- Mod of !anarchism@slrpnk.net posts a great Greta Thunberg quote, but then tries to use it to justify not voting in the upcoming US election
- Multiple people point out that’s very clearly not what she meant
- Removed by mod Removed by mod Removed by mod Removed by mod
Using your mod powers to decide who is allowed and not allowed to speak is not very anarchist of you, @mambabasa@slrpnk.net
YDI: Going to an anarchist space to spout anti-anarchist viewpoints makes the use of mod powers to remove such viewpoints reasonable. It’s like going to a vegan place to argue about the benefits of meat, or going to a feminist place to argue “not all men”.
Some anarchist communities are setup for this sort of debate. Some are not. Both are OK to exist.
Yeah, no. Pointing out that a quote does not support the point of view that someone is trying to use it to support is tacitly not equivalent to “going to an anarchist space to spout anti-anarchist viewpoints.” Your other examples are insufficient analogies, and I hope you can see that.
If your hypothetical vegan space had a moderator who posted a quote of Lynda Carter saying “I try to avoid cheese, dairy, and a lot of meat, but I do like them,” and attempted to interpret that as “Wonder Woman advocates veganism,” it’s perfectly valid to call out the absence of that sentiment in the source quote. Removing such responses, especially on one’s own post, reeks of a petty reaction to criticism.
While I typically find value in your opinions, including the ones I don’t agree with, I’m having trouble mustering respect for this one.
From what I see, Greta was sufficiently vague on this either way. In that case, going to an anarchist space to argue for electoralism using this vagueness as a starting point seems to be sufficient reason for removal. The removed comment from the OP was not even correcting people misrepresenting Greta’s words, it was about starting an argument with someone suggesting 3rd parties (a support which I think also doesn’t belong in an anarchist space, but whatever) with the usual 2-party electoralist talking points
You can read the text of my comments here, or in the modlog:
https://ponder.cat/comment/791878
There were two that were reinforcing Greta Thunberg’s words, which were in no way vague, and then one that could be interpreted as “electoralism.”
Not gonna argue with you, mate. I’m just clearing out that you did not go there to correct misinformation as the person I was replying to made an analogy with, but to argue against 3rd parties and for electoralism in general.
You’re welcome to your interpretation. In my opinion I went there to protect the space against someone who mainly wants to use it to talk about Kamala Harris and the Democrats, and is wearing a fairly unconvincing anarchist disguise and couching their message in terms of “not voting at all” without bothering to disguise it all that much.
Thank you @db0. I co-mod !anarchism@slrpnk.net and administer on SLRPNK. I also support @mambabasa’s moderation decisions.
Is this really what we are going to be? I don’t recall the community every banning people left and right for comments like these. I myself made similar arguments before, where is my ban and comment removal? OP here did not post anything in bad faith, they didn’t come to troll, nobody complained and there also wasn’t a flood of the community. There was a total of 17 comments, 7 were removed, and 5 are just the mod getting into fights with people, and the post was locked after that. This is something you support?
Speaking of the mod, they are aggressive and insulting in every comment they make, almost every post is “don’t vote for Harris”, and this has been flooding the local instance for some time now (11 posts “don’t vote for Harris” in 2 days last week). There is absolutely nothing constructive in this whole story, just one person making as much noise as possible without adding anything constructive and then banning people who make good faith counter-arguments. I thought this was one mod out of control, but if you support all of this, if this is what the slrpnk anarchist community is, I have to say that I am profoundly disappointed in this instance. I can only hope that the majority of slrpnk.net would condemn this whole story, they just aren’t aware.
You are mixing up different things here. I was also not so happy about the high number of low quality memes they posted in a short period of time inciting nothing but anger shortly before a very emotionally loaded election. I mentioned to the mod privately that I found this quite trollish at this exact point in time and they agreed to stop.
The specific post in question was maybe one of the less bad ones (Greta’s take is pretty sensible IMHO) and due to the high number of upvotes it had the usual drive-by comments by non-community members that were mostly off-topic, did nothing but stoke the flames and were also partially offensive*. Maybe the mod overacted somewhat with deleting most of them, but locking the thread was absolutely the right call after it derailed and handing out a temporary (!) community ban to a very argumentative drive-by poster is IMHO good practice to defuse the situation.
*I agree with the mod that you can vote for your lesser evil or strategically whatever, but there is no need to provide lengthy ideological justifications to convince yourself and others that it was something other than a lesser evil vote.
