This one is both upsetting and weird.
So there was a user on ponder.cat who's been spamming posts. Like a lot. 58 per day, on average. Not 58 comments. 58 posts.
I started seeing a little scattering of reports about it, mostly just figured it was the mods' business to deal with, and then finally today I actually really took a look at what they were doing and realized it was way over the top. Pretty much everyone in the comments agreed when someone brought it up.
A 25 day old account with 1,400+ posts? What the actual fuck? My entire goddamn feed is this one account...
Touch grass. Good lord. You're carpet bombing multiple communities with repeats of the same crap.
The user was not receptive.
lol.
I guess people here do not know how to block an account.
:)
Is that a compliment or a rant?
May I introduce you to Lemmy block function.
If you don’t like my posts then block me and you will never see them again. As simple as that.
That's a bunch of bullshit. The voting was about as you would expect. I said to the user:
That's not how it works. If you're interfering with the average Lemmy user's experience, you don't get to claim it doesn't count because each individual person would be able to block each individual problematic account, if they wanted to have a good experience. Honestly, these people have a point. You have been posting an average of 58 posts per day. That's too much. I post a ton, and that's about 10 times more than me, and I've gotten multiple complaints about posting too much in particular communities. The handful of times it's happened, my reaction was "Oh my bad what sounds like an acceptable level" and then to more or less stick to an acceptable level. Getting snarky with people who are asking you to cool it is very bad. Please stop posting so much. Anything about 10-15 posts per day starts to feel really excessive to me. Definitely don't be dismissive about people's complaints to you about it.
They rejected my suggestion, so I sent them a DM that was a little more direct about it: Stop doing this if you want to keep your account on my instance.
Then, for some reason, they deleted their account on their own.
Well, that was weird, but at least it's all resolved and we can all get back to what we were doing. Or wait... what's happening now?
I wasn't expecting "making sure we make a safe space for the spammers by banning people who complain about spam" to be an important moderation duty, but I guess in the bizarro world that is !news@lemmy.world moderation philosophy, it makes perfect sense.
https://lemmy.world/modlog/1347
@Ghyste@sh.itjust.works
Can't answer that, but it's possible they're simply not aware of their alt history. There's a similarly active user, Microwave, but they're legit; they always post quality stuff with no agenda. Perhaps they're giving "Cat" the benefit of doubt? They also give several other controversial posters a lot of leeway (won't mention them, but you probably already know the handful I'm referring to). Not suggesting any kind of agenda with the LW mods; just seems like they're trying a bit too hard to be "fair and balanced".
This user nukes their accounts, so unless one is familiar with the patterns of their previous accounts, it's difficult to correlate them with no history available. If they're on your instance and you have concerns about them (and they haven't self-destructed yet), you might be ahead to just ban them ahead of time (w/o content removal) so there's record for later comparison.
That part, not realizing the person is a problem, I get. I'm talking about banning the users arguing with them and deleting the requests for them to stop spamming, and leaving in place the spam and the cockeyed defenses of their spam.
A super-charitable reading could maybe say that this is an instance of lemmy.world mods believing that their role is "dictating to the community what's right and wrong" instead of "getting a read of the community's judgement of right and wrong, and implementing it." And then, on top of that wrong interpretation of even why they're in the role in the first place, they didn't bother to take even a glance at the claims that were made about this user, just "herp derp it is 100% impossible that they might be spamming, therefore they're not spamming, therefore this user complaining about spam is trying to break the Fediverse. Ban them! I fixed it now, I made things better." But that just sounds like an insane conclusion for anyone who's genuinely trying to help, ever to come to. Maybe I should be more generous to the volunteers but it just sounds really bizarre.
Sorry for barging in. As an admin I also have to do with some crap but I need to be the voice of paranoia here.
We dont think the big platforms and state actors care about us but this has just the right amount of organization to sound like a campaign.
If you're not in the matrix lemmy admin channel i suggest joining. Sorry if that is redundand since I have not looked for you there. A ton of admins are there.
Good luck anyway.
Oh, they care.
It isn't safe to say much of anything about it, but lemmy is definitely on the radar, and has been for at least a few months.
What states, what organizations within them, I ain't saying shit, but it isn't just one vector.
Yeah, I don't think you are paranoid. It's notably weird to me.
I may poke my head into the admin chat and see what I see.
You hit it on the head. We weren't aware of this user, as we had 0 reports about them until today.
Open up your report queue, switch to all, search for "mandates created in the last presidency".