Was recently banned from a whole bunch of DB0 communities for, as best as I can gather, downvoting once when I viewed by All (potentially accidentally while scrolling).
Important notes:
- I don’t use scripts.
- I don’t mass-downvote Communities. If I see a post I generally don’t like when browsing All, I may downvote one post, block the Community and move on.
- Some of the communities I was banned from don’t have any posts in them so I wouldn’t have been able to downvote anything.
- Of all of these Communities, in my history I downvoted one post in one of them. Voting in this manner is not vote manipulation. It’s quite literally a feature of the platform and as a mod of another Community, I would consider it pretty good etiquette.
- One of my bans reads “Appeal Granted, not a brigading member” but I’m still banned.
- I don’t troll.
WTF is going on here?
EDIT - Updated Info from the conversation below: In the initial image, you can see two “ban waves.”
The 10 bans three months ago stem from a single downvote in one Community. It was @[email protected] See here: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/34853477
I was called out by name for a single downvote and culled from a score of Communities I did not participate in by them.
The other bans from two months ago are from four total downvotes over a 10-month timeframe in one Community.
I have also stated in this thread that I don’t have issues with AI-gen images, but there are shoddy ones and well-done ones.
EDIT 2: Now unbanned from the ten Communities listed as “3 months ago” in my initial image, but have been banned from three more because of this thread with the reason given being “self-proclaimed anti-AI brigader” which are two things I didn’t claim to be. God dammit Lemmy…
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That mods/admins can even see who is downvoting is, by far, my least favorite thing about Lemmy.
It is an invariable aspect of lemmy though. It is open source. Anyone can make a server. The servers need to have a database for the up- downvotes and they need the info specific to the user, so it can’t just be said by another instance “heres 1000 downvotes, deal with it”.
E.g. on reddit and any other corporate social media the admins can also see exactly who up- and downvoted stuff.
Admins, not mods. Enormous distinction here. And I don’t understand why that information can’t be anonymized or attached to a user identifying number rather than username, but I will admit I’m not a develop not a sysadmin so I am a layman speaking outside my field here.
As anyone can spool up an instance and become admin there, this information is inadvertently available.
If it would be some anonymized information, it would make it more difficult to validate it. Again any server then could just toss around numbers without any meaning. If the numbers are static, it won’t be too difficult to de-anonymize them.
I feel like this is a solution in search of a problem. Has faulty or malicious vote manipulation via instance federation actually been an issue before?
yup many times, sock puppets exist in abundance on dedicated instances or derelict instances. We have gone through many rounds of spam/vote manipulation cleaning at the admin level. This can be done through pinging the admins incase they missed it, or defederating from instances that are not behaving well.
The reason it doesn’t seem so bad now is due to the attention the admins are paying to the blatant methods. (i.e. 300 votes from a instance in a minute from randomized user names)
Think of the most basic spam:
Advertising something, then give it a bunch of upvotes.
These comments are an eye opening experience for me; and I’m not sure I like that feature. It seems whatever the good it does, it’s open for endless abuse because at the end of the day, we are all human and petty at times.
They should really just remove up/down -votes.
And how would content be organised and curated?
lets just do forums where everything is sorted by recency of comments and instead of bitching about voting people bitch about 25 year old threads getting necroed
I also got banned from some communities for “systematic downvoting”. I’d estimate I’ve downvoted maybe 5 or so posts by a moderator promoting a harmful diet, which was apparently enough for being “systematic”. The mod also banned me from other random communities I had never interacted with in the first place. But oh well, nothing of value was lost for me. Just kinda sucks that mods can use this to make it seem like their statements are less controversial than they are.
Lemmy (and Reddit) are a collection of little dictatorships. But dictatorship is bad, I think, maybe.
The true power of the fediverse is that little dictatorships should, in principle, balance out each other
If you want to have a debate about my diet, I’m open to that - but just downvoting every post you see because you don’t like it… that doesn’t work for me - that isn’t the kind of community I want to grow.
I don’t want to debate your diet, just want to add my voice of disagreement to it (i.e. downvote). There was nothing systematic about any of my votes. I came upon your posts without seeking them out, read them and thought they shouldn’t be promoted, so I downvoted them to reduce their algorithmic visibility and voice my general opposition. I upvoted people who argued against your points, as I agreed with them and wanted to promote their viewpoints. In my opinion, that’s quite a normal way to use this platform. Otherwise, do you also ban people who only upvote you without stating why they agree with your points?
That is a fair way to use the platform, since private communities are not yet a thing we have this weird disconnect between small communities and people who don’t like small communities.
My view is I’m trying to create a safe space for people to talk about a thing, but random people keep looking around at all activity and exporting their negativity since they don’t like the small community. So this weird “please block things you don’t like” state is the best option we have until subscriber only communities become a real feature.
