Will it be effective?
Spoiler
No, it was not very effective.
EDIT: The banning event continues. Please consult the modlog to observe.
https://lemmy.world/modlog?page=1&modId=7121342
If you scroll down to about a day ago, you might be able to observe an emerging behavior from this mod.
EDIT 2: The mod in question moderates a total of 108 Lemmy communities. How deep does this conspiracy run? Is this mod a lost Redditor? More to come!
EDIT 3: The mod has now removed my comment all together, one might assume because it was still receiving upvotes in the 2 hours following my ban. Are there similarities here to Watergate? You be the judge!
EDIT 4: The mod in question has now been removed as a mod of the [email protected] community, as a result of their abuse of power.
https://lemmy.world/post/19731457
This was their response:
EDIT 5: This will be my final update, since as far as I see it, the issue this thread focuses on has been resolved. To quote Beaver herself in a very ironic comment she made directed towards someone else:
Clearly this was all just a case of…
But I was assured this only happened on ml instances and .world was a blistering Wild West of ultimate free speech 🤔
(As long as you don’t dislike Nazis, thats what got me banned from the instance)
Now I’m wondering if all the other drama surrounding her was actually her fault…
Good job assassinating your own character, I guess, Beavs.
It’s “vegans” like this that make the entire movement look bad. They need to be removed as a mod. The movement needs to be honest by letting free and equal exchange of ideas and viewpoints
Ah, this explains it! Saw I was banned from a community that I’d never posted in and evidently one of the mods is a wanker. Mystery solved :)
this vegan drama is dumb as shit
the top three vegan communities by users are hexbear, .ml, .world
hexbear has news, opinions, questions from a vegan pov
.ml has similar
.world has a lot of shitty memes
if you are looking for a serious vegan comm go to hexbear or ml. if you are looking for shitty memes go to .world
if you are not a vegan and just want to lolpost ‘but bacon is delicious’ keep it to your fucking self
Not worth being near tankies.
Yeah being around tankies just isn’t worth it, also it’s not like you’ll escape this kind of drama there anyway, they likely have drama this bad or worse there.
There is also [email protected], their own instance
Which Hamid has made just as bad as beaver did here, but I guess at least he’s transparent about ban hammering and comment removals. He’s insufferable and is the instance mod, not just community mod.
It is starting to look like the only place a vegan community mushroom can grow and flourish is on an even bigger pile of shit. It’s a little crass to say, but it ought to tell you something when the most defederated and blocked instances is where your group hangs out.
I just want to read vegan recipes and see like minded people discuss a topic in a civilized way, you know, like basically every other community.
Yeah I’m not vegan, but if vegans want to be insufferable in vegan spaces I think that’s ok. That’s where it’s supposed to be. If you want to be anti vegan in those spaces you’re an asshole for it
Ok but maybe then you pick a space that isn’t on a open federated social media platform designed for open conversation?
Ahhh no wonder I didn’t see this. I already had Beaver blocked.
EDIT 2: The mod in question moderates a total of 108 Lemmy communities. How deep does this conspiracy run? Is this mod a lost Redditor? More to come!
What was the name of that mod on reddit with 5k communities? I remember they were very well known, but it’s been a long time since having an account there.
Could have been any of a few dozen.
That being said, there were a couple that were automod only mods. They’d get added to help set up and maintain automod, and never do anything else.
I do not recall, but they must have received a very large paycheck each month!
IIRC it was more that they paid to be a mod. Someone had money to burn.
It sounds crazy to hear someone mods 5k communities or 108 until you put eyes on them and realize most are dead, functionally dead, or memes. I modded 100+ subreddits on reddit when I was there, the drop in population after about the fifth was massive. After about 15 or so we were at truly inconsequential populations.
I do wonder however if it suggests things about a person, that they moderate that many communities. For instance, is it indicative of power seeking behavior?
They’re not worth mentioning
It’s amazing to watch progressives eat themselves in real time on a small scale.
removed by mod
I wondered why I hadn’t seen all this drama, but then I remembered I blocked all the vegan communities right after I joined Lemmy, along with all the trans and gay stuff, and the tankie instances.
