So we’ve seen the complaints and the reports and boy oh boy are there complaints and reports.
I’ve discussed the account with the other mods and admins multiple times, and while we agree the volume is a lot, it doesn’t point to a botfarm or multiple people using the account.
Obsessive? Absolutely, but not technically rule breaking… Until today.
Today they indescriminately posted the same story three times from three different sources apparently solely to flood the channel showing a decided lack of judgement.
It’s a valid story from a valid source, the original has been kept here:
https://lemmy.world/post/21098916
The others have been removed as duplicates.
I’m also applying a 15 day temp ban on the account.
“15 days? That’s oddly specific! What’s in 15… OH!”
Good they have been trolling us for a while. Also, thank you for your efforts and you are appreciated.
I dunno if it’s trolling. It’s deluded and obsessive demonstrating a lot of free time, but, like, they’re passionate about it.
I mean, they have some magical thinking and logic and I don’t think their actions are actually pragmatic towards their goals, but I’m fairly certain it’s genuine.
Either way, this was the right move.
Edit: ehhhhhh some other comments have shown they were acting like a troll fairly consistently. Maybe this should have been done sooner.
That’s the consensus from the admins and mods. They have shitty opinions, but having shitty opinions is not a TOS violation.
having shitty opinions is not a TOS violation
Good cause I’d be gone already
They constantly troll anyone who responds to them. It’s sheer flame bait with every comment.
All of the posts and comments that user makes are universally Down voted, and pretty much everyone here hates this user. Why on earth you won’t ban them permanently is beyond any of us.
I appreciate that you want to give them the benefit of the doubt, but it’s obvious that they’re main goal is to provoke Arguments. Pretty much everyone in the affected communities, like news and politics, can’t stand the person. Nobody wants them there.
Please permanently ban them, at least from those communities.
I think this is balanced and fair. I don’t think they demonstrated any supremely shitty opinions, i.e. racism, bigotry, but their presence was incredibly annoying and they didn’t really participate in useful conversations and moreso used the reply box as a soapbox to say a lot of nonsense.
Moreover, I think banning until the election shows an understanding and restraint by the administration team that is commendable.
Yeah, the typical line crossers, racism, bigotry, hatred, genocide denial, etc. get you on the fast track to a ban and they avoided all of that.
…intentionally.
That’s why moderation sometimes requires judgment calls. When someone is intentionally avoiding whatever the moderation cut off seems to be, then it’s clear their participation is intentionally as provocative as possible without triggering enforcement. In that case it’s the user playing the mod team against the rest of the community because they know your boundaries and can weaponize them to “win.”
I think it’s troublesome that there’s more firm enforcement against any kind of “denialism” and “bigotry” than there is for demonstrably antagonistic behavior. Lemmy is veering too strongly toward curating a list of acceptable opinions and too far away from enforcing civility standards, if you ask me. That’s a surefire way to create an ironclad left-leaning echo chamber.
Well, it’s always been left leaning, look at .ml ;)
And decisions to take a more punitive approach to the expression of certain opinions and beliefs than to shitty, antagonistic behavior will ensure that never changes.
than there is for demonstrably antagonistic behavior. Lemmy is veering too strongly toward curating a list of acceptable opinions and too far away from enforcing civility standards, if you ask me. That’s a surefire way to create an ironclad left-leaning echo chamber.
I would argue exactly the opposite.
First of all, fuck “civility” rules, which in my experience (back on Reddit) tend to result in polite bad faith comments (sealioning etc.) being tolerated while comments calling out bad faith for the toxic behavior it is get removed.
Second, facts are not opinions, and it’s hardly Lemmy’s fault if Colbert was correct about reality’s bias.
Genocide denialism and bigotry are WAY worse than just being uncivil. I’m fine with a chamber that doesn’t allow bigotry. If you think that makes it left-leaning, that says a lot more about the right than “free speech”.
My point is they shouldn’t allow either. The only thing worse is using a double standard, because it prioritizes assholes you agree with over polite users you don’t.
It’s certainly not genuine good faith engagement. But yeah not obvious “trolling” no matter how dismissive and off putting their responses can be. They have some sort of personal need for engagement. And way too much free time to pursue it in. Two things combined with unwillingness to understand or acknowledge the arguments other people make. That come off so toxic.
If “not genuine good faith engagement”, “dismissive”, “need for engagement”, “too much free time”, “unwillingness to understand or acknowledge other arguments”, and “toxicity” aren’t signs that someone is trolling, then can you please share the definition of trolling you’re using? In my eyes all of those things are classic troll behaviors.
It is only trolling if they do it from the le beaucoup Trolle province of France.