Let’s say you don’t speak German, when you see the german posts in the ALL feed do you downvote them each and every time because they are in a language you don’t understand?
Let’s say you don’t speak German, when you see the german posts in the ALL feed do you downvote them each and every time because they are in a language you don’t understand?
That’s not a very good comparison, they were specifically stating they down voted something they thought was harmful and shouldn’t be promoted.
For your example it would be closer to seeing a post written in German but it’s a post saying positive things about Nazis or something.
Then yeah, I would hope people would down vote it.
If I get banned for a downvote I dont want to have anything to do with that community anyway.
Db0 has unhinged mods, and an admin that doesn’t give a shit about it. Simple as.
I don’t have an issue with this instance being pro-AI, but I find it weird as fuck how harshly skeptics are treated
I find it weird how harsh AI haters treat people who use it.
People are assholes to people who disagree with them, no matter the topic.
You can find examples of people on each ‘side’ being assholes. Social media teaches people to be outraged, not to have any empathy.
the whole “if you don’t like the content, don’t downvote, but just ignore / block it” is really cringe
I don’t use upvotes to express my support, I upvote when a contribution was insightful, interesting or funny and downvote when I find the contribution off topic, not helpful or diverting/trollish.
If I personally find something uninteresting, I block. And report if something is against the communities the rules/TOS/law.
I don’t want my social media and to become echo chambers.
To each their own I guess
Downvoting posts in the All feed isn’t that bad, as it reduces their visibility if you believe it doesn’t interest you at all and probably
mostwon’t interest many other people, so you let a chance to other posts to show upEdit: typo
Yeah I think big level at the feed, down votes help control what is interesting conversation pieces and not and then in the comments it should be related to how on topic or useful or fun to the conversation presented by the original item.
There is some extremely childish behavior on Lemmy in regards to downvotes and in response to them as well.
Downvoting comments I don’t agree with doesn’t seem that bad either
It’s useful to show that not everyone thinks the same. When I see controversial comments and posts, it sparks my curiosity and I start really thinking about it
It depends. If there’s certain types of content you don’t like that a community mostly deals in, you downvoting it effectively means you’re downvoting almost everything on there - and at that point, it’s just little more than a very crude attempt at community vandalism.
Your voice matters. Downvoting can be useful to prevent echo chambers (ex: downvoting lemmy.ml bs)
Now if the thing is just not fundamentally wrong like it’s just subjective and you don’t like it, yea it could harm, but the most likely is that less people will do it than people liking this type of content will upvote
Its only really problematic on smaller instances or if you do it continuously for every single post without a good valid reason
My first interaction with [email protected] was him threatening to ban me over downvoting his comments.
One of the first things which made me look into what this power tripping bastard is and yeah, a Russian pretending to be an American who’s since been avoiding any communities they’re not a mod on.
Dude says things like “reality has a well known Russian propaganda bias” while pretending to be American while supporting Putin.
Lemmy is infested with Russians
Honestly. Doing this when someone makes dozens of downvotes is ridiculous and stupid. Doing this with a single downvote is… I can’t even begin to fathom how unimaginably stupid and ridiculous that is.
You mean “dozens of downvotes” specifically directed at a single community?
I don’t even have downvotes on my instance but would that really be unusual? I often see a lot of people on a thread making the same wrong statements. I could see how that kind of thing would lead to a lot of downvotes in the same community and I was never very heavy handed with my downvoting.
In this case I’m referring to the hypothetical of a single account, consistently downvoting almost every post on a community with zero interaction history. And they keep doing it.
I can’t speak for whatever you’ve done or been accused of, but those accounts do exist and it’s completely justifiable that some community owners ban them.
I don’t think votes should be an actionable metric in any circumstance. Bots should be banned, but real people should be allowed to vote as much as they want on whatever they want. Otherwise you’re just cultivating an echo chamber.
Disagree. If I run a metal music community, and someone who doesn’t like metal continually goes in there and downvotes everything because, well, they don’t like metal music. What use are they to it? Why wouldn’t I ban them? All they’re doing is hurting the visibility of the community. This is the context in which I would ban downvoters from my community. Serial mass downvoting by people who never otherwise engage with the community, don’t like the topic of the community, and in some cases - the accounts have zero comment history and purely exist to downvote.
I think this is quite different to just ‘wanting an echo-chamber’.
My first lemmy account was banned from the fed. Because I spoke ill of Israel. I figured this place isn’t much better than Reddit.
this place isn’t much better than Reddit
It’s 95% enthusiastic Reddit users/former users! The advantage (which has pros and cons) is the structure not allowing top down control of the entire network. I prefer this to the monolithic Reddit for the most part.
Yeah. I’ve been banned from certain communities on Lemmy for “vote manipulation,” or “not pruning my feed.” -Because when I browse “all,” I downvote a lot of the creepy stuff that seems (in my opinion) to promote rape and/or pedophelia.
