Hello I’m not a person who is affected by this community moderator but I’m posting on behalf of people who are, since they don’t seem to know of this community yet. I attempted to reach some via DM but I’m not sure they’ll respond. So I’m making this post since I feel this needs to be addressed.
Recently I was made aware of a community that appeared randomly on Lemmy.world. It seems to be a troll community given the type of content, but the reason I’m posting about it here specifically is that this mod seems to be banning anyone who points this out or goes against his narrative. Furthermore he is only using the autoremove on ban function, not removing any content the users have posted, which I believe is deliberate in attempt to prevent the content from showing up under the modlog and revealing the hypocrisy.
Some samples of comments:
Comment from: @glimse@lemmy.world
Everything else you posted has been pretty cringe but what he fuck is up with this one, dude lol
comment from: @rain_worl@lemmy.world
comment from: @rain_worl@lemmy.world
comment from: @the_toast_is_gone@lemmy.world
First off, nice new community. I look forward to days of quality posts such as this./s
Second, how many Linux distros have this level of data collection, and what is their estimated market share?
All of these were retrieved from the API, even though they aren’t included in the modlogs, I could’ve included more but it’s kind of a time consuming process to look for them and retrieve them. Viewing removed comments is easier on Lemmy than it is on Reddit but it still isn’t easy.
What do you guys think, does this seem like power-tripping? Also does this person’s content seem like blatant troll content?
CC: @glimse@lemmy.world @rain_worl@lemmy.world @the_toast_is_gone@lemmy.world
People who’s comments I mentioned, I CCed them so they know I did this on their behalf
I think that there are key differences between
Sometimes the boundary between both is not clear - but this community, unless it’s a troll comm, falls cleanly into the second case. Specially given how opaque the moderator is trying to be (check how none of the removals appear in the modlog).
I think it’s very clearly a troll community since really the only person posting there is the mod, most of which are very transparently troll content, like this one hating on the idea of OpenSource and Free licenses for some really weird reason, that hasn’t actually been clarified. Someone said to me when I showed that to them that they could be an alt-right corporate shill, but I don’t have enough information to come to that conclusion. Only thing I can clearly tell is that they are very obviously a troll.
And yeah I definitely agree that these types of communities are very harmful, and definitely something we should nip in the bud before they get out of hand and start spreading disinformation, as well as fostering toxic or even dangerous sentiment.
I think that many people here would benefit from you going further into why it is harmful to society, since people seem to be nonchalant about this issue, or worse, are dismissing the post as an opinion piece.
OK! Short version:
Long version:
What I called “idiocy” and “misinformation” there can be rephrased as “not thinking rationally” and “incorrect and/or harmful beliefs” respectively.
Thinking rationally is doing things like this:
Thinking rationally is essential to prevent you from holding incorrect and/or harmful beliefs - because, if you have access to good and true information, and use rationality on it, your conclusions will be consistently good and true too. But only if you think rationally.
(Programmers’ analogy: if your algorithm is rubbish, then no good input saves you from getting rubbish output.)
And what you believe on has a huge impact, on both you and the people interacting with you. In some this is clear; for example, someone who believes that “all white mushrooms are safe to eat!” might get someone eating a death cap, or even eat one themself. Or, for more realistic examples:
Someone might say “isn’t this overblown in this case? It’s just a community against Looniks and freewarez!”. Well, no, it isn’t overblown. Our lives revolve around software in the XXI century, like it or not - it’s a data centre used by the hospital, it’s your morning news, it’s someone spying on you, it’s a country spying on another… all those involve software - sometimes libre software, always some sort of operating system.
But even if we disregard the above, the fact that someone is promoting lack of rational thinking (what I called “idiocy”) and incorrect beliefs (what I called “misinformation”) is bound to get people used to those things as if they were OK. Thinking rationally is not just an “I did it once, so I’m good to go”. It’s a lot like brushing your teeth - you need to create some habit to avoid the associated [mind / mouth] problems and have good [mental / buccal] hygiene.
As such, I do not think that we should give this community a free pass. Even if it’s a troll community, as both DraconicNEO and me believe it to be, it’s still promoting misinformation and idiocy, and should be handled as such.