Personally I think not having karma limits is nice currently! I understand why they were used but grinding karma as a lurker on reddit was frustrating.

  • Reddit has a longstanding reputation for being a hive of scum and villainy (like hosting the_donald for years, or kotakuinaction, etc). I really hope that Lemmy keeps with the general left-leaning vibes of the fediverse overall, hopefully being a good space for queer people, women, people of colour, etc.

    • I think you do have to be careful here though. If you’re too permissive you allow bigotry, but if you’re too restrictive you cut off honest, good faith debate and create echo chamber silos where beliefs are never challenged.

      Bigotry should never be accepted but that means non-discriminatory opinions, especially ones you disagree with, should be allowed.

      • Good faith is the key here. I’m all for disagreements leading to lengthy discussions and even some controversy as long as everyone is arguing in good faith.

        I can’t stand trolling, outright bigotry, and the normalization of literal fascist opinions as a mere “disagreement”. If a “disagreement” (you know which ones I mean) will lead to people dying if enabled, I’m pretty happy keeping those ideas out.

    • /r/jailbait needed a spotlight in the national news from Anderson Cooper to get dealt with.

      But (allowing for the fact that I’m still learning) by its nature I’m not sure the fediverse can stop these things in total, but the particular instances you subscribe to can. I’m unclear if INDIVIDUALS can ban instances (as far as I can tell they cannot) which I think might be a good addition. But instances can ban other instances, and eventually the fediverse will figure out which instances to put in the time-out corner for the rest of us, I think. But it will take time and might be a bit of wack-a-mole.

    • That would be nice but these platforms with “instances” look like it’s a Reddit on steroids. I don’t see how a community could be shut down with the way it’s setup currently. I’m a complete newbie though so don’t rely on my unprofessional observations.

      • Your instance can ban the offending instances, so they won’t show up for you or your fellow users, and vice versa. It provides a good way to exile the offending community.

          • I honestly have no idea. I’m just running my own instance so I’ll just ban any users from my federation feed if I need to.

            If you check the modlog, you can see what mods/admins have been doing recently (note that there is potentially offensive content there)

      • Communities can’t be shut down, but they can be shut out. This is also just true in life in general.

        If The_Donald were to set up shop on Lemmy.ml, they could ban the instance and the members, but they could just turn around and join another instance.

        So, what do you do then? Site admins can ban the remote instance, and they can put pressure on the hosting site admins by threatening to defederate.

        Let’s say the new hosting site’s admin gives into defederation pressure and also bans the instance and its members. We’ll, then those people can set up their own server. Now, the admin won ban them.

        But none of the major servers will federated with them. They’ll be alone on their low population fashy instance (or not so low population - Truth Social is suppsoey the biggest Mastodon instance), effectively quarantined.

        That’s the best anyone can do. That’s true with or without Lemmy.

    • Yes! Many sumbreddits that actually had a point and were dare-I-say educational quickly became just twitter sceencap platitudes, on repeat.

      I get it, easy to read and agree with and upboat, but ultimately just dumbing the place down to the lowest common denominator and burying anything with effort or insight.

    • I see the same shit in the Fediverse though. Mastodon admins blocking a server just because they refused to participate in a shared block list.

      Someone’s going to make a script to ban a non-local user based on your remote posts, I guarantee it.

        • The fact that opening a new instance still requires some technical knowledge is a difficulty facing the fediverse, since the venn diagram of people with the time and know-how to manage server administration and people who are knowledgeable on community moderation aren’t always two concentric circles.

          • But that’s not a task that is asked of a general user, even if their goal is to switch servers. If you don’t like gmail, the solution for an individual is almost never to start your own email server.

            • Correct. What i’m saying is that since federated networks tend to be more community run initiatives, moderators are gonna be people from within the community and the final say on moderation issues is gonna come from those who understand how the fediverse works and have done the work of setting up the servers that everyone is using. Which I’m sure can and has worked for plenty of Mastodon and Lemmy instances out there, but I’m sure there’s also instances where the head admin simply went haywire one day and nuked everything. It’s not that the system can’ work, it’s just that it isn’t really designed to gravitate towards experienced trust and safety experts being the ones that important decisions fall upon.

              I feel like I should clarify that I have nothing against any Lemmy mods or admins. They’re all being cool and helpful with onboarding reddit refugees like myself. I just think that this is an important thing to think about if we want this place to support more and more people and a growing number of communities in the future.