I only have one lemmy account. I don’t even know how to “manipulate” votes, and if I see creepy pedo stuff while browsing “all”, I downvote it.
I would explain what it is that I feel is promoting pedophelia, but since Lemmy seems to have a lot of fans of that particular genre, I’ll keep it to myself. Let’s just say it involves illustrations and animations of big eyes, small mouths, and childlike physiques.
Disabling downvotes can avoid such drama. Some instances do.
Rare to see a beehaw user so far away from spawn.
How did you reply to them? I thought beehaw defederated LW
Beehaw is defed from world, but not vice versa, so when a DB0 community announces a beehaw comment it sends it to world who accepts the comment. The Beehaw user won’t be able to see the reply though.
Db0ero is explicitely pro AI
I would guess the Mod has gone full shizo and banned you from the whole instance and everywhere he could because you downvoted an AI generated image.
I don’t make it a habit of downvoting images simply because they’re AI-gen, but there are well-done ones and horrible ones just like any images. Do they really ban for simply downvoting ANY AI image? That’s… kind of a lot.
Yes, a few of the mods will ban anyone who downvotes AI or misinformation without making a comment or because you downvoted ‘too many times’ or some other bullshit. My ‘systemic downvoting’ and ‘anti-ai harassment’ community bans are for downvoting a few posts and not being sorry about it.
i discovered i have several community bans for being an anti-ai troll. i find that so odd because like… i’m not trolling, i genuinely have concerns about a litany of issues surrounding ai such as the environmental cost, the double standard of corporate theft being okay and piracy being a serious crime, the ways the ai corporation ceos want to use ai vs how any technology should benefit the populace. i have a viewpoint, not an agenda. i also think and post about a wide variety of other topics. that said, if an ai community wants to block me, that’s fine, i was probably going to block them too. not because i think they’re wrong to have their community, but because i have zero interest in engaging there. it’s like how i block all communities in languages i don’t speak. it’s not an act of me censoring or hating them. it’s just me cleaning up my feed because it doesn’t make sense to be there
I work in IT and think AI is the second biggest threat to the planet in the next 10 years.
samesies. it’s grifters leading the blind in that field and it’s already had devastating effects in certain areas
100% guarantee that LLMs have already been instantiated on murderbot hardware
You don’t need to speculate or go “I guarantee”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI-assisted_targeting_in_the_Gaza_Strip
They shouldn’t be. I’ve messaged the two mods and asked them to respond, because I don’t know the details.
We found the answer (kinda)! It was @[email protected] See here: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/34853477
I was called out by name for a single downvote and culled from a score of Communities I did not participate in by them.
“Create more slop” is, in fact, a message I disagree with rather strongly and did downvote that (and only that) post. I PM’d the the mod in response to that post:
Brigading is organized. I, a single person, downvoted one post I saw in /All because it is actively content with a message I do not care for or agree with. Bad form would be going through everything in the community and downvoting. I didn’t do that either. What I had done is called “using the platform as intended.” And you overreacted with a ban.
So we’ve effectively solved the first part, but not the three Stable Diffusion parts… Those also seem to line up with another single downvote a month later. Again, hardly brigading or vote manipulation.
EDIT: Huh. Looks like we had someone in this thread downvoting nearly every post in here.
EDIT: Huh. Looks like we had someone in this thread downvoting nearly every post in here.
if it is draconic who’s downvoting that would be a hilarious lack of self reflection. Is there any way to check?
I’m still trying to get my head around people giving votes that much attention. Maybe Lemmy has started getting refugees from other places that live and die by the arrows.
Someone go in there and do the same thing and see what happens. I would but you’ve probably picked up on my apathy by this point.
The mods that banned me for ‘systemic down voting’ and ‘anti-ai harassment’ because I down voted a few AI posts and didn’t feel bad also lectured me about how horrible down voting is and how much it hurts the fediverse.
My upvote to down vote ratio is far better than either of those two mods.
I’ve seen quite a few people banned for downvotes in comms. It always makes me wonder what they think lurkers do.
They assume anyone who down votes without commenting is brigading.
Because votes = views.
If you make something and it instantly gets to -2 within seconds because of bot/trolls it means no one will ever see it.
Well luckily it was just AI slop and they didn’t actually make anything.
Creativity is in the idea.
Drawing is dexterity not creativity.
What is important is that what they made reflected what they wanted to, not that they used a pencil or a stylus.
Disagree. Creativity is in the idea, the composition, and the execution.
A prompter hardly even has the idea in the first place.On top of that: “drawing” is labor.
