Asking for moderator Rooki's removal for misconduct
Asking for moderator Rooki's removal for misconduct
In my view as a long-time moderator, the purpose of moderation is conflict resolution and ensuring the sitewide rules are followed. As reported today by !vegan@lemmyworld, moderator Rooki's vision appears to be that their personal disagreement with someone else's position takes priority over the rules and is enough to remove comments in a community they don't moderate, remove its moderators for the comments, and effectively resort to hostile takeover by posting their own comment with an opposing view (archived here) and elevating it for visiblity.
The removed comments relate to vegan cat food. As seen in the modlog, Rooki removed a number of pretty balanced comments explaining that while there are problematic ways to feed cats vegan, if done properly, cats can live on vegan cat food. Though it is a controversial position even among vegans, there is scientific research supporting it, like this review from 2023 or the papers co-authored by professor Andrew Knight. These short videos could also work as a TL;DR of his knowledge on the matter. As noted on Wikipedia, some of the biggest animal advocacy organizations support the notion of vegan cat food, while others do not. Vegan pet food brands, including Ami, Evolution Diet, and Benevo have existed for years and are available throughout the world, clearly not prohibited by law in countries with laws against animal abuse.
To summarize, even if you don't agree with the position of vegan cat food being feasible, at the very least you have to acknowledge that the matter is not clear-cut. Moreover, there is no rule of lemmy.world that prohibits those types of conversations unless making a huge stretch to claim that it falls under violent content "promoting animal abuse" in the context of "excessive gore" and "dismemberment".
For the sake of the argument, even if we assume that the truth is fully on Rooki's side and discussions of vegan cat food is "being a troll and promoting killing pets", the sitewide rules would have to be updated to reflect this view, and create a dangerous precedent, enabling banning for making positive comments about junk food (killing yourself), being parents who smoke (killing your kids), being religious "because it's not scientific" and so on. Even reddit wouldn't go that far, and there are plenty of conversations on vegan cat food on reddit.
Given Rooki's behavior and that it has already resulted in forcing the vegan community out of lemmy.world and with more likely to follow, I believe the only right course of action is to remove them as a moderator to help restore the community's trust in the platform and reduce the likelihood of similar events in the future.
What the fuck is "vegan cat food"? I sometimes can't understand people.
Ok. I get it. As people, we are bad. We mass husbandry just for food, modifying them with artificial selection for productivity. So I can understand veganism (although I am not vegan).
But have we really reached the point where we stop animals from eating meat? Either I'm a bigoted idiot or people are out of their minds.
Hey, check it out! I was right in thinking that the studies indicating good outcomes for the pets were poorly structured.
We found that there has been limited scientific study on the impact of vegan diets on cat and dog health. In addition, the studies that have been conducted tended to employ small sample sizes, with study designs which are considered less reliable in evidence-based practice. Whilst there have been several survey studies with larger sample sizes, these types of studies can be subject to selection bias based on the disposition of the respondents towards alternative diets
There aren’t studies saying that it is dangerous for the pets, which is a little surprising to me. Long story short the jury’s still out. But IMO it is completely fine for the admins of an instance to come down firmly against potentially animal-abusive practices, just as they would against political misinformation or nonconsensual pornography or what have you, regardless of how much in favor of those things are the members of the community promoting it.
Hi all,
For the sake of transparency, we are responding here, as remaining silent will also send a message to the community. We are actively reviewing all the information posted in this thread and all other linked sources. The entire team is being brought up to speed on the events that have taken place, but this process may take some time. We are all in different time zones, and many of us have professional and personal obligations that may take priority. Please bear with us, as there is a lot to review. We promise that after our review, we will respond to the community.
Thank you.
The FHF / LW Admin Team
What the hell. There's just a disagreement, no need to use admin override powers. Just let it be. Let them have their sub. It's not like they're recruiting for Al Qaeda.
I really don't give a damn about this particular fight about cat food. But I do worry about admins or mods who can't sometimes just let something slide. Like cops always looking to escalate
I fully support an admin stepping in to stop poorly researched pseudo science with an aura of fake legitimacy to be spread on Lemmy as a whole although I don't use (dot)World I still see your shit on my feed
I haven’t looked into this (nor will I), but if the situation is as described, I support revoking mod access. Let’s not discuss veganism, pet food, or other off-topic issues. The discussion is about mod behavior on Lemmy. If anyone wants to check user Rose’s claims and show up with receipts, that’d be appreciated, I think, by all.
What is with this? Why can't people be level headed and chill? Good god, people need to seriously touch some grass.
Stop whining that people don't approve of you abusing your pets. Rooki did nothing wrong, they're just fighting vegan disinformation that harms pets
While I agree that the behavior was problematic, I personally think a mature apology and acknowledgement that the science is not necessarily on his side would be a sufficient resolution, if it was offered openly and willingly.
Animal welfare is an understandably passionate topic, so I can empathize with a person's feelings leading them to decide that what they were doing was necessary to protect the animals that they care about. Because the fundamental motive was a positive one, and only the chosen expression of this motive was poor conduct, I think redemption is a potentially viable path forward that may be preferable to harsher consequences. We could see this as an educational and growing opportunity, if we wished, and forgiveness has merits of its own when there is no genuine malice present.
I should probably disclose that I am not a member of that community, so I personally was not impacted by these actions and may be underestimating just how badly people feel about this all. Being myself an active carnivore that has been vegetarian in the past (well, pescatarian tbf) and having experience with both schools of thought though, I do feel like I can appreciate the thought-patterns that led both sides to their chosen actions.
This community is a joke, man. There’s zero feedback—at best, you're ignored, and at worst, you get banned from the whole instance without warning. The unnamed mods are running this place like it's their personal dictatorship, flexing their power at every turn and crushing anyone who steps out of line. It’s like we’re living in some twisted version of Reddit, but with an extra dose of authoritarianism.
The rest of mods? They just sit back, probably too busy admiring themselves or too clueless to care, letting everything spiral out of control. And that 1% of users pumping out 99.99% of the content? They’re just feeding the mods’ power trip (waiting for my coffee to get hot enough).
If you’re hoping for any sort of response or accountability, don’t bother—there’s zero feedback if you’re lucky, and an instant ban if you’re not. This whole community is a mess, but the LW instance? That’s even funnier, like a bad parody of a bad platform. It’s all just one big dumpster fire, and we’re stuck watching it burn.
TLDR: where do i sign up?