Following News, I made a change to the “no trolling” rule in Politics and World (rule 4 for Politics, 5 for World)
“Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to “Mom! He’s bugging me!” and “I’m not touching you!” Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.”
So the new rule is to let trolls do what they want, invisibly to the people who care most about that – because the rule is literally to have to block them? This is fucked up.
Nope, reported comments will be addressed as usual.
With all due respect, that did not happen with UM for months and far longer with linkerbaan.
Because they walked a fine line. Bans don’t happen on presumptions.
You can’t blame the community here for being kind of frustrated with this response. Many people reported trolling behavior for a long time before that ban finally happened. If the things I reported them for myself aren’t trolling then I don’t know would qualify as trolling.
Several other instances banned UM for trolling long before .world did. Because it wasn’t unclear.
The best we can we do is watch and look for an excuse!
An excuse NOT to ban them? That seemed to be the process. And now you’ve told us to just report and block them.
If hundreds of reports did nothing for weeks about the most obvious troll I’ve ever seen, I have no faith at all that reporting and blocking trolls will help the fediverse in the least. They will be free to run their election interference campaigns just like on Facebook.
I know modding isn’t easy but Jesus this case surely was. No fucking way anyone believed he wasn’t a troll if they actually looked at their activity.
No, an excuse TO ban them. Bans happen for cause and it took a long time for the cause to be evident.
If I were capricious as you want me to be, I’d ban you for arguing with me, but that’s not going to get anyone anywhere.
Wow okay.
Here is a gem of a DM from the troll who led to this even-more-hands-off approach, bragging about how they will get away with their influence/troll campaign scot-free.
Notice the use of the word “we”, a tacit admission that they are working in coordination with other trolls. Pretty fucking great, eh?
DMs are outside the purvey of community mods, if you get a problematic DM, there’s a report feature that goes direct to the admins of their instance and your instance.
In Boost, the lemmy client I use, it’s a long-press on the DM to get to the reporting menu.
The official stance with trolls is “report, don’t engage”.
So no reaction at all to the fact that UM is now admitting to being part of a larger troll effort, after dozens of people told you that was likely, for weeks, and you dismissed all of them repeatedly?
Seems like we were all right and UM should’ve been banned long ago. Everyone who said they weren’t a troll was entirely wrong. That doesn’t seem to be acknowledged here at all.
Read what he wrote, he’s talking about alts, not a larger troll effort, and, yeah, he’s yanking your chain. Any number have alts were already banned, but we aren’t going to just ban someone because of “feels”. There has to be more to it than that.
You had dozens of people telling you what he was doing. It had zero to do with vague feelings and practically nothing to do with his opinions, despite that always being the claim. It had to do with very obvious trolling. If I get banned for “sassing” you, that will say a lot
Dozens of people saying something doesn’t make it infringing.
The links he posted were absolutely valid news sources. He responded antagonistcally to comments that were antagonizing (which is why we have the slapfighting rule now).
That is simply not true. Initially the replies to him were not antagonistic - he started taking that tone when the community asked him about the disparity between his professed beliefs and what he was posting and asking why he was supposedly voting third party. He then ran the table on the mods by engaging in a constant stream of spammy, low effort comments and you all did nothing. And the more you did nothing, the more frustrated and angry everyone became about him.
The mods should at least be able to recognize your hand in how UM played out, instead of blaming it only on the users engaging in “slap fights”. The mods chose to moderate per post/comment instead of also considering an account’s overall pattern of behavior.
The rules - as written - seem to indicate a level of judgement and assessment that has not been taking place, and user frustration is evident as many of us see how a pattern of behavior of trolling was allowed to continue for much too long because the user in question almost never went too far in any individual message but was quite clearly outside the rules when looked at as a whole.
I admire your stance on not doing a fast-and-loose approach to bans to protect individual voices, but your job as mods also involves protecting these communities from intentional and purposeful bad actors