Repeated explicitly political memes spamming the community = “not so happy”
= “nothing but stoke the flames and were also partially offensive” “no need to provide lengthy ideological justifications to convince yourself and others that is was something other than a lesser evil vote”, 10 day ban
What a crock of shit. You’re buying word for word the mod’s revisionist history about “ideological justifications” where I don’t think those ever existed in any of the messages they deleted. Definitely not in mine. See for yourself:
https://ponder.cat/comment/791878
I’m not a troll. I don’t make bad-faith arguments, create political spam, or inflame things to no purpose. This person does, and you’re giving them authority and booting me from the community.
I’m not trying to reopen the discussion by saying this. It’s been and gone, and I’ve moved on from !anarchism@slrpnk.net. I think this person has learned how to manipulate the Slrpnk admins to their liking for their own political ends. Have fun with them.
No one said you were intentionally trolling or making bad faith arguments. What you did was randomly enter a post you disagreed with and started an off-topic argument with the OP using emotionally loaded language to justify something that is in the end just a very mundane lesser evil decision. I am old enough to have seen this spiel out many times during every other election cycle and I find it quite offensive to be exposed to such arguments lacking even the slightest bit of self-reflection, especially in what is supposed to be an Anarchist community.
Here. I’m just going to paste what I said elsewhere in these comments:
I think, if I’m being honest, that the lack of time and moderation resources is at the root of a lot of this. You made a separate comment about that under Blaze’s comment. I think that’s the real issue. I think if someone could wave a magic wand, and have moderation of !anarchism without giving god-power to any given person who’s also an active participant in an argument in the discussion, a lot of these issues would go away. I made a whole post somewhere talking about how mods being an underappreciated volunteer position I think leads inevitably to the “mods are power tripping” perception and pattern, whether or not it’s accurate in any given case.
You’re able to run your instance however you want to run it. Good luck.
There are certainly many things that could be improved about Lemmy’s moderation tools and general setup, I agree.
However the core argument is not about “talking with people who don’t agree with you is a valuable thing to do”. There was no real disagreement about any topic where an exchange of ideas would be beneficial to both sides. Unless you have infinite patience, there is no point in arguing with people that don’t even realize how hypocritical their position is, in fact usually doing so only results in them digging in their heels and arguing even stronger as you are likely challenging some of their deeply held believes. I believe this is what happened, and your reaction in the original post itself and even more so in making this new thread to complain about someone not having infinite patience with you pretty much proves that.
We have two very different opinions about what the purpose of moderation is. Among some other things.
There’s a huge difference between “not having infinite patience” to talk with someone, and deleting comments from several different people who are trying to have a discussion with each another about how they disagree with your point of view, thus driving the conversation to some other location where people come to a broad consensus that you’re out of line. Honestly, that’s part of why I posted here, to serve as a check to make sure I wasn’t the one being awful. There seemed to be a broad consensus formed after all the discussion, which I’m happy with. The slrpnk authorities as a group plus db0, seem to have their own consensus, which of course they’ve got a right to do.
If you’ve read some of my comments and exchanges and you’ve decided that talking with me would take infinite patience, then okay. If you’ve read Mambabasa’s comments and think they deserve a position of authority, then okay. I don’t seem to have any issues talking and interacting with a bunch of anarchists, and presumably a wide variety of people, in these comments. Probably I will continue to do so. Slrpnk can do what it likes.
I dont know why you would need such conspiracy theories when there is a much simpler way to explain it, which was confirmed by most folks(mods and admins alike): We are fine with the moderation actions taken, we dont need to be manipulated for this.
Its quite something to make up a conspiracy after writing this just a few sentences earlier:
I haven’t seen evidence of a strong majority being fine with the decision.
Among slrpnk commenters on this post I believe the split was 3-3, or possibly 3-2-1.
Taking into account the comments from dbzer0 folks, it goes to 5-5 or 5-4-1.
Self-proclaimed anarchists from other instances represent, by my accounting, 1 more “for” and 4 more “against.”
The other comments from users who may or may not identify as anarchists appear to slant towards against by about the same margin.
It could be that one or both of us carries a bias in how we perceive support that aligns with what we already believe. I tried to be cognizant of that when I scrolled through to count, but I’m fallible. If I’ve misrepresented, it wasn’t on purpose. That said, I think at best there’s a somewhat even split. I don’t think you can claim that as “most folks” being fine with the actions taken.