I don’t want to see their shit and chances are they don’t want to see mine.
You don;t need to announce your shit out loud, big man.
I knew this would end up here.
Bad mods causing drama ending up on fediverse drama. More news at 11.
Trump could amp the rage: ‘they dont eat cats and dogs, they feed them vegan!’
For the record, I think you contribute a lot to Lemmy, and I really appreciate it. OP’s being melodramatic because blocking a community chock full of content they’d rather not see on their personalized feed (and isn’t hateful, illegal, etc.) isn’t good enough for them. I guess they also need to troll and police different perspectives and how many posts they comprise on this great fedi platform. That’s good for Lemmy /s. Someone should post a PSA about blocking communities that don’t break rules but just aren’t one’s cup of tea. The behaviour helps Lemmy grow and stay diverse. For similar reasons, lemmynsfw (ie, the main porn/adult instance) removed downvotes: because minority communities (eg, rarer kinks) were being downvoted into oblivion - stifling growth and frustrating community members and mods - by people downvoting stuff they didn’t like on their feed versus blocking it
I mean, it was kinda inevitable lol.
It’s one of those things where once you go full jerk, it gets attention. Unavoidable really, unless instance admins want to totally ban “drama” communities, which would just end up as posts on instances that don’t ban drama communities :)
Preemptive banning is a perfect example of prime drama.
In case you weren’t aware: that was the full jerk.
I wanna add that I like your community, I like how you stood up to that rogue admin, I like when you annoy carnists, I like your ban of OP, and I also like that c/fediverselore has posts like this. This community is a tool for calling out mod decisions, and some of those decisions will be good ones that don’t need calling out. It’s still better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it.
That’s it, I’m banning you from my acquaintances.
Was that your goal? Just to stir up shit?
Not a vegan, but what’s the point from the other side?
It seems like non vegan people downvote the posts from that community without contributing at all, and then are surprised they get banned
If you guys are willing to debate vegan topics, why not create a !vegandebate and post content there?
Or just block the community and move on
And what about those commenting on good faith?
And what’s the problem with voting on public posts on a public forum?
I’d love to see vegan content, not … whatever meme shitshow that community has become.
We can always ask for better.
And what about those commenting on good faith?
Do you have examples? That modlog is a bit busy as you know, I’m not going to go through it
And what’s the problem with voting on public posts on a public forum?
What’s the problem with banning on a public forum?
There was a post yesterday about vote manipulation by bots (https://feddit.org/post/2795018 ), if people just downvote the vegan content without contributing, it’s not that far from that.
Or maybe it just comes from them seeing downvotes as “non relevant to the community” and not “disagree”, hence getting rid of people who use it the other way.
I’m really not sure to get why it’s such a big deal. You got banned from a small community on Lemmy.
- Were you going to participate to this type of community? Then create another one and post there, if yours is better moderated, people will come to yours (my experience in the past on a different topic)
- Were you not going to engage with that type of content? Then move on. I’m not interested in US politics, if all the US politics communities would ban me that would be fine, I would just move on.
I’m not doing your homework for you.
Participating in a conversation ain’t homework. And if you don’t want to have a conversation, don’t bother replying.
It’s not the vegan posts people are down voting, but there’s been a huge amount of “memes” that do not contribute to the vegan discussion but just try to divide the community
They are probably trying to identify people who would rather downvote or post cheeky comments (see OP) rather than block the community, or not interact with it
Most people only interact with votes; not comments. If the rule is “No downvoting” make it an official rule and stop banning people under the pretense of breaking rule 5.
With the current thread on [email protected] how “communities should allow everyone to interact if they are not private”, the likelihood of someone else creating the same thread as this one with “look at those authoritarian mods who ban everyone” is quite high
You mean this?
Welcome, and thank you for joining us.
What are your motivations behind posting these memes? Are they not slightly provocational?
Not a vegan, but what’s the point from the other side?
It seems like non vegan people downvote the posts from that community without contributing at all, and then are surprised they get banned
If you guys are willing to debate vegan topics, why not create a !vegandebate and post content there?
