Communities should not be overly moderated in order to enforce a specific narrative. Respectful disagreement should be allowed in a smaller proportion to the established narrative.
Humans are naturally inclined to believe a single narrative when they’re only presented with a single narrative. That’s the basis of how fiction works. You can’t tell someone a story if they’re questioning every paragraph. However, a well placed sentence questioning that narrative gives the reader the option to chose. They’re no longer in a story being told by one author, and they’re free to choose the narrative that makes sense to them, even if one narrative is being pushed much more heavily than the other.
Unfortunately, some malicious actors are hijacking this natural tendency to be invested in fiction, and they’re using it to create absurd, cult-like trends in non-fiction. They’re using this for various nefarious ends, to turn us against each other, to generate profit, and to affect politics both domestically and internationally.
In a fully anonymous social media platform, we can’t counter this fully. But we can prune some of the most egregious echo chambers.
We’re aware that this policy is going to be subjective. It won’t be popular in all instances. We’re going to allow some “flat earth” comments. We’re going to force some moderators to accept some “flat earth” comments. The point of this is that you should be able to counter those comments with words, and not need moderation/admin tools to do so. One sentence that doesn’t jive with the overall narrative should be easily countered or ignored.
It’s harder to just dismiss that comment if it’s interrupting your fictional story that’s pretending to be real. “The moon is upside down in Australia” does a whole lot more damage to the flat earth argument than “Nobody has crossed the ice wall” does to the truth. The purpose of allowing both of these is to help everyone get a little closer to reality and avoid incubating extreme cult-like behavior online.
A user should be able to (respectfully, infrequently) post/comment about a study showing marijuana is a gateway drug to !marijuana without moderation tools being used to censor that content.
Of course this isn’t about marijuana. There’s a small handful of self-selected moderators who are very transparently looking to push their particular narrative. And they don’t want to allow discussion. They want to function as propaganda and an incubator. Our goal is to allow a few pinholes of light into the Truman show they wish to create. When those users’ pinholes are systematically shut down, we as admins can directly fix the issue.
We don’t expect this policy to be perfect. Admins are not aware of everything that happens on our instances and don’t expect to be. This is a tool that allows us to trim the most extreme of our communities and guide them to something more reasonable. This policy is the board that we point to when we see something obscene on [email protected] so that we can actually do something about it without being too authoritarian ourselves. We want to enable our users to counter the absolute BS, and be able to step in when self-selected moderators silence those reasonable people.
Some communities will receive an immediate notice with a link to this new policy. The most egregious communities will comply, or their moderators will be removed from those communities.
Moderators, if someone is responding to many root comments in every thread, that’s not “in a smaller proportion” and you’re free to do what you like about that. If their “counter” narrative posts are making up half of the posts to your community, you’re free to address that. If they’re belligerent or rude, of course you know what to do. If they’re just saying something you don’t like, respectfully, and they’re not spamming it, use your words instead of your moderation abilities.
@[email protected] this post seems relevant as to what people are afraid of. I am glad that the admin team is taking time to reword this policy to make more clear what is meant:-).
Is this s piefed thing I’m too Lemmy to understand?
Here is the link to the post from Lemmy.World directly:-)
I don’t understand what you’re trying to say or why. I’m generally not clicking random youtube videos.
Innuendo Studios has several fantastic videos - I dare say just about the main thing I even highly care about on YouTube these days, even though there are so very few of them. The Alt Right Playbook in particular is a wonderful series. This latest one seems so very highly related to the subject matter of this post, where extremists bury reasonable people behind an avalanche of false statements, each one of which must be rebutted properly, despite how the statements themselves did not have such care and attention put into them.
Side-note: I love how PieFed and Tesseract both provide YouTube previews to help decide whether to click or not - speaking for myself it helps me decide!:-)
Anyway, I’m sure you know all about the subject matter, but the language used in this linked video (or just search for Alt-Right Playbook and choose the latest one) I thought might be particularly helpful to have watched in drafting the next response of this announcement. The flat earth bit especially is off-putting to people bc it conjures up the vaccine disinformation issue that genuinely cost people’s literal, actual lives. Though I didn’t take from the announcement that this has suddenly become a place where such dis/misinformation was “welcomed”, and yet people reacted as if that is what it was saying… so I hoped the video would help bridge that gap between what was intended to be conveyed vs. was managed to be received by some, who seem to just be so very scared and anxious about so many things beyond
theirour control these days.I’ll take a look. And yeah, the intention was the opposite, to poke pinholes into those crazy, reality-denying philosophies.
Hello,
Any idea when the new announcement will be made?
once it’s ready.
this post didn’t follow our usual process for announcements/changes and lately there have been several other events that required a lot of our attention as well.
we’d love to have posted an update on this topic a week ago already but we haven’t finished that within the team yet.
Thank you for your reply!