LOL
Just because it can be, doesn’t mean it is. It’s absolutely taken on more trollish overtones of late. They weren’t always this way. If you want to go dumpster diving, months ago there were moments and posts of introspection.
It’s not healthy behavior regardless. But I can understand it. I don’t tolerate Leninist/tankie hypocrisy, and feel pretty self righteous calling them out on it. Viewing their silent down votes as affirmation. It would be easy to behave similarly to them. Pestering etc. Hell I have done it in the past. And if I was a person prone to the magical thinking of dogma and ideology I probably still would be. But I value my time, logic, and reason much more. And enjoy it much more to engage with someone, that even if we don’t agree in the end. We don’t talk past each other. But focus on actually having a fruitful discussion.
So, again, can you define “troll” for me? I think you and I are operating based on fundamentally different definitions, and I’d like to see yours spelled out so I can understand the difference.
Only after you define a patronizing. And explain why you’ve chosen to ignore what was said. I literally said it’s taken on trollish tone recently. But I don’t believe it’s their actual MO. To be clear I’m not arguing that they should not be banned or trying to defend them. I honestly think there’s much more to suggest mental illness going on there than gleeful trolling. But I see that it’s wildly important for you personally to only see them definitely as a troll. Despite the fact that being undaunted and a bit spammy is the biggest accusation that you have. I honestly am getting much more trollish vibe from you than I have ever gotten from monk all the times I disagreed with them and pointed it out. Which to be clear I’ve largely stopped engaging with them at this point because of the uselessness.
Looking at some of their threads, the trolling type behavior seemed directed at users who were already fairly antagonistic to them to begin with, then it turned in to trolling back and forth all the way down.
The definition you gave in your initial comment is the definition I use. I very clearly didn’t ignore what you said, have no idea what “a patronizing” has to do with anything, and asked you a very simple question, which you ignored.
The fact that after only two replies you went straight to personal attacks tells me I’m unlikely to get anything productive out of this exchange.
Nah. I’ve dealt with these kind of people since BBSs. They’re trolls and get a kick out of the responses.
They usually have multiple “hidden” agendas.
First and foremost is to get a rise out of people to get engagement so their message resonates negatively and then is surfaced and viewed by the impressionable.
Second is to cause strife within the community.
Third is to get that strife to get people to shift to their viewpoint
It’s amazing how many people forgot about the classical “get a rise out of everyone with shitty arguments” troll, or forgot that the way to deal with them was to ignore and ban on sight. Fuck, I was practically in diapers when Usenet and BBSes were a thing and I still remember “don’t feed the troll.”
They are trolling. They love the negative attention here is just one example of it “Wait, do I have 81,000 downvotes now? I thought it was 45,000?! Can you double check. I wanna put the correct number of downvotes in my profile. The link you provided isn’t working for me. Thanks for the updated stats, friend! :)” They purposely post more mild posts and then like today they went for the triple post of troll material. They are playing a lot of people right now. Don’t be one of them.
That’s a much more recent turn. Not that long ago they were asking why they were getting such negative engagement. I think they decided to cling to ideology and take the negativity as an affirmation of their position. Make no mistake, I’m not asking for them not to be banned or anything. I have 100% left community that they’ve been apart of. And will not lament their absence. I don’t think it’s clear trolling.
This is what falling for a troll looks like. Giving excuses for their trolling behavior as if the troll is really just responding to their environment despite the troll being the one who initiates the conflict.
That’s just it though. In a weird sort of way they don’t tend to initiate it. Look at it closer. Try to find an instance of them commenting on a post to community that wasn’t their own. Or did not mention them in some way. It’s oddly rare as f***.
If their whole intent was to feed off metallic replies. Why would they create and moderate many many different communities to which they post some of the same s*** and get very little response? Often still getting ratioed on what little response they do get. That’s a lot of extra work for not very much troll food.
If you choose to Define them as a troll. You still have to admit they’re one of the easiest trolls in history to avoid. Which should make you question the label. The behavior is much too erratic and unpredictable for something like a simple troll. Much more indicative of something like mental illness and a bad response to being bullied
Try to find an instance of them commenting on a post to community that wasn’t their own.
That is just trolling with home court advantage. They put out the honeypot and get to argue on their home turf for the most part, although they also posted to c/politics.
Much more indicative of something like mental illness and a bad response to being bullied
‘Just responding to their environment.’
That is just trolling with home court advantage. They put out the honeypot and get to argue on their home turf for the most part
That’s a REAL stretch. I’m not saying they aren’t fucking annoying. They’re really, FUCKING, annoying. But being annoying doesn’t imply trolling. I’ve met people who’s basic speaking tones and patterns annoyed me. But it was less something they did intentionally and more a malfunction of who they were. And in this case, despite monk making a spectacle of themselves. People sought them out far more than monk intruded elsewhere.