Or just block the community and move on
Are you just gonna copy and paste the same comment?
You have to appreciate their efficiency.
You’re the OP, I guess you deserved to have it too
Well I suppose I have to block the community now, or else it’s gonna be all awkward.
I mean, it is a valid point to be brought up. A year ago when I joined Lemmy, one of the first advices I’ve read for new people starting out is to block communities they don’t want to see posts from - for whatever reason it may be.
What happened to that stance? I feel like if it were any other subject than veganism, people wouldn’t bat an eye. I’m not out here arguing that being vegan is like being part of a minority, but there sure as hell is a lot of vegan bashing on reddit. On Lemmy too, it seems
What happened to that stance?
I don’t know, seems reasonable advice
There’s also voting to voice what you want to see in a community. If you block every community that has content you don’t like, there won’t be anything left.
I see what you mean. However, I think downvoting to curate a community’s contents shows that you are an active participant in the community which many of the people who drive-by downvote usually aren’t
I thought the memes were funny though I suppose from the meat eater view they can be seen as slightly provocative.
The memes we’re referring to seem to have resulted in an increase in moderation action. Is this inadvertent, or were the posts intended to drive up or surface critical commentary?
It was clearly purposeful.
Let’s give them a chance to speak, please.
They deleted that account. Maybe they’ll use one of their sock puppets?
Honestly, what a loser. Couldn’t stand the heat of their own kitchen.
Probably your conscience letting you know it was wrong.
PSA, stop trying to use the Reddit syntax of /c/vegan, it’s [email protected]. The exclamation mark is what makes it a link. Also please always include the instance the community is hosted on or it will link to different places for different users.
At this point we should turn Rule 5 into it’s own joke. Bad vibes? Rule 5. I don’t like you? Rule 5. I’m having a bad day? Rule 5. The great servers need a sacrifice? Rule 5. Bitching about Rule 5? Believe it or not, Rule 5.
Rule 5
Where’s his brother? I could have sworn there were two angry beavers…
Edit: NM totally missed the mod in question’s name.
Am I missing something here? The vegan community is for vegans and people to ask questions about being vegan but is not for debating about any part of being vegan. That is their rule 5, which I see people break every day thinking it is ok to shit all over vegans there. If you don’t want to hear about vegans then block the community.
The mod isn’t banning people for debating in the comments. A lot of people the mod is banning (myself included) are people who only downvoted posts. Considering that a large portion of the posts are blatantly antagonist things like this, it easy to see why they’re getting downvoted. If you’re going to insult 90% of the users on an instance, then you’re going to get downvoted.
The mod could have made the community private so they could insult people without consequences, but instead, they decided to remain public while banning anyone who downvotes their insults. They want to continue to antagonize the instance while removing the instance’a ability to respond. They want to artificially lower the number of downvotes they get, so it doesn’t look like their antagonistic bullshit is as unpopular as it is.
Everyone could block the community, and if you choose to do that, that’s a reasonable response, but it shouldn’t be the only response. We should be able to express our opinion about the content in our feeds, even if it’s just downvoting it. Why should an entire instance be expected to hide from one abusive community?
Consider the absurdity of that statement for a second.
How can a non-vegan ask a question about the lifestyle without engaging in a debate? How do you actively interact with information without debating it?
Debates don’t have to be antagonistic. When both parties are genuinely interested in questioning their own values and opinions they can be incredibly rewarding. I can understand a rule against antagonism, but disallowing debates inherently precludes honest questioning for people interested in growing their knowledge on the lifestyle.
Well it gets fatiguing to debate all the time, especially when some people are just trolling. But you can ask questions like what do you do for protein, B12, iron, etc. without debating. What are some staples that vegans eat, is it easy to make vegan food, how expensive is vegan food, what does a balanced vegan meal look like, what are some recipes, etc. Even asking can a person thrive on a vegan diet through all stages of life and you’ll probably be given an article or recommended to watch Game Changers.
