this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2024
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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.

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[–] pjwestin@lemmy.world 96 points 1 month ago (16 children)

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.

[–] lvxferre@mander.xyz 55 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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.

[–] AceTKen@lemmy.ca 21 points 1 month ago (1 children)

That was kind of what I was attempting to do here. Is there another way to do that?

[–] lvxferre@mander.xyz 26 points 1 month ago (2 children)

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:

  1. The issue (they're banning people left and right)
  2. Concerns (e.g. they might be gaming the system),
  3. This thread (to show that it isn't just your personal pet peeve, plenty people are pissed.)
[–] pjwestin@lemmy.world 14 points 1 month ago

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.

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[–] astrsk@fedia.io 12 points 1 month ago

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.

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[–] DocMcStuffin@lemmy.world 57 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (3 children)

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.

[–] hemko@lemmy.dbzer0.com 36 points 1 month ago (2 children)

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.

[–] remotelove@lemmy.ca 28 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

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!

[–] subignition@fedia.io 25 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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.

[–] hemko@lemmy.dbzer0.com 12 points 1 month ago

Yep, same person

[–] edgemaster72@lemmy.world 33 points 1 month ago (2 children)

"the first amendment holds" lol, I wasn't aware Lemmy was part of the US government

[–] ByteOnBikes 22 points 1 month ago (1 children)
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[–] lvxferre@mander.xyz 21 points 1 month ago
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[–] ccunning@lemmy.world 51 points 1 month ago (3 children)

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.

[–] AceTKen@lemmy.ca 20 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] OpenStars@discuss.online 16 points 1 month ago

img

I hope this is not in poor taste, but it seemed to fit? :-P

[–] ccunning@lemmy.world 16 points 1 month ago

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.

[–] henfredemars@infosec.pub 18 points 1 month ago

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.

[–] toiletobserver@lemmy.world 10 points 1 month ago (1 children)
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[–] ResoluteCatnap@lemmy.ml 50 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (10 children)

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).

[–] barsquid@lemmy.world 24 points 1 month ago

That's the most fragile thing I have ever heard of.

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[–] rustyfish@lemmy.world 46 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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.

[–] MapleEngineer@lemmy.world 15 points 1 month ago (9 children)

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.

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[–] systemglitch@lemmy.world 29 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Mods abusing power, is just a normal day on social media. Power always corrupts.

I'm also banned because I believe cats cannot be healthy vegans.

[–] finitebanjo@lemmy.world 27 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (5 children)

The Vegan Community Mod vs Admin drama aside they're probably in the process of transferring to an instance where animal cruelty is explicitly allowed, so I wouldn't expect them to be very welcoming on the current instance.

[–] EABOD25@lemm.ee 26 points 1 month ago (6 children)

Bet you're on the ban list now. Shit! I'm talking to you. Guess I'm on the ban list now too

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[–] OpenStars@discuss.online 26 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

This post may be relevant: https://slrpnk.net/post/11069853, i.e. perhaps one of those mods is using this same bot. So yeah, you seriously and literally might have been banned bc of a couple of downvotes in some totally unrelated community!?!? As that post says:

even a single downvoted comment could result in a ban.

e.g. I just found out that I've been banned from a community that I've literally never heard about, on an instance I rarely visit, as a result of this bot. Though I never got a message about it, nor does the modlog give a length of time for it? (Nor can I even see the ban in several different modlogs on instances other than Lemmy.World - so there may be issues with federating this action? The community seems to be new, created in the last month, and filled with a deluge of posts from the same few people - so very likely nobody from my instances has subscribed to it yet, and perhaps that caused the ban for it to also not be propagated? I dunno. It's odd to not see a length of time for it though - does it look different to someone who has an account on Lemmy.World, like with an expiration that somehow wouldn't show for someone not logged in?)

And even there, aside from how that post calls us "jerks", and the community too (thereby exposing hypocrisy - bc everyone that they don't like are labeled as "jerks", while they rise above us all, by their own way of thinking...bc they are never downvoted?) it seems to be malfunctioning, bc I most definitely don't have more downvotes than upvotes, either overall or it mentions over the past month - not that we are even allowed to see those? Perhaps it is counting per-community somehow? I do have this comment in !lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world that people seemed to dislike greatly. Probably I was too serious, in a community dedicated to shitposting? :-P And now therefore I banned from this community that I, and probably mostly all of us, have never so much as heard of?

