• 5 Posts
  • 2.4K Comments
Joined 9 months ago
Cake day: November 3rd, 2024
  • kreskin@lemmy.worldtoActual Discussion•(WEEKLY) Lemmy's Aggressive Banning IssueEnglish
    3·
    12 hours ago

    @[email protected]

    Well, I wasnt being “a goof”. I think your framing attempts to steer this discussion in ways I dont agree with. Hence the downvote.

    I also think commenting with mod privs is problematic for the conversation flow. You’ll get more honest conversation using an alt thats a non-mod account.

    You said:

    since both places are commonly found

    That seems an unworkable proposition. Besides Reddit there are few other large anonymous boards. In your coffee shop metaphor its like being banned from a michelin 4 star coffee shop and being told theres a hot dog stand on the corner that serves coffee, so theres no possible issue with banning. There is no seperate-but-equal to be had here. The Worldnews or politics subs here for example arent easily replicated with a new set of rules in any other small similarly-focused sub. Subs that get large tend to stay large and get larger. There is a natural monopolizing effect. So I disagree that commonality is any sort of reasonable basis for comparison. I recognize that this is debateable, but worldnews, news, and politics are core to lemmy, so saying those subs can be operated in any way the mods there feel they want to works less well as they accrue influence and become the core Lemmy product. I suppose federation in general is messy.

    You also said:

    If you are obeying the stated rules

    I really do appreciate that moderation is a hard thankless task and mods deals with profoud hatred and human ugliness and bigotry. Its toxic and poisonous. So thank you for your service. But–mods are human too and they wield a ban hammer in a biased fashion at times. The existence of this sub kind of proves this point, so I assume you agree somewhat. Often some mods (not you, as far as I know) end up editorializing and stretching the definitions of the rules to suit their own biases. For a while it was trivially easy to end up banned if you said something against the actions of the state of Israel, and it was branded by mods (like jordanblund in worldnews) as bigotry against an entire people, and loosely equated to being against global judaism or supporting terrorism. Its also pretty easy for a mod to ban a progressive from pushing back on centrists, both here and on reddit. Or if you defend equality and human rights for muslims in general, or treat a religion as a bundle of philosophical ideas to be studied. This place models all the biases out in the wild, and they dont always effctively serve the noble goals of the carefully moderated forum that we hope for. So obeying the stated rules, as you said, is not cut and dried when enforcement is flawed. Its another difficult balancing problem that could use examination.

    This community was built (somewhat) from a sizeable bunch of people banned or pissed off by over-modding and astroturfing on reddit, but increasingly lemmy has started experiencing similar disseases. I get it, the mods are volunteers. Its an ugly and demanding job. But saying its simply about users following the rules discounts the nuance of the conversations. Underenforcement or light enforcement has to be part of the modding model or you become reddit, which I sure wouldnt want. I have started seeing threads that are clearly being brigaded for fascist, Russian or Israeli memes-- same as the enshitification that took over reddit. And its not like I’m not wading through r/nazi when I see these excesses, these are purportedly “normal” threads. So, theres another difficult problem the status quo doesnt recognize.

    To add to that, there are whole industry of companies built on the idea of steering social media discourse. Much of that is by employees of those companies becoming mods. On reddit you arent even allowed to bring up the idea, and here we just ignore it. There have been some mods particularly on worldnews who have acted in extremely biased ways and made biased comments and then deleted them. Most mods are great volunteers, but a handfull abuse. It stands to reason that some are paid to abuse and steer. Its easy to hide your tracks if you’re a bad mod or paid mod. We users arent privy to any discipline or leveling done within the mod community. Maybe there is some, maybe not. Do mods police themselves? I’d guess not so much. Yes we see the modlog, but thats strictly a transaction log, insufficient to this use case. So, more problems.

    So here we are, downvote explained. Not goofing.

  • kreskin@lemmy.worldtoWorld News@lemmy.world•Calls grow louder for Europe to deploy its ‘Big Bazooka’ in tariff negotiationsEnglish
    7·
    2 days ago

    EU should be deploying the bazooka on American tech anyway. American business patterns are abusive and predatory completely ignoring public good and privacy concerns. Its past the time to be sitting on hands in reining them in. Force them out and replace them with local businesses that follow the rules.

    The same goes for the EU’s stance on gaza-- we are well past the “wait and see” stage of anything and into delays being little more than paid corruption and implicit genocide support.

    Trump is right on one assumption, the EU is as weak and ineffective on these matters as he is. The larger EU markets are like baby birds with their mouths open waiting for the US to vomit food into their mouths.

  • kreskin@lemmy.worldtopolitics @lemmy.world•‘Burning Hatred’: CNN’s Scott Jennings Gets NY Democrat to Admit He’s Being Targeted Because He Supports Israel
    1·
    2 days ago

    lefties take that word “liberal” as an insult. Was that your intent? If I was a liberal I wouldnt be advocating burning the DNC down, but maybe you dont use the same phrasing as I do. I used to call myself a liberal 20 years ago when it didnt mean DNC centrist. Now liberal = centrist and its usually used as an insult.

    Also, Anarchy is defined as an absence of government, is that truly your solution for the questions of government? Being blunt-- I dont see how you’ll get much done with anarchy besides having fun for yourself, and itll inevitably devolve to might-makes-right, which has inherently bad outcomes that are darn close to authoritarianism.

    Are you young? I remember being in my 20s and talking about anarchy, that was fun. But I also held a lot of petitions, cleaned a lot of piss off of… everything from shelters, worked with refugees, beat sick kids at Candy Land as a playroom coordinator in a hospital cancer ward, painted and constructed houses, held classes for kids around how to eat healthy, called for donations, knocked on doors for candidates, volunteered in a list of organizational celebrations and functions, and I’m still at it because I dont know what else I can do. My wife does nothing but community work that occasionally brings in grant funding.

    all of that would be a lot less possible under anarchy. So I dont see the end goal of what you are doing and how you are choosing to do it. If you think I am wrong on that I’d be curious to know why. Yes, it increasingly feels futile, hence my asking this question.

    Anarchy seems like a … dilettante’s solution to a set of real and pressing issues that probably cruelly add pain to a lot of good people who didn’t end up with as much luck in life as you and I enjoy. I’m not about to starve and I dont worry about money much.