lemmyusa 9/14 shenanigans: mass vote manipulation, or reasonable response to serial downvoters? i report, confusion ensues, you decide. maybe.
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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/35891683
I have changed the original title of this post, as it is imo, thanks largely to discussion in this thread, with a lemmyusa mod, unnecessarily incendiary.
Original Title:
"lemmyusa.com is engaging in vote manipulation, suggest defederating unless it is addressed"
Mod Abuse:
The instance has 3 active subs, it's unlikely the admins are not also the mods engaging in this.
Banning anyone who downvotes is a clear attempt to foster a chilling effect on dissenting opinions. The mods and admins of this instance are putting their thumb on the scales in order to make their ideas appear more positively received than they actually are.
Thanks for your attention to this.
I realize that doing a cross post here is... unorthodox, and this doesn't drectly involve my own interactions, and I am technically breaking a number of the rules of this comm...
... but I think this is worth the discussion and consideration of, and potential further investigation from this comm, which essentially functions as a de facto place for discussing things like this.
Further context / info I have been able to gather:
Here is a direct link to their own modlog.
Their dedicated legal page:
Their described 'sidebar rules' appear to only be:
We're keeping it simple:
Be thoughtful, act responsibly, and treat others with respect.
No NSFW content.
Everything else seems to be in the Legal / TOS / Privacy Policy section.
My preliminary, most charitable interpretation of mod/admin activity here... is that they can and will essentially ban anyone who posts on their instance and is not a lemmyusa user, as any other user would not have agreed to their TOS.
???
Further, this instance appears to be hosting an account that is impersonating SatansMaggotyCumFart, a fairly well known, mostly parody/dedicated 'bit' account here on lemmy...
The profile description of their version of SMCF claims to be 'the only real profile!', and is using a clearly AI generated avatar/profile pic... and uh, to me at least, it seems very unlikely this is the actual SMCF.
UPDATE:
Ok.
After some conversation in this thread, I should add:
There is, and there was at the time this all started, a rule in the comm that much of these downvote bans took place in, which reads:
'No Serial Downvoting.'
Personally, I find this rather vague.
How many dowmvotes, in what timeframe, across how many comms/comments/posts, etc?
I am also still uncertain to what extent these actually are dedicated, persistent, serial downvoters, vs just a whole lot of randos seeing something on their feed and then downvoting it and moving on.
I get the intent behind trying to stem a mass wave of negativity, nobody likes a wave of mass downvotes and hostile comments...
But on the other hand, there should probably be a bit more clarity and specificity here, less heavy handed actions for less comitted and persistent behavior.
IMO, a balance has to be struck between allowing people to genuienly freely express their opinion via downvoting, but at the same time, there are clearly also cases where people or groups of people basically just downvote all comments or posts from a specific user or in a certain comm or pertaining to a certain topic, etc.
I myself am fairly confident I have managed to attract at least one person who downvotes all my posts/comments on their instance, simply because I am on their shitlist, apparently.
So ideally... we could maybe have a constructive conversation about that.
As to the SatansMaggotyCumFart profile on lemmyusa being an impersonatory account:
We've got one mod from lemmyusa here saying he really isn't sure, and personally blocked him, I think from his own user standpoint, not from the standpoint of himself as a mod.
IMO, the account still strikes me as likely another person, impersonating the actual user... I of course cannot be certain, but the profile still strikes me as very sus.
Finally, I am least personally going to strongly discourage any one reading this from popping in to lemmyusa and going out of your way to downvote every single thing on there simply because it is on that instance.
They are already in more or less lockdown mode, call that a win if you must.
I did not intend nor do I want this very post to act as an attack vector.
If the users are actually serial downvoters, that's a perfectly fine reason to ban. Votes are supposed to sort the good content (for that community) from the bad, and if someone comes in and downvotes everything, that doesn't do that. They're not participating in good faith for the community's intentions. Voting isn't a Lemmywide opinion score that must be allowed to run unrestricted. It's ok for mods to say "this community is only for people who actually like its subject".
That's not to say there may not be plenty of good reasons to block the communities or defederate. They're likely going to stray into hate speech and/or host their own trolls. It's simply that banning people who are only there to disrupt it isn't itself some sort of high crime.
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If the users are actually serial downvoters, that's a perfectly fine reason to ban. Votes are supposed to sort the good content (for that community) from the bad, and if someone comes in and downvotes everything, that doesn't do that. They're not participating in good faith for the community's intentions. Voting isn't a Lemmywide opinion score that must be allowed to run unrestricted. It's ok for mods to say "this community is only for people who actually like its subject".
That's not to say there may not be plenty of good reasons to block the communities or defederate. They're likely going to stray into hate speech and/or host their own trolls. It's simply that banning people who are only there to disrupt it isn't itself some sort of high crime.