I think they want to stop the antagonistic people, especially if all they want to do is say: it is only natural to eat meat/we evolved to eat meat, humans have dominion over animals, animals don’t have feelings, vegans are just being overemotional aka only logical people eat meat, it is ok to kill animals, killing animals in factory farms is ok because it is efficient, there isn’t enough land to grow vegan food for everyone, etc. Just shit that’s been responded to a million times and at this point seems bad faith since it’s been debunked before. Maybe they could have a sticky or wiki about these common arguments, idk I am not a mod.
It also matters what your tone is and that can be the difference between someone asking questions in good faith vs someone doing an antagonistic debate. But yeah at this point vegans do not need to question their values or opinions when it comes to their diet and lifestyle. You cannot convince a vegan it is ok to kill an animal for food but you might be able to convince a non-vegan it is wrong to kill an animal for food. Anyway that was just my thoughts on it.
The bans seem to be targeting downvotes without other contribution and cheeky comments such as the one in the OP
If you don’t want to hear about vegans then block the community.
Doesn’t help much when one of their users is being so fucking stupid that news of it spreads across all of Lemmy.
Thanks for adding context, I had no idea what rule 5 was.
This is their rule 5:
That rule seems very… Open to interpretation. Thanks for the info though.
deleted by creator
Rule 5 - This community is an echo bunker.
If they indeed promoted vegan diets for carnivores then I’m for a ban of the mod / community too. That’s very much animal abuse.
I’ve responded to this before and no one cared but here is the original thread since everyone has greatly exaggerated what was said about cats who are obligate carnivores not obligated to eat meat per se.
Also the notion of “owning” another animal is speciesist.
I’m not sure I can take the people in that community and what they claim seriously.
I admit I have no idea how to respond to that. Every vegan has different views on their lifestyle. I have two dogs, they eat kibble that has meat in it (they are very picky idk if I can change them to a vegetarian kibble), I homemake simple peanut butter biscuit treats for them, and I brush their teeth with meat flavored toothpaste. This is ok to me but is probably out of line for others. Some vegans would never own a cat and would rather own a rabbit or guinea pig instead. This vegan believes more that we shouldn’t have pets apparently. I don’t have this view so I cannot defend it other than they are trying to reduce harm in their own way.
And they’d ban you for your opinion.
The problem is, in my opinion, that they post memes that are clerly provoking non-vegan people for discussion.
It’s weird to jump under a “here are my 15 ways of cooking asparagus” post with anti-vegan content. But “look at these carnovorous clowns” memes are clearly offensive.
Sounds like something a carnivorous clown would say!
(/s)
I don’t think it’s intended to provoke non-vegan people, I think it’s meant to be a ‘for us, by us’ community. PSA to all: there’s a block community button for communities that are not hateful or illegal (you should report those) but are things you’d prefer not to see on your personalized feeds
That’s what private communities are for. Calling people names while perfectly aware of it leaking into the public feed is a provocation. And it worked.
I’m not sure what you’re referring to re: name-calling tbh, and I think this thread is an overreaction, but I agree with you that non-private communities have some obligation to civility or something like that
Private communities don’t exist; you can only create an instance and defederate from everyone else. VeganTheoryClub is an instance which defederated from Lemmy.World, for example.
I think what you are missing is that they’re banning people for breaking Rule 5 that haven’t broken Rule 5.
Nobody is taking issue with them banning people that broke Rule 5.
This good advice. Everyone should block the community.
Well yeah if seeing vegan content upsets you enough to break their rule 5 then it is not a good community for you. And that is ok, honestly I get grief in real life about me trying to be vegan. Having a place amongst other vegans and people not anti-vegan is nice. I also don’t know the context behind the post so if there is something I’m missing feel free to tell me.
I got banned (rule 5) for downvoting a meme with misleading information. I’m not vegan, but I like the idea in general so I did enjoy seeing content. But things have gone off the rails recently.
Hi there. Things escalated really out of control due to a rogue mod, but the situation has since been resolved, and things should be back to normal.
I’d say not just recently. They’ve stepped it up after the big drama but been at it for a while.
Oh, but the “why do you hate veganism huh??” memes continue. Yeah, it’s definitely the veganism I can’t stand and not the fan club!
