I tend to browse /All and by New on Lemmy. I went to respond on a thread on !vegan@lemmy.world to thank someone for a recipe that looked good, and found out I had been banned.
Odd, considering I hadn’t posted to that sub at any point in the past. I checked the modlog to find that “Mod” had banned a bunch of people citing “Rule 5.”
Their Rule 5 states: Bad-faith carnist rhetoric & anti-veganism are not allowed, as this is not a space to debate the merits of veganism. Anyone is welcome here, however, and so good-faith efforts to ask questions about veganism may be given their own weekly stickied post in the future (see current stickied discussion).
I (and hundreds of others) seemingly broke rule 5 of this community without ever posting there. What is going on?
And my apologies if this isn’t the place for this, but I had no idea where else to post the question.
Pretty sure i heard they are banning people based on the downvotes/ upvotes. If you downvote a vegan or upvote a non- vegan then you get banhammered.
That community is a joke though and i refuse to participate (as a vegan).
That’s the most fragile thing I have ever heard of.
Why the fuck is Lemmy making votes visable to moderators? This is RIPE for corruption and abuse. Secret ballot is the only way voting works!
They’re visible to anyone with a lemmy instance, or any activitypub compatible platform. It’s likely that she set one up to monitor the votes on the community and ban anyone she saw down-voting her, and yes that is very much a thing that power-hungry losers do.
Lemmy is an open, federated platform. You cannot realistically hide who voted, because there is no trusted server that would secretly count up votes and provide a total.
Pretty sure votes are public. It’s just that most (all?) the front ends only show the number.
It’s kinda how the fedi spec works. Nothing is private.
I know kbin/mbin showed who voted.Votes are not specifically visible to moderators. Instance admins can see them through the database and everyone can see them through other federated platforms besides Lemmy.
people really need to stop confusing an upvote/downvote to basic democratic voting. There is no ticker above the ballot box letting you know how everyone voted before you, there is no “policy” or “elected position” being voted on. This is more akin to an open conference debate where people are booing or yaying when someone speaks up about a topic. Your privacy on a public forum discussion never existed to begin with, people in a public setting know their anonymity isn’t guaranteed.
Exactly. Better to assume nothing on social media is private, especially federated social media.
Afaik, votes are visible to server admins (because admins hold the keys to the DB) and server admins can proliferate information however they want. With anyone being able to be a server admin, there isn’t much you can do about it.
They ban anyone that doesn’t agree with their ideology. Regardless how respectful you are about it.
I think they’re trying to damage the vegan brand by being as excluding as possible.
I don’t mind vegans, I really dislike this type of treachery giving any group a bad name.
I would definitely agree with that conclusion, and unfortunately it does work, many people think of the angry vegan stereotype when someone talks about veganism, and that’s because of assholes like her. She would say that it’s because of the meat industry and alt-right think tanks, which is true but they also do feed off the bad examples people like her give and go “see we’re not lying”.
If she wanted to be helpful or benefit that community she wouldn’t intentionally behave in the exact way that people criticize the community for acting, she should shun that behavior and banish people who do it. That’s the only way to bring about positive change.
I’ve never posted in that sub either, but I was banned today, and the only possible explanation is that it was for downvoting. A lot of their posts are self-righteous and needlessly confrontational, so I’ve downvoted a lot of their memes when they wind up in my feed, but I’ve never commented on any of them.
This moderator isn’t trying to remove hostile comments or stop rule violations; they’re trying to artificially lower the number of downvotes their content gets to make the community look less unpopular. You can actually sort posts by recent and see how the percentage of downvotes suddenly dropped off after the ban spree. This is a blatant attempt to manufacture consent for their community by gaming the system.
You can actually sort posts by recent and see how the percentage of downvotes suddenly dropped off after the ban spree. This is a blatant attempt to manufacture consent for their community by gaming the system.
That would violate lemmy.world’s terms of service, specially 3. (system disruption) and 5.1 (community manipulation).
Perhaps you guys could/should elevate this issue to the lemmy.world admin team.
That was kind of what I was attempting to do here. Is there another way to do that?
