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.

  • Cataphract
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    2 months ago

    Ok, I tend to think I’m a decent human being but I don’t understand your logic and I can only see your comments as negative. Please help me understand the differences in our thought train.

    • People are downvoting content (abusing the intended purpose of a downvote) they’re seeing without even being involved in a community
    • Mod of that community bans users (common with vote brigading) who aren’t real active users, users can no longer see the content satisfying your dismay of seeing it in your feed (instead of blocking the community)
    • You then accuse the mod of stopping people downvoting who don’t like the community who aren’t a part of that community?

    You’re actually acknowledging you’ve “downvoted a lot of their memes” because of previous un-related content, continuing to abuse the downvote and even pointed out the mod was effective at stopping the vote brigading from people outside the community. I have no clue about the Vegan situation myself, but I thought a mod had completely autonomy to run their community the way they want and the point of decentralization was the ability to move into another space when needed.

    • pjwestin@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      You’re actually acknowledging you’ve “downvoted a lot of their memes” because of previous un-related content

      No I’m not. I could see how you could choose to misinterpret what I said like that, but I didn’t say that, and I’ll rephrase it so that there is no question as to what I’m saying; they share self-righteous, antagonistic memes, and when those memes wind up in my feed, I downvote them. There are also plenty of neutral posts (articles, etc.) from that community that I don’t downvote, but when shit like this, and this, and this ends up in my feed, I downvote it.

      I could block the instance, but I see absolutely no reason to silence myself and allow their shitty opinions to go unchallenged. Why should I hide from their content and allow their community to insult me freely? I’m using the downvote button, the most passive way to express displeasure online, to respond to someone who is insulting me for my lifestyle. Why the fuck is the appropriate answer supposedly, “well, you should instead just hide from the people insulting you.” Why isn’t the response to the community, “Yeah, if you insult a lot of people, you get a lot of downvotes, maybe stop posting such hostile shit.”

      • Cataphract
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        2 months ago

        I’m not a vegan, none of those memes you’ve posted make me feel personally attacked nor do I feel insulted. I’m glad for the clarification, but I was expecting something much worse like a vegan death cult manifesto by the reactions here.

        You don’t want to silence yourself from a community you’re not a part of by your own admission? Do you really feel it’s your duty to go into every community and mandate their content and tone to your liking?

        I guess you can look at it as “hiding” to curate your feed by removing the communities you’re not interested in. I don’t think you’re really challenging their opinions, just kinda being a douche. I see plenty of shit posted about windows or apple users, we’re not pitch forking everyone that posts a spicy meme. We insult the rich and powerful etc, what class of protection are you proposing to secure? The omnivores? Who’s going to police what’s hostile or insulting? I don’t understand what this call to action is trying to implement or suggest besides outside policing of communities which is one of the reasons the fediverse was made to combat that type of control.

        • pjwestin@lemmy.world
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          2 months ago

          We insult the rich and powerful etc, what class of protection are you proposing to secure? The omnivores? Who’s going to police what’s hostile or insulting? I don’t understand what this call to action is trying to implement or suggest besides outside policing of communities which is one of the reasons the fediverse was made to combat that type of control.

          What the ever-loving fuck are you talking about? No one’s asking for anyone to police the Vegan community. They’re free to post as many obnoxious memes as they like, it’s just fucked up to block people for a downvote. Yeah, a lot of Linux communities post shit about Apple or Windows users, but if the mods start combing through the downvotes to ban anyone who disagrees with them, I’d like to think we’d recognize that as an abnormal behavior. What is so hard about this?

          Edit: It looks like the other mods on /c/Vegan have chosen to remove the Mod responsible for this ban wave, so hopefully we’re all on the same page that this is abnormal behavior, and not how mods are meant to operate.

          • Cataphract
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            2 months ago

            I think I can explain it. I think it’s abnormal behavior to downvote outside of misinformation or out of context. I also think it’s abnormal to ban anyone who downvotes, but both of you have the right to do so. Neither of you broke a site-wide rule, unless you didn’t follow the guidelines in their community sidebar before participating. Them choosing to remove the mod is the communities right and I support that. I look at the form of downvoting you’re conducting as a form of vote brigading (socially, not directed by an individual but a group effort nonetheless with evidence by the bans). If bans for non-participation go out and downvotes continue, they can better get a grasp of what the actual community wants. Atm they’re just following what the “All” feed tells them without being able to differentiate.

            • pjwestin@lemmy.world
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              2 months ago

              I look at the form of downvoting you’re conducting as a form of vote brigading

              You’re welcome to look on that however you like, but that’s not what brigading is; actual brigading is a coordinated attack by a group of accounts to affect the vote count of a specific community or user. That’s why it’s called brigading; you’re supposed to be part of a brigade.

              It’s great that you only downvote things taken out of context or misinformation, but it’s not abnormal to use voting to express approval or disapproval for opinions. The vote counts on this thread show that most people are using voting this way.

              • Cataphract
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                2 months ago

                thanks for ignoring my statement on the difference in brigading so you could brake off into a diatribe -_-. The Jan 6th wasn’t a brigade, just ask Trump. Just need some social boogeymen to stir up trouble and it becomes a “natural” problem, not a brigade. “The vote counts on this thread show that most people are using voting this way.”, in this space, about lemmy drama and a small echo chamber.

                Look I’ll be honest and let you know you just seem like a spoiled down-voter after all of our back and forth. You don’t follow the communities rules, you don’t belong to the community, you constantly downvote in a negative way, and the only people who have broken a rule, is this post with all the people talking about the ban on here (instead of privately reaching out like is spelled out).

                fighting over this, but I don’t really care. As long as it banning people for downvotes doesn’t become normalized by Lemmy Mods, this doesn’t affect me.

                You don’t care about the community, only your ability to downvote on anything you want

                • I’ve never posted in that sub
                • I’ve never commented
                • their posts are self-righteous
                • they’re trying to artificially lower the number of downvotes their content gets

                By people who never participate or even belong in the community, who downvotes because of … feelings. You’re the perfect example of the Paradox of tolerance, by allowing your views you will only wish to silence and put down other’s who you don’t agree with.