Summary: some children are attempting to play around with what they seem to think is AI, and are now weaponizing downvoting in an attempt to cheap out on modding effort. Not only that, but they are using my data without my consent, or apparently much thought into it at all. And to top it all off, they call anyone they want to as "jerks" - bc obviously anyone who ever receives downvotes, even once, even on a single comment, in an entirely unrelated community, qualifies for that label, don't you agree? /s I think you should form your own opinion though, as to who may be acting like jerks here:-).

Edit: the bot post has a spoiler tag at at the end, but with nothing inside except a horizontal line? i.e., they don't seem very experienced with markup, and presumably therefore with actual coding as well?

Edit 2: omg reading through those comments - it just keeps getting better and better! Especially how readily they take to criticism, but this comment also caught my eye:

Some people were getting banned just because of a single downvote from one of the admins, applied to a reasonable comment, outweighed the whole community’s consensus.

Wow, just wow. The author also did not seem to care about the load this will put onto the instance servers, to be federating hundreds or thousands of community bans, and then lifting them, and then reapplying them again later, however often this bot will be ran. More to the point, modlogs seem like they will become no longer human-readable? (unless perhaps you could filter out all actions taken by these bot accounts - which I can't see how to do) As such, I wonder if this will be treated by other instance admins as an attack against the Fediverse? What would the limit be, I can only guess - 100 community bans per account per day? 1k? 10k? We might soon find out, whether we want to or not!?

[–] lvxferre@mander.xyz 14 points 1 month ago (11 children)

If they're indeed using this bot or something similar the amount of idiocy goes up the roof.

The bot author outright says that the bot is experimental. Automatic bans are stupid and silly. Using votes as grounds for banning is something that should be done only to address vote manipulation, or something damn serious. And it should never be done based on a single vote, but on voting patterns.

And they're showing the exact same lack of transparency as a certain instance, except that instead of "rule 1 and 2" it's "rule 5".

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[–] ech@lemm.ee 12 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

This is such a bad idea. Voting already achieves what they are doing - increasing the visibility of "good" content and minimizing the visibility of "bad" content through crowd sourcing. 1) Banning people for using that system is seriously off base, and 2) turning that system into outright bans from interacting at all is way too far.

This is an automatic system to rigidly create and maintain echo chambers. Really hoping this doesn't spread.

*Also also - administering bans based on how and where people interact with content, even as mild as up or down voting, is a dangerous choice. Utilizing a purity test of who's allowed to interact where isn't going to make Lemmy a better place.

[–] OpenStars@discuss.online 11 points 1 month ago

The author of the bot has already been challenged. It looks like (although I'm no admin so I cannot confirm) they simply downvoted that dissenting opinion, responding with derision (this we all of us can read since it's public, note no /s tag either, though sarcasm heavily layered on), and proceeded to do whatever they wanted regardless of consent, by anyone.

i.e. they aren't simply turning away applications to join a community, that's 100% within their rights, although even that would be more than a little weird to scrape through every single downvote from every community across the entire Fediverse in order to make that determination. But even so, at least the applicant would be asking for it (hopefully with appropriate informed consent). Instead, they seem to be proactively judging the entire population present across the entire Fediverse, regardless of whether we've ever so much as even heard of their own community, and then filling up our modlogs with the manifestation of their disapproval. Like okay Karen, I don't need you spamming my (public!) inbox with every thought that crosses your mind, that my post history happens to remind you of! :-P

I noted elsewhere that this is exactly what Trump supporters have talked about wanting to do, both online but also even irl as in Project 2025. However, the cat is out of the bag - we are not offered the choice to avoid this occurrence altogether, our only choice now is how we will respond to these attacks on the principles of freedom of expression, and also the ability to preserve the modlogs to be human-readable rather than continually polluted with bot actions, taken by every community that we have zero interest in to begin with, until they wormed their way to becoming the center of attention (Karen) with their expressions (Karen) of what they (Karen) seem to think of us, at every given moment that they decide is right for them to divulge that "information".

[–] the_crotch@sh.itjust.works 22 points 1 month ago

I love the irony of a vegan community eating themselves

[–] PugJesus@lemmy.world 18 points 1 month ago

How utterly bizarre and yet entirely predictable based on recent events.

[–] Donjuanme@lemmy.world 17 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] Zess@lemmy.world 13 points 1 month ago

I'm so tired of hearing about this community. They should change their name to ShittyAntiCarnivoreMemes and move to .ml.

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