I suggest you (or anyone else here, really) to direct message !lwreport@lemmy.world, the account is a relay to the admin team. Be sure to mention:
- The issue (they’re banning people left and right)
- Concerns (e.g. they might be gaming the system),
- This thread (to show that it isn’t just your personal pet peeve, plenty people are pissed.)
The issue (they’re banning people left and right) Concerns (e.g. they might be gaming the system), This thread (to show that it isn’t just your personal pet peeve, plenty people are pissed.)
Done! I appreciate the pointers as I would have never known about this on my own.
Since I wrote this, things have changed a bit. The mod in question seems to have become extremely unpopular, even in her own community, and she’s gone on posting spree on /c/vegan that’s getting downvoted. I still think you can demonstrate that she was trying to manipulate the downvote numbers, but it the evidence is less clear.
I honestly thought the vegans had moved to a different instance since the drama. I thought the .world comm would be killed but looks like their sticking around and doing some sus modding of their own. I mean, one good turn and all that. 🤷♂️
There’s a vegan community on vegantheoryclub, they spat the dummy and defederated from .world. Maybe that’s what you’re thinking of.
I mean, the flipside could be just as true. I would be surprised, if there’s not some right-wing twats, who felt attacked in their manliness by the concept of veganism, and then started gaming the system by deploying tons of downvote bots. If you regularly downvoted posts without commenting, you might’ve looked like such a bot.
It could be, but it’s really not. This community posts shit insulting, “carnists,” all the time, then suddenly claims they’re getting attacked or brigaded when these posts get negative responses. I get not wanting to have to debate random assholes every time you share an article about veganism; I even get banning people for being hostile to your insulting memes; but banning people for downvoting a meme is messed up, which is why the other mods on /c/Vegan just removed Mod the responsible for this..
Welp, I guess that’s that then…
More or less. A quick skim of the comments shows that there’s going to be some internal fighting over this, but I don’t really care. As long as it banning people for downvotes doesn’t become normalized by Lemmy Mods, this doesn’t affect me.
Indeed
That + this is exactly why I just blocked them. They don’t want downvotes? Fine, I don’t want to see their posts. Win win.
Ok, I tend to think I’m a decent human being but I don’t understand your logic and I can only see your comments as negative. Please help me understand the differences in our thought train.
- People are downvoting content (abusing the intended purpose of a downvote) they’re seeing without even being involved in a community
- Mod of that community bans users (common with vote brigading) who aren’t real active users, users can no longer see the content satisfying your dismay of seeing it in your feed (instead of blocking the community)
- You then accuse the mod of stopping people downvoting who don’t like the community who aren’t a part of that community?
You’re actually acknowledging you’ve “downvoted a lot of their memes” because of previous un-related content, continuing to abuse the downvote and even pointed out the mod was effective at stopping the vote brigading from people outside the community. I have no clue about the Vegan situation myself, but I thought a mod had completely autonomy to run their community the way they want and the point of decentralization was the ability to move into another space when needed.
You’re actually acknowledging you’ve “downvoted a lot of their memes” because of previous un-related content
No I’m not. I could see how you could choose to misinterpret what I said like that, but I didn’t say that, and I’ll rephrase it so that there is no question as to what I’m saying; they share self-righteous, antagonistic memes, and when those memes wind up in my feed, I downvote them. There are also plenty of neutral posts (articles, etc.) from that community that I don’t downvote, but when shit like this, and this, and this ends up in my feed, I downvote it.
I could block the instance, but I see absolutely no reason to silence myself and allow their shitty opinions to go unchallenged. Why should I hide from their content and allow their community to insult me freely? I’m using the downvote button, the most passive way to express displeasure online, to respond to someone who is insulting me for my lifestyle. Why the fuck is the appropriate answer supposedly, “well, you should instead just hide from the people insulting you.” Why isn’t the response to the community, “Yeah, if you insult a lot of people, you get a lot of downvotes, maybe stop posting such hostile shit.”
I’m not a vegan, none of those memes you’ve posted make me feel personally attacked nor do I feel insulted. I’m glad for the clarification, but I was expecting something much worse like a vegan death cult manifesto by the reactions here.
You don’t want to silence yourself from a community you’re not a part of by your own admission? Do you really feel it’s your duty to go into every community and mandate their content and tone to your liking?