    • The Fediverse already has these, there are lots of echo chamber instances that automatically block other instances for simply federating with the “wrong” instance (equivalent to those AutoMod bans on Reddit for posting in a certain subreddit). Since instance admins pay for their instances out of pocket, they are more restrictive with their instance’s allowed content than social media websites that want to cast the widest net. Eventually, there will be a massive split between communities, like how conservative and progressive Mastodon instances all block each other. Centrists can just have an account on each side of the wall.

  •  Cal   ( @Cal@kbin.social ) 
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    As a new community we need to identify and stamp out bad actors immediately and thoroughly (spammers, selfservers, ads disguised as posts, brigading, illegal content, racism, you get the idea).
    We can’t control if they create their own instances, but we can isolate them.

  • Bullshit moderation.
    Reddit was so full of hateful shit. Reddit’s AEO (Anti Evil Operations, basically the admins personal “mod team”, probably outsourced to some country with lacking English skills) would continue to tell me that the most blatant hateful comments do not violate Reddit’s ToS. Meanwhile, you get (perma) banned for the most ridiculous & mundane things at times, like saying that a fascist Italy should get kicked out of the EU & NATO. Apparently this is considered “spreading hate” and they even denied my appeal, explaining that both institutions require the members to be democratic. Meanwhile all the racism on subs like /r/europe would go unpunished. I also tried to report similar comments to mine as hate, but containing less popular countries like Turkey, and unsurprisingly they also didn’t see it as hate.

    Getting harassed by other users that reply on all your comments & follow you around? Nope, no violation.
    Questioning the title & picture relation of a governmental account? Apparently harassment / bullying worth a 7 day ban.
    Calling out dehumanization? Perma ban in a sub.
    Perma ban in a sub? Perma ban in another sub for complaining about it, for “ban evasion”.
    Speaking out against predatory monetization methods & FOMO tactics in modern video games? Getting attacked & insulted by users and consequently perma banned for being “an asshole troll” - none of the attacks & insults were removed, let alone punished.

    What isn’t a violation? Racism, transphobia, homophobia, calls for violence, etc.
    In regards to big hate subs it is also mostly the case that Reddit only goes and does something against them when there’s some sort of media attention around it. When it directly affects their potential income. Maybe if advertisers start to complain about it.

    The enforcement of the rules is so random at this point that I don’t even know what one is allowed to say, or why I even should care about accounts and the platform as a whole. I understand that moderation of big platforms is not an easy task, but one surely can do better than whatever the hell Reddit is doing nowadays.

    In regards to specifically Lemmy I would say they aren’t up to a good start with the controversial admin team and their extremist views.

    • The nice thing about federation is that you can always go somewhere else if you disagree with a particular instance.

      Lemmy’s devs have questionable politics at best. IMO, I don’t care as long as it doesn’t impact how they run the site - people have a right to their own opinions, as long as those opinions don’t harass or hurt others directly.

      But let’s say they changed one day. Maybe one day they added something to the code forcing everyone to praise the CCP or else.

      Because the software is open-source - people could fork it before the change. It’s out there already. People can totally make their own little variants of Lemmy with added features, if that’s something they wanted to do. You can modify the code yourself and then self-host the modified version. No matter what Lemmy’s devs do… they have no power on your instance. A fork means you own the code.

      I’ve seen the sentiment tossed around that it’s unethical to use Lemmy because if you donate to the project (or contribute to donations towards the project) you are financing people who have bad politics. That’s your prerogative. I personally disagree - again, as long as your politics aren’t actively contributing to harassment/harm you shouldn’t be punished for them - but I understand the sentiment.

      To that, I say - well, there’s other options. That’s the beauty of the Fediverse - you don’t have any Musk or Spez that comes along to ruin everything. I’m on Kbin, which I like a lot. The dev is a great guy, and I really like how it combines the best of Lemmy and Mastodon.

      Even if you want to stay on Lemmy, there are wonderful communities on Lemmy that disagree with the direction of the devs. Beehaw is a great place with a fantastic mod team, for example. You can donate to Beehaw’s devs and know it’s going to keep Beehaw running, and it’s not the same as supporting Lemmy directly.

      • Because the software is open-source - people could fork it before the change. It’s out there already. People can totally make their own little variants of Lemmy with added features, if that’s something they wanted to do. You can modify the code yourself and then self-host the modified version. No matter what Lemmy’s devs do… they have no power on your instance. A fork means you own the code.

        People are already doing so, right now. AFAIK Lemmy by default doesn’t have the ability to disable downvoting, yet Beehaw and the instance I’m on (among others, probably) do have downvoting disabled.