Voting isn't a Lemmywide opinion score
That is precisely what it is. I would say that browsing only a particular community's content and none other is not the most common way that people look at Lemmy.
It's ok for mods to say "this community is only for people who actually like its subject".
Dude what kind of content are people posting that is prompting any detectable number of people to run around downvoting all of it?
Personally my opinion is that if you're using multiple accounts to artificially inflate your number of up or downvotes, you're doing something wrong, but if you just don't like a bunch of content, it doesn't really matter whether "you are part of the community" or like its subject in terms of whether or not you should be allowed to enter downvotes. That's why they're there, for stuff that people don't like. You can always visit an instance which just doesn't allow downvotes, if you feel your stuff needs to be insulated from anyone being able to say that they don't like it.
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Voting isn't a Lemmywide opinion score
That is precisely what it is. I would say that browsing only a particular community's content and none other is not the most common way that people look at Lemmy.
It's ok for mods to say "this community is only for people who actually like its subject".
Dude what kind of content are people posting that is prompting any detectable number of people to run around downvoting all of it?
Personally my opinion is that if you're using multiple accounts to artificially inflate your number of up or downvotes, you're doing something wrong, but if you just don't like a bunch of content, it doesn't really matter whether "you are part of the community" or like its subject in terms of whether or not you should be allowed to enter downvotes. That's why they're there, for stuff that people don't like. You can always visit an instance which just doesn't allow downvotes, if you feel your stuff needs to be insulated from anyone being able to say that they don't like it.
Let's say someone starts a Malaysian community and they only post in Malay, this annoys people who don't speak Malay (most people), and some people just downvote every Malay post they see rather then block the community.
Is it helpful for the Malay community to get all these downvotes from non-Malay speaking lemmy users who are too lazy to hit the block button?
Or if you prefer a non-language scenario, let's say a community to discuss youtube videos of a specific creator is here, but most people don't care for the creator... same thing
lemmy is a commonwealth of small communities, we won't grow unless we allow niche communities a safe space to gain traction, that means drive-by-chilling is bad for lemmy over all.
That’s why they’re there, for stuff that people don’t like.
It's really in place to be a signal of what is bad for the community like a micro-report, not just personal opinion. It is often used as a personal opinion, but sorting by ratio, auto hiding, auto-mod removing based on votes indicates its real utility as good or bad for the community. The problem is that lemmy is not some monolithic community with the same values and interests for everyone, but if we treat it as such we will end up with just one which isn't great for lemmy at all.
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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/35891683
I have changed the original title of this post, as it is imo, thanks largely to discussion in this thread, with a lemmyusa mod, unnecessarily incendiary.
Original Title:
"lemmyusa.com is engaging in vote manipulation, suggest defederating unless it is addressed"
Mod Abuse:
The instance has 3 active subs, it's unlikely the admins are not also the mods engaging in this.
Banning anyone who downvotes is a clear attempt to foster a chilling effect on dissenting opinions. The mods and admins of this instance are putting their thumb on the scales in order to make their ideas appear more positively received than they actually are.
Thanks for your attention to this.
I realize that doing a cross post here is... unorthodox, and this doesn't drectly involve my own interactions, and I am technically breaking a number of the rules of this comm...
... but I think this is worth the discussion and consideration of, and potential further investigation from this comm, which essentially functions as a de facto place for discussing things like this.
Further context / info I have been able to gather:
Here is a direct link to their own modlog.
Their dedicated legal page:
Their described 'sidebar rules' appear to only be:
We're keeping it simple:
Be thoughtful, act responsibly, and treat others with respect.
No NSFW content.
Everything else seems to be in the Legal / TOS / Privacy Policy section.
My preliminary, most charitable interpretation of mod/admin activity here... is that they can and will essentially ban anyone who posts on their instance and is not a lemmyusa user, as any other user would not have agreed to their TOS.
???
Further, this instance appears to be hosting an account that is impersonating SatansMaggotyCumFart, a fairly well known, mostly parody/dedicated 'bit' account here on lemmy...
The profile description of their version of SMCF claims to be 'the only real profile!', and is using a clearly AI generated avatar/profile pic... and uh, to me at least, it seems very unlikely this is the actual SMCF.
UPDATE:
Ok.
After some conversation in this thread, I should add:
There is, and there was at the time this all started, a rule in the comm that much of these downvote bans took place in, which reads:
'No Serial Downvoting.'
Personally, I find this rather vague.
How many dowmvotes, in what timeframe, across how many comms/comments/posts, etc?
I am also still uncertain to what extent these actually are dedicated, persistent, serial downvoters, vs just a whole lot of randos seeing something on their feed and then downvoting it and moving on.
I get the intent behind trying to stem a mass wave of negativity, nobody likes a wave of mass downvotes and hostile comments...