I guess you can look at it as “hiding” to curate your feed by removing the communities you’re not interested in. I don’t think you’re really challenging their opinions, just kinda being a douche. I see plenty of shit posted about windows or apple users, we’re not pitch forking everyone that posts a spicy meme. We insult the rich and powerful etc, what class of protection are you proposing to secure? The omnivores? Who’s going to police what’s hostile or insulting? I don’t understand what this call to action is trying to implement or suggest besides outside policing of communities which is one of the reasons the fediverse was made to combat that type of control.
We insult the rich and powerful etc, what class of protection are you proposing to secure? The omnivores? Who’s going to police what’s hostile or insulting? I don’t understand what this call to action is trying to implement or suggest besides outside policing of communities which is one of the reasons the fediverse was made to combat that type of control.
What the ever-loving fuck are you talking about? No one’s asking for anyone to police the Vegan community. They’re free to post as many obnoxious memes as they like, it’s just fucked up to block people for a downvote. Yeah, a lot of Linux communities post shit about Apple or Windows users, but if the mods start combing through the downvotes to ban anyone who disagrees with them, I’d like to think we’d recognize that as an abnormal behavior. What is so hard about this?
Edit: It looks like the other mods on /c/Vegan have chosen to remove the Mod responsible for this ban wave, so hopefully we’re all on the same page that this is abnormal behavior, and not how mods are meant to operate.
I think I can explain it. I think it’s abnormal behavior to downvote outside of misinformation or out of context. I also think it’s abnormal to ban anyone who downvotes, but both of you have the right to do so. Neither of you broke a site-wide rule, unless you didn’t follow the guidelines in their community sidebar before participating. Them choosing to remove the mod is the communities right and I support that. I look at the form of downvoting you’re conducting as a form of vote brigading (socially, not directed by an individual but a group effort nonetheless with evidence by the bans). If bans for non-participation go out and downvotes continue, they can better get a grasp of what the actual community wants. Atm they’re just following what the “All” feed tells them without being able to differentiate.
I look at the form of downvoting you’re conducting as a form of vote brigading
You’re welcome to look on that however you like, but that’s not what brigading is; actual brigading is a coordinated attack by a group of accounts to affect the vote count of a specific community or user. That’s why it’s called brigading; you’re supposed to be part of a brigade.
It’s great that you only downvote things taken out of context or misinformation, but it’s not abnormal to use voting to express approval or disapproval for opinions. The vote counts on this thread show that most people are using voting this way.
thanks for ignoring my statement on the difference in brigading so you could brake off into a diatribe -_-. The Jan 6th wasn’t a brigade, just ask Trump. Just need some social boogeymen to stir up trouble and it becomes a “natural” problem, not a brigade. “The vote counts on this thread show that most people are using voting this way.”, in this space, about lemmy drama and a small echo chamber.
Look I’ll be honest and let you know you just seem like a spoiled down-voter after all of our back and forth. You don’t follow the communities rules, you don’t belong to the community, you constantly downvote in a negative way, and the only people who have broken a rule, is this post with all the people talking about the ban on here (instead of privately reaching out like is spelled out).
fighting over this, but I don’t really care. As long as it banning people for downvotes doesn’t become normalized by Lemmy Mods, this doesn’t affect me.
You don’t care about the community, only your ability to downvote on anything you want
- I’ve never posted in that sub
- I’ve never commented
- their posts are self-righteous
- they’re trying to artificially lower the number of downvotes their content gets
By people who never participate or even belong in the community, who downvotes because of … feelings. You’re the perfect example of the Paradox of tolerance, by allowing your views you will only wish to silence and put down other’s who you don’t agree with.
How utterly bizarre and yet entirely predictable based on recent events.
For a community that just tries to exist peacefully and gets brigaded by “jerks” all the time, they sure are weirdly fixated on becoming the centre of attention every single week.
You should not feed the troll, but it’s too fascinating not to look at it. Like a pack of chimpanzees flinging their doodoo at the glass walls.
They could make the community private. They could keep rabbits as pets. They have made veganism their entire identity, a pseude-religion, and they have a pathological need for validation. Anyone who questions their absolute moral superiority challenges that identity so they seal themselves up in a hermetically sealed, idea tight echo bunker where only supportive ideas are allowed and only validating up votes are tolerated.