  • Realized another - the awards that reddit created were out of control. I didn’t mind avatars too much since customization can be fun and it was optional, but the awards are spammed and shown on most reddit clients.

  • Censorship. All the major subreddits became political echo-chambers. Reddit was founded on free speech and open discourse, especially when it was really uncomfortable. I’d love to see the same for Lemmy. Over the years I’ve seen authoritarianism creep into the moderation policies of most major subreddits. Today, even posting on the wrong subreddit is grounds for being banned from dozens of major subreddits. Even having a polite disagreement about, for example, anything to do with “trans,” is grounds for being banned.

        • No problem. I quoted it below. If you need something even more specific, I am referring to the part where you say something that’s obviously not true and put the word trans between quotation marks in order to further emphasize the impolite nature of your “disagreement”:

          Even having a polite disagreement about, for example, anything to do with “trans,” is grounds for being banned.

          • I’d say that a fairly debated topic related to transgender people, which isn’t just transphobes attacking people trying to live their own life, is the presence of transgender athletes in competitions. Some will take it as a personal attack whether you take a side or sit on the fence. I’m not looking to start that conversation here, but yeah. It’s definitely possible to hold a polite conversation about this while disagreeing on parts of the question. In a healthy space.

            • I think that after HRT the difference is not that big. Trans athletes may even be at the disadvantage since there are some cis woman that have higher than average amount of testosterone.

              In the long shot I think it would be for the best to abolish gender based separation altogether and replace it with something more like weight categories.

              • Consider two 5’6" 65kg athletes, one man and one woman, are you saying that the man doesn’t have an advantage?

                I used to believe the same until I saw the recent Women’s Premier League in Cricket. They had to reduce the size of field and the weight of ball. Even with that, the fastest bowl in the tournament was 130kmph while that speed is considered a “slower ball” in men’s cricket.

                Now some of these female cricketers earm more than any Pakistani male cricketers. Which is fair, bigger market, bigger payout. But female cricketers don’t stand a chance against the male cricketers

                • Consider two 5’6" 65kg athletes, one man and one woman, are you saying that the man doesn’t have an advantage?

                  No, my MMA teacher was female and she’d kick my arse regularly

                  They had to reduce the size of field and the weight of ball. Even with that, the fastest bowl in the tournament was 130kmph

                  Now you’re undermining your first point, you’re not comparing same heights and weight. Physics is real.

                • Here is a surprise for you: HRT actually does things to your body. I don’t think this should have been that hard to find on your own, but I can’t judge your circumstances.

              • There are things that don’t completely change with HRT (particularly when started after puberty.) Height, bone density, lung capacity, hand/foot/limb size etc. do not vary significantly after HRT and depending on the sport can make a huge difference (eg. Hand and foot size or lung capacity in swimming even where the two swimmers are the same height.)

            • the presence of transgender athletes in competitions

              I disagree, that isn’t a “polite disagreement” and is, absolutely, “just transphobes attacking people trying to live their own life” as you put it. Every time that “Argument” happens it’s openly done in biologically unfounded ways by people who simply don’t understand how our bodies actually work- yet those arguments get mass upvoted by people who also don’t understand how biology actually works and who believe that trans athletes get some insane, unfair advantage.

              If you want to pass laws to restrict trans people from sports, then you want to pass laws to discriminate against trans people. That’s not really up for debate IMO, it’s a straight up fact; it’s what you’re doing when you advocate for laws that are not founded in science, that are specifically targeting a tiny minority for the chance that one of that tiny minority might beat cis athletes in an “unfair” way, you’re advocating for bigoted laws.

              Such arguments are also inevietably filled with people misgendering trans people, deliberately calling trans women “men” and hiding behind the “I’m talking about biology” argument to do so.

              Replace the word “trans” with “black” and you’ll find that people are making literally identical arguments to those against desegregating professional sports leagues 80 years ago. Literally word for word.

              • Every time that “Argument” happens it’s openly done in biologically unfounded ways by people who simply don’t understand how our bodies actually work.

                I’ll be the first to admit I don’t know how our bodies work, but I think explaining it will be more helpful in the long run than just making the subject taboo and banning everyone who asks it.

                At the beginning of the pandemic a common argument against masks was “the virus is too small to be caught in a mask” - which made sense from a layman’s point of view. When people started explaining that masks did stop the water droplets the virus needs to be airborne - that argument become a lot less common.

                Not everybody who has questions is “just asking questions”, if you catch my drift.

                • Not everybody who has questions is “just asking questions”, if you catch my drift.

                  I agree with that statement, context is everything.