This is entirely a mod issue. I’m vegan, and they need to be removed. They are ruining the image of the community so that people like OP start pushing for everyone to block it. If that isn’t ruining the prospects of our cause, then I don’t know what is.
Ah I see. Not sure what is going on then.
Fwiw, anyone giving you grief irl is a jerk, unless you’re trying to convert them.
Away from the internet, I know a good handful of vegans that I gladly cook for. Not regions everyone hates y’all for living your beliefs.
And, just for full disclosure, I troll vegans online. That’s where most of the jerks that are vegan do their thing, not irl.
Me and you, if life threw us together, I’d make you my vegan chili, and we’d chill. But I’d still troll you online if you did the usual online stuff that gets vegans painted as crazy.
Which is my best effort at saying that that’s probably what you’re missing. Even people like me that have no problems with the precepts of veganism per se, we can get tired of the vegans that take things too far, and then the entire belief system gets colored by that brush. It creates a general fatigue, then a general stereotype, and that turns into assholes going to vegan spaces and being assholes (as opposed to only doing it in other spaces). That in turn makes militant vegans go on the warpath, and you get stuff like this drama lol
It’s a cycle of annoyance and limited perception. That cycle attracts the worst elements of humanity
Thank you for posting this. I know now that it was because of voting which is ehh not as bad as I thought. But yeah IRL my family and partner aren’t very supportive, I’ve been trying to ignore their comments. It’s just hard sometimes, like just last night my partner said they felt sorry for me during dinner because I didn’t have meat in my meal. I think that’s probably why some vegans become more aggressive online as well as the cycle going on. Idk I just like reading articles and seeing recipes. When I first went vegan my dad tried getting my whole family to convince me to eat meat again. I love my dad but that sucked. I also love my partner and they are otherwise fine, but they seem to have a problem and are adjusting to my new diet. I can understand the fatigue a vegan may go through, but banning people for voting isn’t exactly what I had in mind as their rule 5.
I’m sorry you went through that. It shapes us to have thicker skin, but it can also lead to bad outcomes depending on the friends and family involved.
Ed Winters talked about this on his channel recently. One of the biggest reasons people don’t go vegan, and one of the biggest reasons pushing people away from the movement is the social dimension: living with people and still holding them as on your side when they very clearly violate your moral code. It’s one of the hardest burdens of vegans, as I’m sure it can be for other minorities. Again, I’m not equating vegans to a minority group like LGBTQ or POC. The animals are the minority group. But when you have discrimination and sometimes segregation for specific groups in society, you can start to draw parallels.
Good luck with your vegan life from a fellow vegan 🤙
I’m sorry you’re running into such a degree of outright opposition. I never have understood that part, why someone that loves you would be persistent and nigh aggressive about something that’s essentially not their business.
Somebody wants to make a change, move towards something they feel is better, you support that, even if you need to draw your own boundaries about it.
That would be exhausting to deal with for anyone, the opposition.
I kinda get where the mod is at, the way you describe the fatigue. I think it’s better to step aside once your at that point, refresh yourself, maybe make a decision about that being a permanent break from trying to herd cats online or not. I’ve had to do the a few times over the years.
I personally believe this particular mod may be abusing the community’s rule 5, stretching it to suit their agenda. But I’ll leave the interpretation up to you.
Note that others are reporting being banned by simply downvoting community posts. Suggesting further overreach.
I forgot Lemmy lets you see who downvoted and upvoted. Idk why that is happening. I thought the brigade was about comments.
I’ll be one to admit my own comment was a bit cheeky. I had honestly never really noticed the [email protected] in my All feed until today, when this particular mod started posting a great deal of really poorly formatted memes. My cheeky comment was my only ever comment in the community.
I can’t speak to any actual brigading, as the community normally isn’t worth my time, which is very, very important to me.
Not just poorly formatted…they were full of insults.
Theory: the posts are bait so Beaver can feel powerful banning people.
I’m on a (admittedly slow), slide towards vegetarianism so I’m obviously pro-vegan…but apparently I got banned two days ago for rule 5
Users cannot vote in a community that has banned them. If the mod wants to restrict voting only to people who vote in good faith, that’s their prerogative. It’s probably a good idea, it prevents downvote spam from bots and the like. When you have a community that has very different values from /all, maybe kicking the /all people who vote against the sub’s values out is good. Voting is participation.