Additionally, the way the mod conducted themselves in these comments doesn’t inspire much confidence that they moderated in good faith
Mambabasa’s posting history at the time I looked at it started with:
I don’t think it’s inflammatory or a conspiracy theory to say that there’s a visible pattern there which points to a very un-anti-electoral goal for their participation. If I was doing half the spamminess of participation that their history evinces, or done half as much inflammatory participation as they’ve done in these comments, I’d leave the platform on my own, feeling bad that I’d done that much to bring badness to the platform.
Clearly. Like I said, have fun with it.
SLRPNK is an intentionally both an international instance, as well as an ideologically diverse instance. We give a lot of autonomy to moderators. Despite being administered by anarchists and having a significant membership that identifies as anarchist, we expect our anti-fascist moderators to follow the politics of their conscience rather than toe a particular anarchist line. Solarpunk is an internationalist movement, and should not be dominated by any one country or culture.
These two goals sometimes create tension. A significant portion of our international audience is from the United States, and some SLRPNK moderators have filled their community feeds with Democratic Party propaganda. I guarantee @mambabasa does not want Trump to win, and criticizing the hypocrisy of liberal politicians and the losing proposition of elevating electoral politics above direct action is not an endorsement of fascism.
His meme posts exist in the context of a local feed full of United States election centered news in what is supposed to be a haven for internationalists and anarchists. They’re a reminder that anarchists are not edgy Democrats, and if that idea is offensive, you can unsubscribe and block !anarchism and !notvoting@slrpnk.net. Other people existing who don’t share your politics and have their own spaces should not be so threatening to someone with confidence in their own ideology.
Do you have an example of this? Which community?
You are letting people into your space to use it for political propaganda, because they are making a pretty thin and implausible claim to being on your team. I don’t think this person is on your team. For about two weeks, they have been posting constantly about Kamala Harris and the Democrats. They can’t keep their story straight as to whether they know who Jill Stein is. They constantly accuse anyone who dissents from their viewpoint of various wild strawman horrible things, repeatedly, and even after repeated clarifications.
Regardless of whether you agree with me on that or how you feel about the original issue, they’re representing the anarchist community in an incredibly poor light. I think you should take some time to look over all the comments here. There’s a group of people who are perfectly open to anarchism, reading and learning about it, and talking about moderation, having differences of opinion but working them out like normal humans. Then there’s one person cursing at everyone and accusing them of all kinds of weird imaginary crimes, wanting to kill Palestinians on purpose with that as the only possible explanation for their statements, along with “evilism.”
Are you really wanting to give this person a position of authority, to represent your community? I think that some of these political bad actors have developed the skill of putting on the right tribal affiliation so they’ll get cover from genuine members of the community, even though when looked at in an objective light, they are clearly acting in toxic ways, and their motivation is pretty obviously related to the election, nothing to do with anything beyond the electoral.
You’re free to grant authority in your community to whoever you want, but I don’t think this person is showing any kind of good judgement or good faith, or showing your community in a positive light.
I don’t need to agree with someone on all points for them to be “on my team” - a diversity of politics, experience, and opinion is a strength, not a weakness. @mambabasa represents themselves, and in so doing elevates anarchism as an ideology that celebrates the lived experiences and politics of diverse sets of people.
@mambabasa and I differ in that he has often taken the line that !anarchism should focus on outreach while I have suggested more action be taken to prevent it from being dominated by non-anarchist voices. His gentle 10-day bans are a compromise between our divergent visions for the space, and a measured response to all of you as a group dog-piling on him in the now locked thread.
Your impression of the reception they’re getting within the wider community is not at all the same as mine. I think they’re doing anything but elevating anarchism as an ideology. More than a couple of anarchists have felt the need to chime in within the comments unprompted, to make clear that his actions don’t represent anarchism as they understand it.
If you think the length of the ban is relevant at all to my continued participation in those spaces, you’ve misunderstood my reaction here significantly. I only learned I was banned when I went to unsubscribe. That was before I learned that the whole Slrpnk team seems to be in favor of this as a moderation philosophy.
You used to be mozz@mbin.grits.dev, right? Ponder.cat’s stylesheet looks nice. How does Lemmy compare to MBin from an admin perspective?
Interesting, it’s been a while since I’ve seen that name
oh fuck. yeah. no way they should be in an anarchist community anyway.
they are not a safe person. their pattern of “investigating” other users is toxic as fuck.
not too mention their conspiratorial “everyone is a trump supporter in sheep’s clothing” accusations every time they find a principaled disagreement.
fuck them.