They, of course, feel quite free to spread their extremism to discussions outside of the echo bunker, they just don’t tolerate other ideas in the echo bunker.
You can tell this is a good faith criticism by how it simultaneously criticizes them for not making the community private and for being an “echo bunker.”
I didn’t criticize them for not taking the community private. I simply pointed out that they could completely seal the echo bunker by taking the community private. I also pointed out that they could keep vegetarian pets and feed them a vegan diet without anyone criticising them for trying to feed a vegan diet to a carnivore.
Fair warning: The account you’re arguing with is a troll account who bad-faith argues with everyone, as evidenced by their post history - they often simply have their posts deleted by mods. It’s best to block and move on.
As much as I hate echo chamber-ing, when it comes to trolls, it is occasionally required.
It’s an. ML account. I know what it is but thanks for the warning.
Fair enough!
Wait, vegans have animal prisoners? Like in cages and leashes, and glass prisons?!?!?!?
Real coherent .
I think it’s an expression of ego. They are absolutely convinced of their moroal superiority and are frustrated by the fact that they haven’t been able to insult, harass, bully, shame, and threathen everyone into joining their quasi-religion so they’re going to prove to themselves that they are right by keeping a captive carnivore and forcing it to eat a vegan diet. They justify this by self-absolving. Self-absolution is one of the hallmarks of extremists. Anything they do, even when it goes against their own beliefs, is ok because they are morally pure.
Did you know that vegans are hated on par with drug addicts? Perhaps. Did you know that people who consume a plant-based diet for their health or for the environment are hated much less than people who are vegan because of concerns about animal welfare? I think that’s interesting. People feel judged by the mere existence of ethical vegans. And I think you are demonstrating how those feelings of being judged are expressed as defensiveness and “hatred” (though I know that language seems strong in this context).
Did you know that vegans are hated on par with drug addicts?
Oh take the back of your hand off your forehead. That’s just fucking ridiculous. You know you’re not purple, right? You don’t glow in the dark? How the fuck could anyone know that you were a vegan other than you telling literally everyone you speak to that you are? It’s like that fucking cross-fit and spin crowd. Literally no one would care if there weren’t extremists out there harassing restauranteurs and butchers to try to bully them into not serving meat. If vegan extremists didn’t lecture, harangue, and shame anyone who eats meat then no one would care. If you’re hated it’s because of your behaviour and how you treat people, not because you choose not to eat meat.
Perhaps. Did you know that people who consume a plant-based diet for their health or for the environment are hated much less than people who are vegan because of concerns about animal welfare?
No one cares what you eat or why. They only care how you act and how you treat other people. Have you tried being nicer to people?
I think that’s interesting. People feel judged by the mere existence of ethical vegans. And I think you are demonstrating how those feelings of being judged are expressed as defensiveness and “hatred” (though I know that language seems strong in this context).
It has nothing to do with ethical veganism and everything to do with harassing, intimidating, bullying, shaming, insulting, labeling, haranguing, etc. people to try to get your way.
It is how you act, not what you eat.
I’m so tired of hearing about this community. They should change their name to ShittyAntiCarnivoreMemes and move to .ml.
I love the irony of a vegan community eating themselves
I don’t understand why most people even care. They would have never know this community existed except for for this post.
B/c this is just the tip of the iceberg, and b/c a stitch in time saves nine and all that jazz. And b/c some find it entertaining to discuss about:-). And b/c it’s not fair, e.g. how would you feel if I told you that because you commented here, you automatically receive a…
Yeah, I don’t care about that community either!:-P
Your equivalency is not great. If you told me I was banned on !genv@lemmy.world (saw in the trending communities) I wouldn’t even spend the time to find of if it was true.
B/c this is just the tip of the iceberg, What?
b/c a stitch in time saves nine and all that jazz What’s the bigger problem?
Personally, I think it justifies their choices. Not that I would have made the same choices in their shoes. They are just getting shit on left and right by random people that would never take the time to even honestly engage, but just believe they are terrible for personal choices.
Well, remember this is social media - we aren’t here to read, but to talk. This gives something for people to talk about, sharing their opinions and such. Also, if it were even possible to read the comments in time order, you’d see people solving the puzzle as it went - first a question was asked, several people put forth different answers, and it snowballed forward from there.