But on the other hand, there should probably be a bit more clarity and specificity here, less heavy handed actions for less comitted and persistent behavior.
IMO, a balance has to be struck between allowing people to genuienly freely express their opinion via downvoting, but at the same time, there are clearly also cases where people or groups of people basically just downvote all comments or posts from a specific user or in a certain comm or pertaining to a certain topic, etc.
I myself am fairly confident I have managed to attract at least one person who downvotes all my posts/comments on their instance, simply because I am on their shitlist, apparently.
So ideally... we could maybe have a constructive conversation about that.
As to the SatansMaggotyCumFart profile on lemmyusa being an impersonatory account:
We've got one mod from lemmyusa here saying he really isn't sure, and personally blocked him, I think from his own user standpoint, not from the standpoint of himself as a mod.
IMO, the account still strikes me as likely another person, impersonating the actual user... I of course cannot be certain, but the profile still strikes me as very sus.
Finally, I am least personally going to strongly discourage any one reading this from popping in to lemmyusa and going out of your way to downvote every single thing on there simply because it is on that instance.
They are already in more or less lockdown mode, call that a win if you must.
I did not intend nor do I want this very post to act as an attack vector.
The main role of a moderator of a small community is to grow that community, be that providing content, or weeding out any negative influences on participation. A safe space for whatever the community is about.
Drive by voting usually is neutral with the +/- cancelling out, but for niche topics the drivebys can have a impactful chilling effect on the actual community growth and participation, so its reasonable for the moderator to remove negative drivebys from the community. (For now, until subscriber only communities becomes a federated standard in lemmy 1.0)
I've written in more detail on this philosophy here
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Let's say someone starts a Malaysian community and they only post in Malay, this annoys people who don't speak Malay (most people), and some people just downvote every Malay post they see rather then block the community.
Is it helpful for the Malay community to get all these downvotes from non-Malay speaking lemmy users who are too lazy to hit the block button?
Or if you prefer a non-language scenario, let's say a community to discuss youtube videos of a specific creator is here, but most people don't care for the creator... same thing
lemmy is a commonwealth of small communities, we won't grow unless we allow niche communities a safe space to gain traction, that means drive-by-chilling is bad for lemmy over all.
That’s why they’re there, for stuff that people don’t like.
It's really in place to be a signal of what is bad for the community like a micro-report, not just personal opinion. It is often used as a personal opinion, but sorting by ratio, auto hiding, auto-mod removing based on votes indicates its real utility as good or bad for the community. The problem is that lemmy is not some monolithic community with the same values and interests for everyone, but if we treat it as such we will end up with just one which isn't great for lemmy at all.
Is it helpful for the Malay community to get all these downvotes from non-Malay speaking lemmy users who are too lazy to hit the block button?
That's a great analogy. So, if the posts are marked as English/Unspecified, so they're cluttering up everyone's feed with posts that practically all users literally can't read, then yes having them sort of "marked down" for the majority of the community to keep the overall feed clean is probably the right answer. It's easily solvable by teaching people to use the language setting correctly on their posts so they're hidden from people who don't enable Malay, and that's probably a better answer than spamming everyone's feed with Malay stuff and mechanically preventing anyone from filtering it out for other users via downvotes, because "it's not fair to me that you don't want this in the feed."
I know that's not quite what you meant. I don't want to argue back and forth about this issue indefinitely, but I think it's just another instance of the same "depends on your perspective" issue, of the average user who wants the algorithms assembling the feed to work right, versus the community creator who obviously doesn't want everything they post to be downvoted. I think they're both valid viewpoints but it seems like you guys keep repeatedly emphasizing the second point of view and not really considering the first one.
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Is it helpful for the Malay community to get all these downvotes from non-Malay speaking lemmy users who are too lazy to hit the block button?
That's a great analogy. So, if the posts are marked as English/Unspecified, so they're cluttering up everyone's feed with posts that practically all users literally can't read, then yes having them sort of "marked down" for the majority of the community to keep the overall feed clean is probably the right answer. It's easily solvable by teaching people to use the language setting correctly on their posts so they're hidden from people who don't enable Malay, and that's probably a better answer than spamming everyone's feed with Malay stuff and mechanically preventing anyone from filtering it out for other users via downvotes, because "it's not fair to me that you don't want this in the feed."
I know that's not quite what you meant. I don't want to argue back and forth about this issue indefinitely, but I think it's just another instance of the same "depends on your perspective" issue, of the average user who wants the algorithms assembling the feed to work right, versus the community creator who obviously doesn't want everything they post to be downvoted. I think they're both valid viewpoints but it seems like you guys keep repeatedly emphasizing the second point of view and not really considering the first one.
of the average user who wants the algorithms assembling the feed to work right, versus the community creator who obviously doesn’t want everything they post to be downvoted.
seems like you guys keep repeatedly emphasizing the second point
Because the role of a small community moderator is to grow that small community, so if the zeitgeist is against that they don't have many tools available to them other then the ban.
