I do have to admit to feeling at least a little validated for having called him out way more for his pattern of behavior when it came to interactions with other users as opposed to his posts. His posts were bad but the way he engaged with anyone and everyone was downright toxic. /politics is a better place with him banned, and now Lemmy will be a better place for him being gone. I’m sure he’s still out there on some platform playing the poor victim, as I doubt this was a “teachable moment”, but I sincerely hope he gets help somewhere. It’s cliché, but that dude had issues.

It was only a matter of time.

Ah, I was thinking that it was a ban from lemmy.world completely.

Poop.

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.

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.

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

That’s the consensus from the admins and mods. They have shitty opinions, but having shitty opinions is not a TOS violation.

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.

He had a standard copypasta for people accusing him of being a troll. If that’s not trolling I don’t know what is

The number of comments/posts makes me think they’re getting paid per comment or post (or maybe per reply?)

In any case, I still find it funny that in one of their earlier posts I called Stein a Russian stooge and they took personal offense to that. (for a moment, I wondered if maybe they were stein.)

I am not entirely sure what tools they have, but yeah the script was just pulling data from the public api. Anyone can write this script, and I will open source it if folks are interested. It could be good to have a set of tools similar to this one which mods could run with minimal effort.

It’s a script I wrote. I’m planning to open source it soon. Should I send you a link when it goes up?

Hmm… that is a good take. (Somewhat scarily, that also seems to describe me really well.)

Being on the spectrum could also explain a higher than typical screen time. I’ve been on these online communities in the past, and there are folks there who get online as the first thing they do when they wake up, and then go offline just right before bed. (There are good reasons for it of course - when you crave social interaction but the only medium that you can handle it is using a computer, then this sort of thing becomes more understandable.)

Do not treat neuro divgerent people with training wheels.

I’m neuro divgerent and it pisses me off when people treat me differently. Yeah, I’ve got my shit, and I often need things explained to me with clear guidelines, rules, and expectations.

But one thing my neuro divergence doesn’t grant me is the ability to act like a shit stain and get away with it while prodding everybody around me antagonisticly.

So if I want to copy paste the same non-response 26 times, I will not get banned for it, as long as I don’t say overtly mean things? I would absolutely assume that would get me perma banned if I kept doing it.

Are you trolling us now?

While I understand your concern because I knew someone who was like that personally, that person’s ability and desire to constantly respond caused them a significant bit of distress, often replying to people with something like, “please stop replying because I feel compelled to say something in response.”

Maybe shutting a user up every now and then would be a net positive.

This is a perfect representation of them.

Yeah, if I didn’t think they were fucking up the whole ecosystem and showing other potential trolls they can too, I’d just block them and move on.

I’m pretty sure they were referring to The Cole Protocol.

Ah, ok. Yeah, the comment seemed hard to judge but the account was so similar to UM’s modus operandi that I wanted to raise it just in case.

I agree with this. The rule applied to justify the ban seems to be rule 3 - by posting the same article from multiple sources, it’s a repost. And IIRC this user has had articles removed in the past for the same reason (in fact leading up to new rules, e.g. the ones against linking to aggregators and the one that was put in place related to posting 19 articles in a single day) - so the multiple posts removed criteria was also met.

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.

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.

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.

That’s totally doable by clients. Not sure why they don’t all include that feature. It’s so basic.

So that the trolls would gang up on posts they don’t like?

There is no perfect solution, and I guess human moderation is the best one we have.

Now that they were banned from politics, their rate of engagement went WAY down. Kinda speaks volumes.

I’ll bet they have an alt account up and running already in either case.