deflated.
I've seen what happens when moderation enforces an echo chamber. It's so much easier to believe a narrative when it's the only one we hear. It's the entire premise of reading fiction. We're primed to believe the story goes as the author says, whether it's fiction or non-fiction. Timed correctly, it doesn't take a huge opposing narrative to trigger us to think about it more.
Yeah, I didn't know who he was until recently. I was falsely accused of being an alt of him a few times. They would just reply with "linkerbaan." But I thought it was some Swedish word for "ban" and they were saying I should be banned. lmao
After looking him up today, I see that he would go way overboard on the attacks. So I don't even see how anyone would compare him to me.
Even seeing that, I don't think he should have got banned from whole instance, seems to me community bans would be enough, but I'm sure he'll just alt up and come back on anyway. He seems, um, determined. lol