Quote: "LW admin/mod team seem to have this overbearing and weird belief that they need to tell everyone else what to think and how to think it. How about... you all just fuck off and don't?
Quote: [there were no comments removed in the modlog, but stormesp's recent comment history contains opinions critical of the LW News mod team, read them yourself]
Quotes: [multiple quotes, there are a lot, check out the link]
Result: 15 day ban
=====
Summary
Most interestingly here is that the two users who got permabanned didn't use slurs and didn't call for violence, they merely insulted the moderator team. I guess in the LW News mod team's eyes, that's a horrible, terrible, awful, unforgivable offense, so.......... PERMABAN.
Aniki literally is saying "words are useless, let's resort to violence" but that's a 15 day ban only, OK, makes sense, right????????
Catloaf and Stormesp were actively leaving comments sparring with the moderator team in that thread. To be honest, none of what I'm seeing in these comment seems worthy of a ban. Unless of course, you're a LW mod and you go "this guy is disagreeing with me, therefore they deserve a ban."
Edit: I forgot to write about MindTraveller since that guy was a last minute addition. But look at those aggressive comments, guy deserves a ban for sure.
=====
Conclusion
Not a good look. Does LW want to grow into a good Reddit alternative or do they just want to turn it into Reddit for themselves only?
LW can at least come clean about this and say "yes, the rest of you can get fucked" or maybe they will have a moment of realization at some point "oh my god, are we the baddies?"
LW is partially moderated by people that can't take any criticism and that shows in their rules, sign-up process and admin behavior, not all their admins/mods seem to be like that, but those that are are so very very much. This behavior reminds me of awkwardturtle and i wouldn't be surprised if it is him under another name.
Such behavior can also be seen by another "general purpose instance" (.ml) and slrpnk does not seem to be much different.
Notice which ones have the biggest shares? World, .ml, and Hexbear - three of possibly the shittest instances on Fedi at the moment.
Unfortunately until communities outside of LW become more lively, if most people are looking for drive-by discussion, they will find it at LW. For now.
In order to change that, we can all chip in to start livening up communities outside LW, like Blaze seems to be doing.
I would focus more on the second listing which has 57 for LW, 10 for lemmy.ml and 5 for SJW
Hexbear only has 1
I'm kind of impressed lemm.ee has even 3 top 100 communities due to the predominance of LW.
Also, I just had a look again. The 100th monthly community is starwars memes, and I count at least 2 sopuli communities above, !memes@sopuli.xyz and !ukraine@sopuli.xyz
we can all chip in to start livening up communities outside LW
In my opinion it was a mistake for Lemmy to copy the same failed moderation model as Reddit.
In offline politics, we’ve learned from history that non-democratic governance always leads to the abuse of power. But somehow we imagined that in the online world this same dynamic would not play out. However, I don’t have a fully formed alternative in mind right now. It’s a thorny issue.
And I’m not trying to shit on LW admins here. I generally think they’re doing their best. But they’re only human, and it’s hard not to respond to people being shitty to you without being shitty to them. If you have an issue with what they’re doing, I would highly recommend you approach it in a polite way. Not just because it’s likely to have a better outcome. It’s also just the right thing to do.
Something I learned the very hard way, against my will, is when you have a user who is seriously against the mods, and doesn't really care about the sub, it's often best to just ban them.
Normally, the max I give is a week or two, long enough for most to move on, but some people just get obsessed. Others will literally ask to be banned. Those catch a perma.
Not saying the LW admins are right, but moderation is harder than it looks on the outside. Also ban evasion is basically a feature of Lemmy, it's so easy, and a lot do it.
It sucks, mods suck, being a mod sucks, everything sucks.
It means nothing, because these folks have complete control, but it fundamentally shouldn't be a ban for arguing with a mod or general shit talking. They've used the civility rules to essentially put moving target on what "disagreement" and "ban" looks like.
Telling a mod to fuck off should, at most, result in a deletion.
Lemmy mods jump to scorched earth
Edit tldr many more deletes, far less bans
Edit edit I'm not saying it's cool to just like, be a complete asshole, blow up a community, chase a mod around yelling garbage.
But it seems like mods here are far more trigger happy and "you don't see the world like I do, so banned" than any chat forum I've seen in the past.
It does seem heavy handed, but given how incredibly insufferable and annoying vegans on Lemmy have been recently, I can't say I blame the admins for deciding they've had enough.
Lemmy.world admins made it very clear they considered the statements being made as animal abuse, and that it wasn't welcome on their platform, and the community mods actually banned an admin in response, and reinstated a bunch of deleted comments.
I think the vegans will probably move communities, and it's probably the best option at this point.