I won’t miss them. But some of the behavior has definitely been obsessive and bullying towards them. Regardless of their actions or what you think of them personally. Maybe you like that fact. Maybe you don’t. For me personally though it feels like pretty shitty behavior all around and no one to really root for. When I stopped engaging with them. I stopped having issues with them. They didn’t follow. Didn’t harass others the way they were harassed. That’s not justifying or defending their behavior. Whatever lessons they learned they learned the wrong fucking thing. There’s no question about that.
Yeah, they are literally bragging about being a troll in their profile when they boast about their downvotes.
Pretty wild this is even being debated.
I see I wasn’t up to date on my Monk lore… I blocked them fairly early on after a weird conversation.
Exactly there intentions are right there for anyone to see.
The news source of this post could not be identified. Please check the source yourself. Media Bias Fact Check | bot support
They should stick to writing mildly interesting short horror stories
Maybe some kind of rate limiting would work for cases like this. Anyway, i doubt we’ll see that one again after the 15 days are up. At least for the next four years.
Yeah, reddit had something like that baked in, I’m not sure how lemmy could implement it.
“You are doing that too much, try again later.”
It seemed to be tied to both the age of the account and the karma of the account. It varies from subreddit to subreddit.
There also seemed to be a difference if you were subscribed to the community or not.
But then we’re comparing something relatively new (lemmy) to an established platform with over a decade of development too.
Sounds like a bot could do the job. Counts submissions in a rolling 24 hour period and fires a report off if someone goes over. Or it even deletes the post itself.
For local, lemmy.world users, yeah. I think the confounding factor is federation, but like I say, I raised the issue and we have people way smarter than me!
I was just thinking about reading the name and time on the post and running a counter. Then deleting the posts if they are above the limit.
Sounds like a great feature to request
I asked in our Discord. I think the limiting factor is federation. I’m not sure how it’s possible to rate limit things in a federated environment.
Fortunatley we have smarter people than me around!
If they don’t reappear then I think there is a legitimate argument that it was a coordinated propaganda account.
If they do come back with the same level of veracity then I think there is merit to the potential mental illness, or neurodivergence argument.
I’ll bet they have an alt account up and running already in either case.
I mean maybe, but I think it would be pretty obvious given the nature of how and what they post.
Possibly, yeah. Or they might just be content with spamming other politics communities.
Oh I bet there’ll be posts regarding election integrity starting 11/6.
I’m pretty sure they’ll start before that.
I’ve handled users like this similarly in some of the communities I head up here. I try not to touch the content unless it is obvious misinformation and that violates instances rules. That said, if their content and or comments are clearly intended to create discord, pester, or pester in a passive aggressive manor, then they get the boot.
I wish we had some sort of sort filter that hid aggressively downvoted content and comments. That way the “knights of the new” could bury problematic content.
People don’t like the idea of mods having to censor users, but they also don’t want their feed full of downvoted posts or infighting.
It would be a nice Lemmy feature if posts and comments under, say, -20 were auto-collapsed. That would allow people to still see unpopular content without everyone having to wade through it.
That’s totally doable by clients. Not sure why they don’t all include that feature. It’s so basic.
“I’ll keep posting what I want, when I want, where I want, and respond to people how I want. Whether it is “working” or not. Thank you!” - Monk
This is when I realized it was all in bad faith and I stopped giving him the benefit of the doubt.
You gotta know they’re absolutely loving this shit right now. An entire post dedicated only to them? Where they are the topic of discussion? That’s probably the biggest badge of honor someone like them could earn here.
I’d wager it’s bookmarked and will be read several times a day for months to come.
I think the bigger issue here is the indiscriminate obvious trolling.
The fact that it took “bad judgment” and not the reading between the lines for their sealioning and bad faith arguments and faux “friend” comments points towards the need for strengthening our community standards.
Allowing people to come in and troll under the guise of “I’m following the rules lolololol” makes the mods look like rubes.
When it comes to moderation, I’m of the opinion that it should never be a “read between the lines” interpretation. If we’re going to take action as severe as a ban, it should not be open to interpretation.
For example, I remember a comment that was reported and removed for referencing the whole disingenuous question “when did you stop beating your wife?”
Reported and removed for call to violence, and I had to explain to the other mod that “no, no, they’re making a point about asking disingenous questions…”
Post was restored.
That was my comment. I’m both a little embarrassed that got referenced after so long, but was also impressed in the moment that someone took the time to actually understand the context in which it was made.