Classic .world admins showing their constant incompetence
nice
My take is we Admins are just running the community for the users of it and Mods are caretakers of their communities. The idea that communities are a Mods personal fiefdom seems to be a holdover from Reddit and just seems like it can/will lead to power-tripping.
It is generally a good idea to have multiple mods and it should be encouraged for mods to have a back-channel to coordinate (we for example offer a XMPP based chat system for members of our instance) so that less moderation decisions are self-involved and made in the heat of the moment. But ultimately the idea that the mods are the ones that are in control of a community is the least bad of the various alternatives, and certainly admin overreach is more problematic than mod overreach, as people can easily switch to another community if they don’t like the mods’ decisions in one community.
as people can easily switch to another community if they don’t like the mods’ decisions in one community.
I know it’s true in theory, but in practice if the mod is really power tripping (so banning everyone mentioning the alternative), it’s quite hard to achieve. It took me months to get people to the alternative community, and even now people still post there from time to time.
Definitely
I would say just block .world but I think they need exposure therapy. Fuck the police
What a real Steve Huffman post. Really impressive.
You’re trying cut back on echo chambers and power tripping mods. I like this, but I wonder how this going to play out.
Well, hopefully this will finally get saner instances to deferate .world as the disinformation hub it’s now openly admitting to intentionally be (and has always been, see the misinformation bot debacle for a previous example), so that’s good for lemmy as a whole, I suppose, in the long term (once .world communities have moved to other instances).
I appreciate everything the .world admins do. As a mod of a community here, I also agree with the general concept of letting the community downvote posts that aren’t actually harmful in terms of hate/abuse. That being said, I think it would be wise to reformulate and reduce down this post to a straightforward announcement: what events precipitated this policy change, what are going to be permitted kinds of content, and what is not allowed. This post is just a kind of wandering philosophy right now.
That being said, I think it would be wise to reformulate and reduce down this post to a straightforward announcement:
Indeed. I know what they mean and why they arrived at this decision, and I agree with it, but I got bored half-way through.
Happy i migrated off of lemmy.world some months ago with the piracy mess.
Same here. While I appreciate the work LW sysadmins do, this kind of decision just seems questionable
This policy is the board that we point to when we see something obscene on [email protected] so that we can actually do something about it without being too authoritarian ourselves.
Any comment on this one?
https://lemmy.world/post/23229045
I checked the thread, those comments are still removed: https://lemmy.world/comment/13966483
Is there some context that could help clarify what’s led to this change?
Similarly, could you provide clearer examples, and how this is intended to fit into the existing Terms of Service/Rules? Despite the length of the post, the way in which it’s written leaves this change too ambiguous to be easily understood, which I think is evident both from the voting and commenting patterns.
In my opinion, my questions should have already been addressed in the post, and I think may have helped reception of this change (supposing at minimum it’s to curtail some abusive moderation practices).
There’s something that everyone should keep in mind with this announcement. Due to the nature of federation and the fediverse, it can ONLY apply to lemmy.world. Users and communities on other instances can, do, and will continue to have their own policies on the matter.
Expect the tankie and fascist instances to keep doing tankie and fascist shit, and very little has changed in that regard. They still have the same risk of defederation, even if the chances have inched up slightly.
Fair, just don’t expand this any further, because its a slippery slope into taking autonomy from community mods.
Brigading
I feel bad for you
Oh hey, it’s the coward that post inflammatory shit and bans anyone who disagrees with them even if even toned. Shocked you have a problem with this policy. Shocked.
they’re free to choose the narrative that makes sense to them, even if one narrative is being pushed much more heavily than the other.
This just translates to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean or “reversion to mediocrity”. Much like 🤬🤬🤬🤬it’s
/all, every time that mainstream spills into a community it ruins it and brings it closer to the mainstream.In biology, you may recognize some of these phenomena from biochemistry: osmosis and diffusion. The demand to disable the “semi-permeable membrane” ends the purpose of the compartment.
Either the invading posts/comments get removed or the influx of participants (including voting) has to be rationed somehow. Doing neither is not a discussion about narratives, it’s a mobbing. It’s the opposite of promoting discourse, as that setup heavily favors the “mainstream” narrative, the status quo.
I should mention that I’ve been a moderator of internet communities since before Web 2.0 and I find the moderation tools for Lemmy type platforms to be terrible. If the expectation is to not have practical moderation, but instead to separate into fedi-islands and block the problematic networks, well, that would be a very blunt way to get to the same goals. Instead of having moderators individually ban users, you have admins ban entire networks of users.
There is no getting away from the need for moderators. Musk proved that again since he took over Twitter. Zuckerberg is proving it again now. You’re not building a protopia by hampering moderation, you’re building a cyber-wasteland. Any success with that will be temporary, like a pump and dump: you get a period of growth and a honeymoon, and then the critical mass of assholes is achieved and they turn everything to shit, and then most users have to start searching for greener
pasturesfood forests to migrate to. Another term for that is unsustainable, it can’t last.The point of this is that you should be able to counter those comments with words, and not need moderation/admin tools to do so.
