Public moderation logs was a fantastic idea.
this post was submitted on 02 Nov 2024
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Ye Power Trippin' Bastards
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2 users here now
This is a community in the spirit of "Am I The Asshole" where people can post their own bans from lemmy or reddit or whatever and get some feedback from others whether the ban was justified or not.
Sometimes one just wants to be able to challenge the arguments some mod made and this could be the place for that.
Rules
- Post only about bans or other sanctions from mod(s).
- Provide the cause of the sanction (e.g. the text of the comment).
- Provide the reason given by the mods for the sanction.
- Don't use private communications to prove your point. We can't verify them and they can be faked easily.
- Don't deobfuscate mod names from the modlog with admin powers.
- Don't harass mods or brigade comms. Don't word your posts in a way that would trigger such harassment and brigades.
- Do not downvote posts if you think they deserved it. Use the comment votes (see below) for that.
- You can post about power trippin' in any social media, not just lemmy. Feel free to post about reddit or a forum etc.
Expect to receive feedback about your posts, they might even be negative.
Make sure you follow this instance's code of conduct. In other words we won't allow bellyaching about being sanctioned for hate speech or bigotry.
Some acronyms you might see.
- PTB - Power-Tripping Bastard: The commenter agrees with you this was a PTB mod.
- YDI - You Deserved It: The commenter thinks you deserved that mod action.
- BPR - Bait-Provoked Reaction: That mod probably overreacted in charged situation, or due to being baited.
- CLM - Clueless mod: The mod probably just doesn't understand how their software works.
Relevant comms
founded 3 months ago
MODERATORS
They keep delivering
Yeah i just wish it showed which mod did what action tho
It used to, I believe the option to anonymize the acting moderator was added in at some point
Yeah its a setting in admin panel. Defaults to anonymouse unfortunatly tho
They did it that way on purpose hoping more people would use it accidentally rather than it being a desired thing to use.
Yeah i dont like it goes against the open philosophy of lemmy imo
Same way with private votes, oh and they also want to force servers to manually review all user sign-ups (devs have literally said that to me) even for servers which can handle automatic creation and have spam protection bots in place.
A lot of things they do are surprisingly against the open nature of Lemmy and the fediverse as a whole.
Votes fundamentally cant be private due to the way Activpub works otherwise anyone with an instance can spoof an arbitrary amount pf votes (u can do this with extra accounts but its a whole proccess).
I think its cos the devs have very strong political opinions and are only now realising they are losing control of the narrative due to said open nature. The open nature of federation (and the free speach it enables) is our best strength that has the capability to reshape the digital narrative towards a free (as in freedom) and inclusive future.
Federarion is everythibg web3.0 promised to be but with blackjack and hookers.
Seems reasonable to avoid mod harassment
Then there needs to be modmail. There had to be a way to reach "a representative"
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I dunno, I'm from the really old days of forums where you either had an alt account to moderate with, or where the penalties for harassing a mod over a moderation action was a kos
I kinda feel like it should be the norm for it to be public, but there's a line to be drawn somewhere to disallow endless arguments about it
kos
What's a kos? Kick off server?
Kill on sight; like an IP ban, but if you made an alt account to get around it, that account would get banned too
I've moderated a number of communities on a number of platforms over the years and I've never seen it be a problem. I don't think it's worth losing accountability.
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Non Credible Defence?
I've seen some cool posts on there but parodying the death of millions and destruction of prosperity certainly would attract people of that nature.
I kept an eye on it because it’s cool to know what the buzz is with the more mainstream memes about wars and whatever. Weapons systems I haven’t heard of, military secrets being leaked on gaming forums, I wouldn’t post or comment there but monitoring it isn’t stupid if I’m browsing All. A little crass about people dying but I thought it’s all an in-joke.
When things started escalating here in Lebanon I was absolutely baffled how the average poster there had zero nuance or interest in questioning whatever they considered to be the status quo. I saw people arguing and getting banned in the comments over “supporting terrorism” while I was out dealing with the very civilian damage we are experiencing. You can check my post history for more on that, my comments detailing the situation feel like screams into the void and I’m less and less motivated to write about my experience.
I never posted or commented anything in NCD because how could I possibly say “Whether you consider this person a terrorist leader or not, their tactics were more pragmatic than potential successors and this will likely lead to prolonged conflict” on a page like that. A message that ostensibly should be very clear on a conflict discussion board.
I think it’s mostly Europeans and Americans fetishizing their fancy weapons, never having been on the receiving end of them. But I have, and therefore my opinion doesn’t matter, because I must be a terrorist.
The 'no politics' rule works against NCD insofar as it ignores that all defence policy is politics, and thus it leads to the mods enforcing a pro-status-quo viewpoint, intentionally or unintentionally.
Also, the mod team here on Lemmy seems to be of... lower quality. Not that I doubt that Reddit NCD has had a rightward and pro-Israel lurch since the exodus.
Yeah. Generally, things that seem too 'serious' are removed, but it seems that internet drama is just noncredible enough to get mod approval and mod participation.
Good lord what a shit show.
It's funny because he was wrong about the community being banned from the instance but he ended up getting it banned anyway by lashing out at the owner. Their comments towards people who criticize them are disgusting and rude, yeah PTB for sure hopefully that gets dealt with soon.