So, I’m torn on the issue of what the appropriate course of action would be in the instance of UniversalMonk, and when it should have been taken. I see the validity in your argument in regards to not moderating in the gray area due to the abuse & power-brokering that comes along with it.
At the same time, in order to create a healthy community long-term I think there needs to be some way to enforce a more black & white standard that dissuades people from engaging in this kind of behavior because it drives away legitimate users who care about the platform.
I don’t necessarily have a good solution for that, and again I do appreciate the complexity of the situation from a moderation standpoint.
Clearly we just turn over moderating to ChatGPT, what could possibly go wrong? ;)
When it comes to moderation, I’m of the opinion that it should never be a “read between the lines” interpretation. If we’re going to take action as severe as a ban, it should not be open to interpretation.
The problem with this is that it allows people to ride the line of what is acceptable and get away with things that effectively poison the platform with toxicity.
It’s very similar to what Trump did, and now look at the state of the entire US politics system now.
By allowing people to toe the line by not technically breaking the rules, it still adds to the overall toxicity of Lemmy.
Oh very much so, which is why I, and other mods, were paying very close attention to what they were doing.
Reports fall into two categories:
“Oh, this guy again, can we ban them yet?”
and:
“Oh, god, it’s the person who reports everything…”
The weird part is in the latter case, you can’t just ignore ALL their reports, no matter how much you want to, because there is that 1 in 10 chance they’re right. LOL.
Yes, but when there’s literally thousands of posts and comments to build the “between the lines” data within a 30-day time frame what excuse is there?
When somebody is trolling so hard that it’s causing strife within your community it should be addressed. Identify the behavior that isn’t desired and enforce existing rules around it or create a new one and warn the person that they need to operate in good faith within the rules or they will be ousted as an antagonistic troll.
In cases like that the default position is to allow the downvotes and individual user blocks to do the job.
The problem with individual user blocks is that if someone submits enough of the links in a community, blocking them means blocking most stories and discussions so you can’t really read or participate in the community without leaving them unblocked.
I think that would carry more weight if downvotes had some kind of meaningful effect on the user’s engagement with the platform. As it stands they’re purely symbolic.
Additionally, deferring to user blocks does two things: 1) It decreases the chance that the problematic behavior will elicit meaningful criticism or pushback from more engaged participants, which amplifies its unchallenged visibility/effect on marginally engaged lurkers, and 2) it puts control of the dialogue squarely into the hands of committed trolls, rather than the community or the community’s moderators. Blocks don’t do anything to change or improve the community, they just allow people to filter their own version of it.
Which makes your community toxic and your job harder.
How many reports did you get and have to filter through and ultimately ignore? If that’s not an indicator from your community that something needs to change you’re not listening to our needs.
My default is to be more lenient because I saw how badly heavy handed moderation can go from 15 years on reddit. ;)
Too many times what’s “toxic” or not was decided by… well…
People are commenting about one glaringly obvious troll with a long history of baiting in comments, not calling for widespread bans based on a few posts per user.
This very much appears to be a case where it would be reasonable to break from your default. This is not a typical user doing typical things.
Well, yeah, and I did that when I raised the issue with the other mods and admins multiple times. ;)
Thankyou :D
The Dark Monk is going to write some erotic friend fiction about you, jordanlund.
Oddly, on a personal level, I have no beef with the guy. If we were local we could probably go out for beers or something.
You’re a better man than I.
I think @jordanlund@lemmy.world is right. The Monk has many beliefs that I either agree with or at least understand where they’re coming from. If there had been full duration Democratic primary, or any of the 3rd parties been even remotely competent/had a chance, or the voting system been a universal Ranked-Choice Voting system or better I’d probably support them. But he refused to see reality to the point I think it is fair to argue a dishonest agenda at best.
Regardless of the cognitive dissonance saying that gives me, I think it was a good thing for the community, and perhaps Monk too, that a break was mandated.
I have mixed feelings about zombies. They’re dangerous but I like their swagger
🤘🧟♂️
HOW do you post here 1.9k times in two months? I have like 7 posts in over a year and I feel somewhat active.
I’m not complaining about any decisions mods have made, I’m legitimately asking cause that seems crazy. 32 posts a day is a LOT.
32 posts a day is a LOT.
Honestly, that’s not even that impressive… It’s only 4 posts per hour over a 8 hour work day, which is completely achievable if Internet trolling is your hobby of choice.