Not related to the OP here, but downvote trolls can be a problem for small communities trying to build up. I managed to discover the serial downvoters on my old lemm.ee comm and when I banned them (about 4 of them?) it had a huge impact. They didn’t all downvote /everything/ but they downvoted a lot of things, and no contribution. And if they got in early, they could sink new threads. Now, I wouldn’t just ban randoms for occasional downvotes - but if I kept seeing the same names on threads (and they never actually engaged with the community) with no discernable patterns - I might.
Made a huge difference.
Thank you for limiting your bans to people who were actual serial down voters and not just someone who happened to down vote a single post.
Don’t use ableist language in a community where both of the mods are neurodiverse.
It’s annoying that the amount the general public cares about schizophrenic people is often less than they care about changing the words they speak.
sidenotes - CW: R-slur, used non-casually
This is common with a lot of disability-related terms, I expect this usage to decrease over time similar to how usage of ‘retard’ has.
I am unsure whether [‘schizophrenic people’ or ‘people with schizophrenia’] is correct here, I am going based off of what I have heard about [‘autistic people’ vs ‘people with autism’] as I could not find relevant information online.
Have you considered perhaps not just saying the r-slur.
EDIT: see below comment
I don’t say that either.
You… Literally said it in your post. Big fucking shock to my system.
original comment, see edit first
are you kidding me
EDIT: I was confused by her saying ‘post’: I think she’s referring to my usage in the sidenote, which was intended as an example of [slurs towards disabled people that are no longer used], whereas I thought she was saying that I used them casually.
I don’t think discussing slurs is harmful to society in the same way that using them directly (as an epithet) is.
Despite this, I understand some people have strongly-negative reactions to seeing them, so I have added a content warning to the section.
Where do yall get this ban notification stuff do you pay for some kind of lemmy Bloomberg terminal or?
If on the web (not a mobile client), you can click the three dots with the arrow pointing down under any post (including yours) and hit “NAME Moderation History”. It’ll show you what mod actions have been taken on you.
Thanks, I didn’t know about that
Then you check some of those communities and there’s like less than 10 posts in them.
There’s more banned people than content.
If they are such tiny communities then the question is why do so many trolls go out of their way to find them, downvote everything, and harass/bully the mods? Not saying that was the case in this instance, but it’s been an ongoing problem, which is why the mods are a bit twitchy I guess.
You’re a bit more easygoing with the downvotes than the average Lemmy user. Those rarely downvote, while you do like 30% downvotes. Maybe that triggered someone if you did something like scroll through a community and hand out several downvotes consecutively. But I don’t think you’re doing anything wrong here.
There might be a misunderstanding… I only downvoted one post in one of those communities once. The others were untouched. As I said, some of them don’t even have any posts to downvote.
How can you tell what you downvoted while randomly scrolling through the all feed or your subscriptions 3 months ago? I certainly couldn’t remember.
And the communities you were banned from aren’t necessarily the ones you downvoted in… That’s just the realm of the admin or mod who banned you. But they could have based the decision on other behaviour or downvotes of yours.
How can you tell what you downvoted while scrolling through the all feed or your subscriptions 3 months ago?
By looking at the ban times and then comparing to the (very few) number of downvotes I made on my account in a range around that period.
But they could have based the decision on other behaviour or downvotes of yours.
I hadn’t participated in those Communities outside that downvote whatsoever, so that would be doubtful.
Ah right, maybe that was it. I remember seeing the post as well. You got “called out” by name publicly. For supposed “brigading”. And told to F off. That must be the reason for this?! https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/34853477
What are they even alleged to be doing in that post?
Good question. I don’t know when Lemmy got the feature that mods can see all votes, but looks to me someone is agitated/frustrated or something and goes through the logs. We had some discussion back then about people doing their thing in their communities and then some random people aren’t even subscribed and do drive-by downvotes… Which is a bit frustrating. And AI is one of the many polarizing topics here. People tried discussing it in peace but it’s not very easy. Maybe OP got caught in the turmoil of this. Or they pissed off that person and then the next downvote was one too many… I don’t really know. And the person calling out people by name sounds a bit agitated. I’d say someone with that state of mind is likely going to react a bit more extreme. And they’re concerned with voting fraud and brigading in general.
I don’t know when Lemmy got the feature that mods can see all votes
PSA: ALL VOTES ARE PUBLIC INFORMATION. To everybody, not just mods.
Whoa, I thought only the conservative mods were pulling this
there’s a lot of conservative / AI bro crossover.
ooh downvotes :D think they’re the conservatives upset about being categorized with the ai bros, or ai bros being cranky about being lumped in with the conservatives?
I find it hilarious that they’re ideologically identical but despise each other
You think only conservatives mods would want to create safe positive environments for their users?
I don’t think that’s at all what conservatives want to do.
No, they want to control the narrative. This person set their comm to mod-post-only. It’s their private blog. They’re not making a safe place for others, they’re making a safe place for themself.
Well that’s equally as fine as well.