                  I think that in the context of someone starting out going “it’s unfair for men to compete in women’s sports,” the person is “just asking questions.” That context poisons the well for questions.

                  But if someone comes in and makes a thread like “I don’t understand how hormone therapy works, can someone please explain it?” that, to me, is a good faith question and 100% should not be bannable.

    • That’s the same here unfortunately.

      It also sucks when you’re not American, like Reddit auto-banned a load of Irish and Brits discussing stopping smoking due to the colloquial term there.

      Unfortunately all these American-based websites really force the American views and positions on everyone.

      • Well that explains it. I’m not American either and I really feel like I’m being forced into their weird social war. I just want to talk about cool gadgets without some culture warrior banning me everywhere because I didn’t show the requisite fealty to whatever the current thing is.

        • Yeah, one thing I hope to leave behind with Reddit is every major subreddit farming outrage w.r.t. American politics.

          It just became exhausting and made me unsub from a lot of the big subreddits. So far, Lemmy has been quite positive! It’s refreshing.

        • Yeah, I got banned from loads of random subreddits for posting in /r/LockdownSkepticism just supporting the policy of where I live (in Sweden). It was bizarre.

          Likewise if you dared oppose the US-specific policy of forcing toddlers to wear face-masks. Wasn’t a thing anywhere in Europe, but you’d get banned for misinformation on Reddit.

        • You are showing plenty of fealty to bigotry, sinophobioa, pseudoscientific transphobia, and American notion of ‘free speech’ on web forums.

          I’m deleting a few of your comments (they’re in the modlog, if anyone wants to see) and generously giving you a 1 month ban. If you decide to come back then, or sooner with another account, I recommend posting about cool gadgets (which you don’t seem to have actually done yet).

          edit: my ban was overridden by another admin; i’m new at this and overstepped.

    • Even having a polite disagreement about, for example, anything to do with “trans,” is grounds for being banned.

      A subreddit I moderate, /r/moderatepolitics, has had to do a delicate balancing act around this. There are site-wide rules banning many statements around trans people, and the red lines are not well defined. Reddit’s “Anti-Evil Operations” (site-wide moderation team) frequently swoops in and deletes comments that are offensive to trans people, but well within current political discourse in the US. That has undermined our mission of being a forum for diverse voices to hold productive but difficult discussions. At a certain point, we entirely banned the discussion of trans issues because one side was able to speak freely and the other side was walking on egg shells. I’m solidly pro-trans, but that’s no way to have a conversation.

      This likely was done to try to keep Reddit from becoming a cesspool like the “free speech” sites like Gab, but it has turned out to be a lazy way that short circuits necessary conversations.

      •  Sphere   ( @Sphere@lemmy.ml ) 
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        11 year ago

        There is only one necessary converation around trans people, in which trans people say, Let us exist without being harassed or persecuted, and everyone else says, OK. Anything else is just allowing bigots a platform.

        •  pingveno   ( @pingveno@lemmy.ml ) 
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          I wish the world worked that way, but in practice there are just too many ignorant people out there. They can walk out their front door and talk to their neighbors who are more than willing to pass on the latest slander about trans people. Our sub’s mission is to provide a space where they can try to pass on something resembling the latest slander and get push back. As-is, too much of the US is so segregated by ideology that people may not ever meet an out trans person. We want to foster those human-to-human connections instead of letting them rely on Tucker Carlson’s latest Very Concerned mouth diarrhea.

          Edit: I value safe spaces for their function as a reprieve for trans people, and I don’t think every platform should provide a space for unrestricted speech. But at the same time, I think it’s beneficial to have some spaces that require a bare minimum of good behavior so that society can talk about these topics and move forward into a better future. There’s too much ignorance of trans people as-is.

          •  Sphere   ( @Sphere@lemmy.ml ) 
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            a bare minimum of good behavior

            See, the correct definition for this here is “no transphobia”

            It’s cute that you think you can fight back against reactionary BS by arguing with it, but history does not bear this out. What you end up doing is creating another space where people can post Tucker Carlson’s latest Very Concerned mouth diarrhea, only distilled into a more toxic form that even Tucker couldn’t get away with, as long as they say it politely. Your way has led us here, to a political situation where people are actively trying to eradicate trans people in law.

            • Your way has led us here, to a political situation where people are actively trying to eradicate trans people in law.

              Our sub’s way has largely not been followed in the US. Everyone’s retreated into their corner. Trans people have tried to keep safe, both physically and emotionally. Those hostile to them have cloaked their fear and hatred in the usual: family values and “think of the children”. The country is rife with tribalism. Different parts of the country have vastly different ways of thinking. There are fewer and fewer spaces dedicated to talking across ideologies, even closely related ones. We frequently hear that ours is one of the few spaces where people can talk over difficult issues without being shouted down.