What’s really impressive is the number of comments. I won’t speculate on Monk’s motives (out of fear of running afoul of this community’s rules) except to say that they seem extremely motivated to argue with anyone and everyone who posts a disagreeing comment. Their tactic is to bicker with any dissenting voices (without actually engaging with their arguments) to the point of exhaustion so that no one will bother engaging anymore — a very specific strategy I have to imagine is designed to shift the Overton window a particular way.
Fortunately, their efforts seem to have been mostly ineffective given the number of people around here who continue to call out their BS. So keep fighting the good fight, I guess!
I told them in PMs that, as a mod, I self limit to 3 posts a day for fear of being seen as putting my thumb on the scale and influencing the discourse.
And that’s in the groups I mod(!)
He’s over that by a factor of 10+
I don’t know what his deal was but anyone who is that gleefully belligerent when confronted by people who don’t like what he’s doing isn’t really anyone I want around. Coincidently, I blocked him today. I don’t think he was doing anything wrong other than sheer volume of one-note posts. But I got tired of all the comment sections being about him. And I think I’ve absorbed enough of his point of view for a time.
For all I know he was just trying to keep folks riled up enough to vote. But those posts didn’t add to the value of the community IMO.
For a while I didn’t block them b/c I wanted to see what and how much they were posting. The shtick was indeed getting old and after seeing the glut of posts today, I blocked them. Enough is enough and I know what they are about.
Trolling. Trolling and disinformation.
Have you not seen that Dot person? They post like 50 news posts a day. The accounts days old and already has about 100 submissions.
That boii went super saiya-cringe mode.
This is a perfect representation of them.
Oh holy fuck it’s only 15 days away! Anxiety!
Also having seen the guy, makes sense you can’t ban bad takes (or at least, shouldn’t) but my sense is he just likes to be infamous. Hell, this is a post about his banning, even! He’s probably loving the attention.
Still, I’ve got my Lemmy heroes — obsessive posting can be used for good, like a certain maneuver named after a certain starship captain.
I approve of this action and appreciate the transparency. Thank you for doing something about this individual.
Are you familiar with toxoplasmosis? The disease that mutates into different forms so a bunch of different animals can host it and pass it along.
This is a long article but it’s really good, it’s worth a read and it predicted a lot of the discourse of the last decade: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage/
The sort of gist of it is this: the more grey area / ambiguity in a topic, the more we pop our own identity into our stance on it. And so if that thing is controversy, we argue about it so much more if there’s room to self-insert our identity in that grey area. It spreads and spreads to a bunch of different hosts. It becomes a meme via argument by infecting a bunch of hosts to pass it along.
And that’s Monk.
Pretty early on, it was very clear that they had no actual understanding of the topics they were talking about. I tried in their first few weeks to engage with them and so did others. Only to find nothing there. No opinions, and all counter-arguments were clearly copy & pasted off of Wikipedia. Things like “we have X amount of members in Maine”.
Please.
Eventually they stopped trying to engage altogether, and instead moved into a deliberate pattern of line-toeing retorts. None in good faith. But, more importantly, never with enough substance to interrupt the ensuing argument, while simultaneously always enough comment traffic to perpetuate the thread.
Monk is a memetic toxoplasmosis source vector. Through pure ineptitude or irony, I think they’ve accidentally turned more people against third parties than for them, but maybe that isn’t their goal.
Even now there’s an undercurrent of “I don’t think I even disagree with them”. Well, how could you? They haven’t said anything worth disagreeing with, have they? What have they said, though? Not much. Nothing recognizable as an opinion in defense of the third party articles. Often, just enough to establish a veneer of plausible deniability.
It’s a sophisticated form of trolling and it’s recognizable to anyone with a long history of community management online. There are some people who never seem to be directly at fault for things, yet every single time you remove them, the temperature goes down.
You don’t need to actually build a case against these people to know that the equation is simple: when they’re around, everyone is angry. When they aren’t, people get along better.
Anyway, my point is this: you can tell who is contributing in good faith and who isn’t, because they will attempt to say what’s on their mind. It might be the worst take you’ve ever heard in your life, but it has a concretion to it. Monk has no concrete substance, they simply like to stir the pot.
Agreed. They are being intentionally passive aggressive and they are trying to create discord in this community. They often say that they expect downvotes.
IMHO, if a user is repeatedly trying to get a rise from other users, then it’s time to go.
It’s like a little bother holding a finger to your face and saying “I’m not touching you.” They’re following the rules and not hitting their sibling, but know they’re being a pest.
Absolutely agree with this and for this reason, in my opinion, they really should be instance-banned. They contribute nothing that anyone else isn’t already doing. And they’re absolutely doing it in bad faith.
So good riddance to bad rubbish.
You’ve pretty much nailed it.
upvoting for well articulated nuance
