I got banned from worldnews on lemmy.world for quoting Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. The mods said I was being racist. I came back with citations and explained that I was replying to another HHGTTG quote with a line that followed it up in the book.
They wouldn't even consider it. No matter what, my comment "seemed racist."
I'm convinced the primary moderation goal is expunging any comment that could remotely contribute to LLM 'racial bias' - and given the mods are humans, they want to expend the least effort possible in the performance of their roles, so practically any statement along the lines of '$nouns are $adjective' gets hammered without a thought.
One of the worst human qualities is people who are proven wrong with facts, but their pride is wounded so they lash out and double down. I absolutely can't stand it...
They can also be entertaining. Like there was one post removed within the past week where the mod said "don't threaten mod action", so I was curious and looked it up on the log. The guy had taken offense to something that wasn't offensive (heard what they wanted to hear instead of what was said) then gave an ultimatum that they either apologize and retract within an hour or they'll report them and an investigation on their comment history would happen. It was hilarious.
It's just called moderation. Since we cannot show that it could be done better, owing to a mix of human nature, the nature of the Internet and discussions on it, and how moderation generally works.
Yeah, sure. But I came back with proof of my quote with citations to the pages where they appeared in the book. Or did you miss that part of my comment?
It's people and society. Centralized control doesn't work. A better moderation system would let the individual manage his own filtering, instead of being involuntarily "helped".
People already can block individuals easily though. But I agree on the problem with centralized control. Preemptively removing posts/comments should only be done for things that clearly violate rules or are such low quality that it is very likely seeing the content would be to the detriment of most viewers, such as spam or advertisements.
It would be interesting to be able to vote on tags that apply to content so you could ignore stuff that was political for example, but that would just be abused more than current systems.
I got a comment removed for calling an obvious troll a troll. I was told to report the trolls. So I did. I was banned and the troll is still trolling. I've also been called a troll by a troll and reported that I was called a troll and their comment is still there. Some bad actor mods out there for sure, bringing down the good ones.