Shining transparency on these values and modding decisions to the attention of the fediverse then serves the greater good.
It does. You’ve opened the conversation about voting as participation and helped us reach some new ideas on moderation practice. It’s dialectics. As I said in another comment in this thread, I think the existence of posts like this is good even if this ban wasn’t a problem.
When some of those mods are perfectly fine with lgbtq persecution, and make it out like vegans have it worse, or dont care because they wouldn’t have to see it personally…
I’m just going to go ahead and consider it a toxic shithole. Worst part? Different mod, but they seem to be all over the same vegan communities, so none of them become worthwhile.
I personally don’t care if they ban me since I’ve blocked the communities anyway. Just unfortunate as I really enjoy seeing some of the recipes, as there are a decent number of them that are gluten free (which I need to be).
Which mod is queerphobic? Can I see the evidence?
Well, spoke to soon. I was banned for being ‘uncivil’ on the .world vegan community for calling out this same behavior, and hoping the community ended up somewhere other than on that particular instance.
Sooo… yeah I’m keeping the block. Maybe expanding to some mods there would be sensible.
Edit: There, all set now.
I’ll have to unblock, so I can do that later on, sure. Working so not paying much attention to Lemmy at the moment.
Edit: Sorry, my mistake, not a mod. An admin on the instance recommended / linked to in the side bar.
but is not for debating about any part of being vegan
If that’s the case, I want to know why perfectly innocuous comments are still removed. Seems like they operate on a whim.
Depends on the context maybe? Idk I am not a mod. I’ve just seen comments about arguing for eating meat or saying something like “I’m going to eat 2 hamburgers now because of you” which are just annoying. I thought that was what this was about. I’ll leave my comments up for anyone else confused.
Cause over the last few weeks, a bunch of debates over moderation drama have been full of people attacking vegans over the cat taurine debate. That drama is over and it reached a consensus resolution between the mods and admins. If they’ve made an executive judgement that the moderation drama is no longer relevant and baits carnists into breaking rule 5, then removing that debate is a valid application of rule 5.
Odd then that they’re using Rule 5 bans on people like me who never posted to their community
Many people see a post on All, never notice the community name, never read the sidebar, comment, and move on.
I’m not vegan, but honestly I can understand. As soon as you have an opinion which is not the one of the majority, your posts, even in thematic spaces, are heavily downvoted, and it’s tiring. I’m not conservative, I disagree with the posts in c/conservative, buy why would I downvote the things they publish there? A lot of Lemmy members do, however. Same with c/vegan or the religious communities.
The Fediverse seems a lot “bubblier” than Reddit, with people quicker to hit the downvote button for views that intrude. I’ve lost a lot of drive to engage here, I find myself often dropping a comment into a discussion and then never looking back at it. Unfortunate, but I suppose not too surprising when communities are smaller.
I hide downvotes since we can (latest Lemmy upgrade), that’s better
I also hide downvotes due to the same reasons, (was getting stressed) but that also hides other users’ downvotes. Is there any way to still see them?
Not that I know of, it’s all or nothing at the moment
Sorry. Do I understand this correctly? You were getting stressed by random internet strangers downvoting you? Are you serious?
yeah I have an anxiety disorder, I get stressed by a lot of things
I’m sorry to hear that. I hope life becomes slower and calmer for you in the future. I don’t read anything into up or down votes. I just open my fat stupid mouth and anonymously comment. Sometimes people like it, sometimes they don’t. Voting is more a reflection of the people you talk to. I’m sure the first person who said the world was round and circled the sun would have been downvoted into oblivion back in the day, but… gestures broadly at modern astronomy. Don’t sweat it.
![[email protected] mod suppresses criticisms of fediverse spam campaign, using mass ban technique to silence opposing viewpoints](https://lemmy.sdf.org/pictrs/image/3c83e0c1-768e-462f-8cba-e2d7dcdadee9.png){kind=link}
