Mods have been using their positions to silence/ support specific political views in both c/news and c/politics (see non-rule breaking ban of @return2ozma ). The have a very specific and narrow political view they are "ok" with seeing and anything that strays from that gets removed (see @Blackbeard , @FlyingSquid ). However, its not any different than reddit in this regard, which was more draconian in that because it was so much larger, there were fewer consequences to banning individuals.
Here, the consequences are much much steeper. You can map the return2ozma ban directly to a drop in site wide/ lemmy wide engagement, because they were the one doing the actual work of posting content. Banning them had immediate and significant consequences to the viabiltiy of the platform, in that it survives on content/ engagement, which @return2ozma was disproportional responsible for. In these kinds of arbitrary bans, these mods are hurting the entire platforms viability in a significant way.
thanks for sharing! i do recommend posting these issues somewhere (possibly here but unsure if mods are active; testing this out with this post) so that, if not accountability, there is at least awareness of the leanings and controversies of certain mod groups
Well its a push pull. Those who might mod are typically far more engaged, and its a thankless job. Its not something that can be easily automated and there is real important work around true bad faith actors trying to derail the entire platform/ fediverse.
Its also important to acknowledge that its a balancing act, and that frankly, I think if you are a mod for a community, maybe you should't be allowed to participate in discussions in that community?
Its like, if you are playing pitcher, you shouldn't also be calling balls and strikes. More broadly, its something we'll need to keep iterating on and thinking about as a fediverse; it goes beyond lemmy and extends to the entire principal of large scale social media.
Can anecdotally say that I've pretty much stopped using Lemmy completely at this point because of mods than somehow feel even worse than Reddit's. Only shitposting because I've got a 5 day weekend and fuckall to do
I think this is a good example of the "cost" associated with how people decide to mod.
Were a very, very small community. There are maybe in the low thousand to upper hundreds engaged users across the entire fediverse.
And social media engagement always follows a log distribution, so for every 10,000 scrolling past, maybe 100 comment and 1 posts.
Preventing people from posting/ disrupting engagement because you've got a little fiefdom and an axe to grind is a great way to kill lemmy as a platform in the crib.
Agreed. Ozma's posts were some of the most active I ever saw. It doesn't matter what's being posted (within reason), if people are consistently engaging with it: you leave it alone. Even Reddit mods seem to understand this most times.
Thanks! I just know which headlines/articles will get the most engagement from all sides. Before I left Reddit I used to be on the front page multiple times a week. I do hope Biden or whoever they replace him with wins but I'm still going to voice my criticism of him.
Dude was rightfully banned for spamming the community. It’s absolutely against the rules. That you think it was a politically motivated move by the mods only shows your own bias in these matters.
The community he was banned from has banned people on al sides of the political spectrum. So when you go looking for a bias, you’ll find one if you want to.
From my perspective, Ozma does nothing but post anti-Biden propaganda. The dude is a bit of I ever saw one.
So you see, there two sides to everything. Who were left to do our best to see things from the perspective of those trying to maintain balance. And in this case, due was banned for spamming.
Hi, it's me. I'm on the fence about it. On one hand I guess I did post a lot of articles, even though they were on topic being political in a political channel. On the other hand, It is the mods decision to decide who gets banned and who stays.
We partially agree on this. You posted a lot of very specially tailored articles. It is a political community- so that’s not the part that’s a problem. While the amount of the posts was a lot- that we agree on, the bias in the subject matter was absolutely tilted towards an anti-Biden agenda.
Your posts still are, but that’s your thing. You’re allowed to hate whoever you’d like. I think the saying is- you’re free to say what you want, and everyone else is free to call it out.
To summarize, you didn’t do anything wrong by being anti-Biden, that’s opinion related. What you did wrong was spam a community which is against the rules.
I mean at this point, with the polls showing Biden is losing in most swing states and multiple mainstream newspapers calling for him to step down, if you're not trying to get Biden to resign then you're helping Trump win. I know that sounds like a hot take but that's how I feel about it. I have never wanted Trump to win. At least some of my posts have lit a fire under Dem supporters so they didn't get complacent, hopefully.