Rationality is much more complex than you think. The experience of the COVID-19 pandemic should’ve taught you that already, first hand. The simple model of persuasion by presenting reasonable arguments and evidence is wrong. There’s an entire field looking into cognitive biases that show how irrational humans are. How exactly do you plan to argue with people who believe in “alternative facts” and “post-truth”?
All I see in the article you posted is a lack of experience in dealing with bullshit, a lack of understanding of the viral or memetic nature of bullshit.
It’s harder to just dismiss that comment if it’s interrupting your fictional story that’s pretending to be real. “The moon is upside down in Australia” does a whole lot more damage to the flat earth argument than “Nobody has crossed the ice wall” does to the truth. The purpose of allowing both of these is to help everyone get a little closer to reality and avoid incubating extreme cult-like behavior online.
It’s disheartening that you haven’t learned yet that flateartherism is a variant of creationism, another religiously inspired pseudoscience.
Well said the majority will often want to oppress the minority.
The phrase “common sense” is flawed as the majority have been wrong about certain topics in the past like lobotomies being used to “correct problematic behaviour”.
“A Lie Can Travel Halfway Around the World While the Truth Is Putting On Its Shoes.”
This policy change will only reward bad actors. This sort of behavior needs to be stopped ASAP, simply correcting the record after the damage is done is not enough.
Have you seen the thread that brought this about? It was one group of vegans lamenting at a formerly vegan restaurant which added a small number of non-vegan options to try and attract enough customers not to close, and then closing regardless when that didn’t work. Then there was respectful debate as to whether it is better for every restaurant to have a small number of vegan options, or for one restaurant to be 100% vegan. The mods of that community shut the whole thing down, despite it being incredibly respectful, because to them any possible concession in any circumstances makes you a “fake vegan” and worthy of a ban.
This rule change could be problematic if applied in the wrong circumstances, but it’s being enacted for a very clear and beneficial purpose.
It sounds like you’re being trolled by the mods. Open a different vegan community, even if it’s small. Also, in almost every other instance, this rule change would be a bad thing.
I did that. [email protected]
Baby steps is not what veganism is about, that’s flexitarinism.
This is why people shit on vegans.
This is why I’m going to block you for arguing in bad faith.
I’m not arguing? I’m not whoever you were talking to before.
People hate vegans because they’re pompous and irritating
Wrong, people do not like the status quo being challenged.
People in certain places in the world do not appreciate being told to stop beating or eating dogs. They think those animal advocates are “rude”.
As long as they bring their own food to events and dont make others cater to their whims, who cares. They are free to watch me eat my bacon and it means more bacon for me, I figure. The ones I know are easly enough to shut down if they try to dominate a conversation. Many of them are meat-curious, and converting them passes the time.
This is some of the most hilarious stuff I have ever read on reddit or lemmy. When word of these changes started, I thought it’d be about the DNC and genocide. Nope. Vegans.
Your opinion on veganism does not justify the mods’ abuse of their power to silence other vegans.
You do not get to bend words to suit your beliefs. Every legitimate vegan community would ban anyone who falsely claims they’re vegan. It’s always an abuse of power every time vegans moderates their communities but not when carnivore grifters do it.
You do not get to bend words to suit your beliefs
But apparently you do? Almost nobody is a carnivore. They’re more rare than vegans by far. I think the word you were looking for was omnivore.
Anyway, the mods of the community you seem so desperate to defend were banning vegans. Vegans who were discussing what they sincerely think is best for them as vegans. I don’t understand how you can think that’s ok, regardless of how one chooses to define what vegan means.
But apparently you do?
Well yes because I dont eat/use animal products for ethical reasons. A carnist obviously knows the least about this subject.
You’re dismissing the definition from the vegan society because it allows you to participate in reductionism. Go hang out with the flexitarians, vegetarians and the plant-based if you want to engage in the kind of conversation.
There are so many people who claim to be “vegan” who consume honey or oysters or fish for crying out loud. No wonder why the general population is so confused on what being vegan actually means.
Not to mention all the bad actors who lie about “being vegan” or that they know “someone is vegan” to push false narratives about the community in an attempt to discredit the whole movement.
Ok, so (a) you don’t know how language works, and (b) you’re happy to be a complete hypocrite and insist people use your personal definition of vegan while using “carnivore” to refer to what is properly “omnivore”. Nice.
Anyway, an ethical vegan is no “more vegan” than a dietary vegan or an environmental vegan. If you want to have arguments amongst yourselves about who is “better”, go ahead. Just don’t try to do it by twisting the definition of the word itself.
so much drama stems from the vegan community it’s honestly hysterical. Textbook case of why vegans are memed on so hard
And? Go make a new community if you don’t like how one is run, don’t invite misinformation and trolls into all spaces because you don’t agree with how one mod runs their community.