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of the average user who wants the algorithms assembling the feed to work right, versus the community creator who obviously doesn’t want everything they post to be downvoted.
seems like you guys keep repeatedly emphasizing the second point
Because the role of a small community moderator is to grow that small community, so if the zeitgeist is against that they don't have many tools available to them other then the ban.
Of all the sins that got us booted from the Garden of Eden that was the early internet, I would say "my growth is more important than your good experience, so let me tweak things to boost my growth, and put my stuff in front of you" is probably a strong contender for the top spot.
Again, I get it. A lot depends on the specific details of the community and posts we're talking about. I don't think wanting to grow your small community or insulate it from unfairness is automatically a bad thing, but wanting to adjust things to make sure your small community will grow is not automatically a good thing, either.
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Of all the sins that got us booted from the Garden of Eden that was the early internet, I would say "my growth is more important than your good experience, so let me tweak things to boost my growth, and put my stuff in front of you" is probably a strong contender for the top spot.
Again, I get it. A lot depends on the specific details of the community and posts we're talking about. I don't think wanting to grow your small community or insulate it from unfairness is automatically a bad thing, but wanting to adjust things to make sure your small community will grow is not automatically a good thing, either.
but wanting to adjust things to make sure your small community will grow is not automatically a good thing, either.
Sure, in my philosophy i just want to remove any chilling effects on participation, I don't care about visibility in the overall lemmy all feed.
So yeah, there will be communities I don't like, and I wont think its good they grow, but that is why I have my block button.... but i can't begrudge someone else from having their own little garden on the internet too.
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The main role of a moderator of a small community is to grow that community, be that providing content, or weeding out any negative influences on participation. A safe space for whatever the community is about.
Drive by voting usually is neutral with the +/- cancelling out, but for niche topics the drivebys can have a impactful chilling effect on the actual community growth and participation, so its reasonable for the moderator to remove negative drivebys from the community. (For now, until subscriber only communities becomes a federated standard in lemmy 1.0)
I've written in more detail on this philosophy here
Briefly skimming that... one idea that comes to mind would be if maybe users have more ability to fine tune but also customize not just one 'feed', but many.
Like different playlists for spotify kinda.
Don't just have comms I'm subbed to.
Let me sub, but also, let me as a user, sub to it, and put it in my minifeed that i name... politics, or news, or tech stuff, or, happy animal pictures, or whatever.
Afaik, you could do that all clientside, maybe not in lemmy itself, but certainly via a frontend app or some other kind of way of viewing lemmy.
You can do what I just described with NewPipe, for youtube viewing without ads.
So this way, instead of 'all' 'local' and 'subs', you have like 'custom subgroup of subs 1, 2, 3, etc'.
Having that paradigm on its own may significantly alter the perspective of the average user toward 'i am responsible for the kind of stuff i see' and thus take a more active role in curating their own content, as opposed to just expecting someone else to do that for me, and complaining/lashing out when i see things that i dont like.
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Briefly skimming that... one idea that comes to mind would be if maybe users have more ability to fine tune but also customize not just one 'feed', but many.
Like different playlists for spotify kinda.
Don't just have comms I'm subbed to.
Let me sub, but also, let me as a user, sub to it, and put it in my minifeed that i name... politics, or news, or tech stuff, or, happy animal pictures, or whatever.
Afaik, you could do that all clientside, maybe not in lemmy itself, but certainly via a frontend app or some other kind of way of viewing lemmy.
You can do what I just described with NewPipe, for youtube viewing without ads.
So this way, instead of 'all' 'local' and 'subs', you have like 'custom subgroup of subs 1, 2, 3, etc'.
Having that paradigm on its own may significantly alter the perspective of the average user toward 'i am responsible for the kind of stuff i see' and thus take a more active role in curating their own content, as opposed to just expecting someone else to do that for me, and complaining/lashing out when i see things that i dont like.
Like different playlists for spotify kinda.
That is a really great idea! Multiple feeds depending on your mood
Let me sub, but also, let me as a user, sub to it, and put it in my minifeed that i name… politics, or news, or tech stuff, or, happy animal pictures, or whatever.
piefed kinda has that with topics
You can do what I just described with NewPipe, for youtube viewing without ads.
And freetube!
Having that paradigm on its own may significantly alter the perspective of the average user toward ‘i am responsible for the kind of stuff i see’ and thus take a more active role in curating their own content, as opposed to just expecting someone else to do that for me, and complaining/lashing out when i see things that i dont like.
Or have clients suggest an auto-block for communities the user persistently finds disagreeable.