              I’m under no illusions that reactionaries just need to hear the right words and they’ll be enthusiastic supporters. But I have found that when forced out of their zone of comfort, their minds change inch by inch. Even just starting by not allowing the worst slander helps jolt them out of that mindset and filter out people who will never be interested in discussion. Civil rights are gained by winning hearts and minds of our fellow citizens. The LGBTQ rights movement has moved amazingly fast, with under 55 years having passed since the Stonewall Riots. We have moved this fast partially because LGBTQ people are harder to “other” because any family member or friend can turn out to be LGBTQ.

              • The thing that irritates me about this comment and the ideology your subreddit represents (well, the pertinent thing) is that the popular world “polarization” obfuscates the massive difference there is between radicalism and dogmatism. That is to say, when two people disagree politically, some people like to imagine for various reasons that their level of animosity is a function of how different their political views are plus some ability to compartmentalize. These things are factors, but ones that lead to political illiteracy on their own.

                Dogmatism is the common word for having a circumscribed set of “correct beliefs” and being hostile to any deviation from that set. Radicalism is the sheer extremity of one’s views. It’s entirely possible to be a radical and to be accepting of people, and it’s quite easy to be both a centrist and a dogmatist. We know that second one because that describes a huge portion of the Democratic base! They are people with very little commitment to progressivism who nonetheless are deeply hostile to people on both their left as well as their right.

                Of course, sometimes the two traits coincide, like in the Republicans, which have a massive portion of their base that is both pretty radical and pretty dogmatic – though ironically they could be said to be accepting in an extraordinarily cynical way, what with how Evangelicals supported Trump, who is literally the fakest Christian to ever be President (“Two Corinthians”).

                Anyway, my point for saying this is that hucksters, useful idiots, and some who I’m sure are good people like to characterize American politics as a situation where there has been a sizable shift towards radicalism. There are new radical (QAnon) and “radical” (Bernie socdem) movements today as there are in any age, but overwhelmingly the Democrats have been getting more conservative if you look past their lip-service, while the Republicans have mostly also become more conservative. The world doesn’t need more centrists, the Democratic Party has plenty! When Obama said he’s “less liberal in a lot of ways” than Richard Nixon, that wasn’t his attempt at absurdist humor!

                What would actually be useful is functional empathy and – god forbid – a political ideology that has some ability to explain why people have political differences beyond some puritanical insinuation about moral failings. That does not mean we need to be nihilistic or appeasing with our actual political ideology as though nothing is true or else the truth is the median of whatever everyone happens to believe right now.

                Paraphrasing Lafayette, “If the world is divided between people who say 2 + 2 is 6 and those who say 2 + 2 is 4, that does not make it the most reasonable position that 2 + 2 is 5.”

                If I was writing it, I’d probably say that the camps in America are “4+4 is 44” and “4+4 is 64”, with “4+4 is 54” being the Enlightened Centrist answer (and ironically perhaps the most deeply irrational).

                • The subreddit was somewhat poorly named. It’s not about “enlightened centrism,” as the insult from the left goes. The idea is to build a space where people with a fairly wide range of views can discuss those views without personal attacks. There are of course areas where different people will have different definitions of personal attacks, but for the most part we manage to keep a baseline of respect. What we’re not doing as moderators is deciding if 4+4 is 44, 64, 8, or a potato. Commenters talk that out and we keep them polite.

                  When Obama said he’s “less liberal in a lot of ways” than Richard Nixon, that wasn’t his attempt at absurdist humor!

                  Just for a little bit of context, Obama was griping that Fox and other right wing media was doing their usual “X Democrat is basically the avatar of Marxism” shtick. But the comparison with Nixon was not a good one. Nixon was constrained by a heavily Democratic Congress, while Obama was constrained by a lesser Republican House. Since Obama was comparing the outcomes of both administrations, his comparison looked at a Republican administration pushed hard to the left domestically with a Democratic administration push mildly to the right domestically.

      • Turns out when people complain about being censored and “free speech” it’s because they got in trouble for not being able to call people the N word or becasue they want to “politely discuss” why certain people shouldn’t be allowed to exist.

        We should never tolerate the intolerant.

  • The forced ‘inside jokes’ that filled so many threads, so many times you would see a post and be able to predict the top comment and its replies. Hoping that the lack of account karma helps with that.