As for why people care - why do any of us like anything? Books, games, movies, etc., it’s all a variety of entertainment to distract us from our real lives:-P.
Eh. If you look over the mod log for the months before the incident, it makes sense why they just started banning anyone with negative interactions. People were just dropping in to harass them.
Also, some social media spaces are closed for most - i.e. you can only read and not comment unless you’ve been approved…
Fair. I don’t really care either way, but do feel like mods of communities like that have a hard job. I wouldn’t sign up to do it.
I did not do that look, but indeed that sounds bad. And yes, it might be nice to have at least the option to create a closed space.
Part of the issue though was whether the mod was banning people for offering so much as a singular downvote - crucially (imho): in some other community. Downvotes are part of the normal functionality of the Fediverse, but if people thought that they could be banned for such, then they could avoid them, thereby lessening the functionality of the Fediverse.
And all the more so when the decision was not reviewed by human eyes. And again even more so when the mod in question was becoming unhinged, refusing to communicate with their fellow mods. And even more so again, trying to ban even instance admins who literally own the machines upon which the Lemmy code is being run.
So… lots of drama. Just like watching a TV show I guess.
The bad: simply downvoting a meme gets you banned
The good: You didn’t have to open your apps filter settings to stop seeing the absurd shit they post
Funnily enough, their ban spree is self censoring and will end up creating an echo chamber nobody will see.
I say, tofu and let tofuck it up.
Holy hell! It’s over 19 pages long, and that’s over the past day. They even went as far as trying to ban admins.
Edit: it looks like they only tried to ban one admin. I thought I had saw more, but I guess not. But damn, talk about sour grapes.
There’s a lot more to the story on Rooki.
“the first amendment holds” lol, I wasn’t aware Lemmy was part of the US government
It’s doubly stupid because LW is construed and governed by Dutch, German, and Finnish laws. Not United-Statian ones.
Seems like something Russians and Chinese would say about their imperialism.
It’s all also done by a one single moderator, a same one that was complaining about the “carnists brigading” in the community. There was a handful of comments deleted along with more than 300 users banned.
I wonder if it’s the same user who has almost exclusively dominated the front page of the sub with memes in the last day or so. Going back a couple pages, there was a lot more variety and nuance in the content. Subject matter notwithstanding, it looks like someone terminally online going on a power trip.
Yep, same person
That one moderator has just downvoted every comment here and is likely responsible for the single downvote on this post.
mOr bAns?!
Edit: Aww shit! Two downvotes! Popcorn time!
I’m moderately offended that I haven’t been banned yet. It’s giving “the last one picked for kickball” vibes. I want to speak to the fucking manager of c/vegan immediately!
Do you want to build an echo chamber? This is how you build an echo chamber.
(I find this entirely unsurprising. I think they do want to build an echo chamber.)
Yeah.
I left beehaw because they seem determined to build a echo chamber too
A minority literally accused of me of wanting to kill all of them simply because I only half agreed with a post.
And then a admin overlooked that, and accused me of causing a fight in a “safe space” which seems to be just another term for echo chamber
I have friends from that minority 😂
Bro’s unironically saying “I’m not a racist, I have minority friends” and wondering why Beehaw doesn’t want him around.
From what I’ve been told there is a rift between mods of the community.
I had the same issue as you and contacted the mod team no understand how I violated rule 5. One of the mods confirmed I hadn’t violated rule 5 and unbanned me. I was then immediately rebanned again by the original mod.
There was another conversation about it on /c/unpopularopinion and it looks like people were getting banned simply for downvoting one of the mods.
One can only hope that mismanaged communities will be outgrown by better ones when enough people simply get together somewhere else.
Banning your good faith readers is a fast path to irrelevancy.
I’m kinda dumbfounded. I’ve only posted (or commented) once in the past nine days. The one that happened to be at a similar time was this comedy one on a completely different Community on a different instance for a goofy anime question. Did… did I really just get banned from talking to vegans for… not liking anime?
This might be peak stupid internet if so.
I hope this is not in poor taste, but it seemed to fit? :-P
My only comment in the community was a suggestion that someone reformat their post to make it more legible ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I totally get what you’re feeling.
Ah yes, fair and balanced