Honestly sh.itjust.works should really look into this community, mod abuse is not good for communities or platforms. Especially over crap like this, but until and unless they do I support Ada in her decision to ban the community from her instance, it sucks for the people on it but considering the mods are power-tripping it's for the best.
PTB
What does this mean?
Their comments are certainly rude, but I didn't see anything that I'd characterize as disgusting.
U/nuke erroneously believed that Ada was deliberately removing many of the posts from NCD, but it was actually because u/CDRMITTENS had been banned from blahaj.zone months ago and was one of their most prolific posters. Despite this misunderstanding, the fact remains that blahaj.zone can and does selectively remove content from NCD on the basis that it constitutes political extremism.
Nuke was overly rude and aggressive in their behavior, but this isn't really a case of mod abuse. They informed their subscribers that some community content is being removed by admins from a particular server, which is true and serves the community. Then they removed a bunch of comments for brigading and criticizing them, which was maybe a bit over the top.
This is not an ideal situation and better communication could have prevented it, but it's ultimately a minor issue. A more senior NCD mod has since restored many of the comments and reverted bans. Also, they have refederated with blahaj.zone already. Thank you to u/Shit for helping to resolve this issue.
PTB is a community term, they've got initialisms similar to Am I the Asshole on Reddit (and I'm the asshole for referencing that awful place), it means Power Tripping Bastard.
I'm extremely tempted to go to the Agora and propose de-anonymising the moderators names in the mod log but I really don't have time in the next few days to deal with the possible drama of that, lol.
I agree the mod log for communities should be public or at least have the option to make it that way. More transparency is always good.
You need to put [Discussion] at the beginning of the post title.
Are moderators able to see the public modlog for their own community? Or is the modlog totally anonymous for everyone besides admins?
I'm not sure what the case is, I expected that moderators would be able to view the identity of mod actions in their own communities.
Moderators of the community can see what mod did what action. I don't think users can. It should at least show the user that was "moderated" what mod did the action so they know who to complain to first.
Yeah I guess. I just feel like a user complaining directly to the mod who removed their post is unlikely to have a productive outcome. It's not likely that the moderator is suddenly going to change their mind and restore it, nor is it likely that the user is going to suddenly decide that the removal was justified. You're probably gonna need a third party to arbitrate anyway.
But I also don't totally disagree, it's definitely worthy of discussion.
I was thinking more along the line of user bans. Usually from what I gather they end up mailing all the mods to figure out why they are banned. It creates extra work that could probably be avoided.
Unbanning users from a community is a whole process in itself as well since you have to find a post they made.
That's definitely fair. Thanks for starting the Agora thread
Thanks.
Yeah, I'd have to oppose you on that suggestion. Vigilante justice is rarely effective. It's perfectly functional as is, where users can identify anonymous mod actions that they disagree with, and then raise the issue with other moderators/admins, who can deal with the issue.
Even if users could publicly see the mod names, the proper response is still to contact the admin if you believe the mod is abusing their power. Which you can already do right now. So the only change would be that users would start DMing mods abusively and making meta posts about mod decisions that would ultimately be far more dramatic and far less effective than simply reporting the behavior to the relevant authority (admin or senior mod) and letting them deal with it internally.
I think that it would make sense to deanonymize them and allow users to look them up in the modlog, this is because the data on who did what is still shared with other servers, so even if we don't choose to do it, they still have and it doesn't really make sense to hide who did it on our frontend when it can still be seen plain and publicly. It is beneficial though for users to be able to look up the mod actions of a specific moderator from the frontend. They can then confirm the suspicions that a specific mod is abusing their power. That's not vigilante justice, it's just making people more aware of the facts, and possibly being aware to avoid communities modded by those specific people.
These are some good points, I can't really disagree with them. Transparency and equal access to information is usually a worthwhile goal.
It's possible that I may be coming from a biased perspective as an admin who can already view modlog and sees this causing plenty of drama down the road, as opposed to purely looking at the pros/cons for an average user. I'm interested to see how the Agora discussion goes.
Yeah, I just commented in the discussion on my other account.
It means Power tripping Bastard, means that the mod is power-tripping abd abusing their power as a mod to silence dissent or criticism, in this case their approval of racist memes conflating Palestinians and Hamas as the same thing.
Post Edit: I thought I was replying to a different thread so I wrote a hasty incorrect correction which was wrong because I thought my brain farted while I was writing my original comment.
Ultimately, I too support Ada's decisions in this.
Her users come first for her, which is something I can only fully respect.
Here I was hoping for some ambiguous drama, and instead no, it's just a mod starting an internet fight because he thinks he should have jurisdiction or something. Really disappointing, not juicy at all, smh
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I respect and support Ada's decision to ban that person from the instance over a meme that conflates Palestinians with Hamas, and I respect and support her decision to ban that community from the instance over the mod's apologia of that type of content. It might seem like a downside for people who are on that instance but in all honesty most of the users and communities they ban there are better off not interacting with. Keep in mind that blahaj.zone is meant to be a safe-space instance for LGBTQ and marginalized groups, maybe not to the extreme and isolationist degree beehaw is but they still aspire to be a safe-space, and that means content from bad actors and malicious people will and should be banned and filtered out.
Honestly, I was against the ban of the whole community until Nuke doubled down and the other mods rallied around him. Now I'm much more sympathetic towards Ada's position.
And here I was of the general impression the user in question was just a bot that reposts the subreddit.
Pffffffft. PTB. (The mod, not Ada; Ada is being sensible as usual.)