Ahoy me hearties!
To run alongside the discussion on the simplified Golden Rules for the instance, I decided to post a separate proposal for a single rule addition.
The proposed rule is: Off topic comments and downvote trolling to protest the use of genAI images is not permitted in our communities.
It would only apply to communities where GenAI art is not disallowed by the community rules, so mods can opt in or out.
Since the rule will likely attract some pushback from the anti-GenAI crowd, I wanted to run this proposal as a member vote to confirm we have broad support.
Exhibit 1 - dbzer0 Main Sidebar for context
Be Weird, Download a Car, Generate Art, Screw Copyrights
Communities about Anarchism, Generative AI, Copylefts, Neurodivergence, Filesharing, and Free Software.
Our instance has been associated with genAI art since its inception, because the founding admin, db0, has also spent years developing and maintaining FOSS Projects like AI Horde (a crowdsourced distributed cluster of image generation workers and text generation workers) and Haidra.
We have a number of popular genAI communities on our instance including:
Exhibit 2 - The Problem
This is the recent experience of one of our community mods:
"From the moment I started the [redacted] community here people have been brigading it trying to suppress it, and had I not had the sense to ban the droves of anti-AI trolls who come to downvote it into oblivion. They probably would be continuing to do so in insanely large volume. A lot of the users who come to downvote do so with empty no content accounts, but a lot are also trolls from the !fuck_AI@lemmy.world community. I’ve also received a fair amount of harassment including threats and bad faith accusations from it like people saying I’m a pedophile or saying I’m pretending to be nonbinary over the fact that I like and use genAI. Really awful behavior that has no place on this instance of this community."
This sort of thing is hateful and should not have to be tolerated by our users. Let's call it what it is: bullying and harassment.
Exhibit 3 - Escalating Problems
If you take look at this post from today in the lighthearted Lefty Memes community, it's a total shit show of offtopic comments. I'm not going to re-litigate the whole experience here since there is a YPTB post about it here.
This sort of brigading is completely unwarranted and I regard it as hostile bullying behaviour towards our community members and moderators. It completely derails the comments and goes way off topic for the community. Even after repeatedly asking these users to open a meta post about the issues they clearly wanted to talk about, instead of brigading the comments, I was mostly ignored and eventually pretty much gave up on trying to moderate the post.
Conclusion
In summary, as an admin on this instance I've noticed a significant uptick in the amount and volume of trolling in our communities by this group of users. I'd like to make sure we have this rule in place so that we can continue to effectively moderate the instance for the enjoyment of our community members, and to protect our moderators and admins from abuse.
Thank you for your consideration. If you have any suggestions to improve the rule, or thoughts on the topic you wish to share, then please do so in the comments.
Edit: for detailed voting information see this post. But in summary, please upvote if you support the rule addition or downvote if you are opposed.
I think this needs some clarification about what does and does not warrant mod actions.
Comments are free-form, so are easy to determine as off topic and unlikely to hit bystanders, but downvotes don't communicate intent.
Anecdotally I have come across a post in a sub I like, found it glaringly annoying/ugly/wrong etc. downvoted, then seen another one and actually gone into the sub to see if it is a wider trend and specifically downvoted a bunch of these.
Lemmy is a rating system, I think this behavior is acceptable.
I would draw the line at coming back repeatedly to keep "filtering" in this way, while not otherwise being active in the community and while not being subscribed to it. (Not that being subscribed is even visible)
Is it possible to tell apart a lurker superhumanly good at finding genai really ugly, from the 15 downvote bots of an anti-genai brigadier?
If someone is systematically downvoting every post in a community, then that is not organic voting imo, it's an attempt to suppress the community. And it is usually pretty apparent. That's what the block community feature is for. I think it's legit for the mods to community ban those folks. I know some folks argue "votes don't matter" but it can be upsetting to have trolls shit all over your community every day. There's nothing to be gained from allowing it. We also have an appeals channel if anyone feels the rule was unfairly applied, to help make sure it's not abused.
Downvoting all posts is problematic, yes. It does not accomplish anything but downrank the entire sub. But that isn't the matter at hand as I see it.
What if you downvote all ai posts and don't touch other posts or upvote them?
In an attempt to discourage ai pots and encourage other posts on that sublemmy for example.
Some of the examples given are about generic subs like !leftymemes@lemmy.dbzer0.com, where you see both ai and non-ai posts.
Someone downvoting every single post in an ai-specific sub is not the edge case I am worried about.
I think I understand what your saying. To clarify are you saying that in lefty memes, for example, if someone went through a bunch of posts and just downvoted the genAI ones would they get a community ban? Probably not, and I doubt I'd even notice or care unless the comments were getting dogpiled again, or there was some obvious use of dodgy downvote accounts that needed to be addressed. The rule is intended more for the GenAI specific communities, like the Stable Diffusion ones, which are all GenAI, where the community wants to be able to enjoy their interests in relative peace and safety.
Ok yeah, that does address my main concern.
If this could somehow be communicated in the rule that would be great.
Yeah when we talk about downvote trolling it's always about systematically downloading all or most content from that Community or user. It's an attempt to suppress that Community or user instead of choosing to block or ignore them.
It's a form of vote brigating, you might even go far enough to say vote manipulation.
I think that if that lurker has chosen to downvote every single post systematically in that community that's already an act of aggression against the community. Whether they know it or not these types of voting patterns are used to suppress communities and content. It's literally the reason why Blahaj opted to just exclude Downvotes as a whole.
I don't think that we need to go that far but we definitely need to address the problem and action people who do it. Especially since as I've said it can be very demotivating to have this happening to your own fresh new community that you're trying to start. And that's on purpose, that's why down vote trolls and brigaders do what they do. That's just not acceptable.
My question was more about mixed subs, with ai and non-ai posts. Where the hypothetical lurker is downvoting selectively only ai-generated posts.
How can you tell appart someone looking at every posts and happening to dislike all the ai ones, from someone specifically seeking out the ai posts and downvoting them regardless of post quality or preference as a matter of principle?