Comment on Lead Lemmy developer dessalines@lemmy.ml Appears to Have Had Their Account Compromised After Moderation Actions Raise Serious Concerns

• Zangoose@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  There were a few, not exaustive since it’s been a few months since I looked through the source code, some of this might have changed and there’s also a few other checks that I’m forgetting:

  • 4chan screenshots (specifically anything that OCR identified as having “Anonymous #(number)” in it) were banned. Honestly this one is fine as a toggle but I think for a while it was just on by default in the code
  • any community that had specific words in it were blocked at instance level. I think “meme” was there, a few swear words, and a few carryover reddit meme community names (196, I think nottheonion was also there, anything with “shitpost” in the name, etc.)
  • There’s a hidden karma/social credit score based on a user’s interactions and net total karma hidden from them that gets impacted by any moderation actions, including some of the automated hardcoded ones (e.g. even trying to upload an image that gets flagged by the hardcoded checks)
  • users with a low enough net score get shadow-banned without being informed

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• Eldritch@piefed.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  There are some disabled by default, filters built into piefed. That the main Dev uses on their instance. It’s not really even remotely the same thing or as controversial. But it’s the closest thing piefed has and gets brought up regularly because of it.

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  • Zangoose@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Honestly I would consider hardcoded shadowbanning just as bad.

    Just because I’m closer to agreeing with the PieFed dev’s opinions a little bit more doesn’t mean that I’d support shadow banning someone because the trivially-evaded checks caught a false positive in the crossfire. Piefed’s auto moderation/social scoring is pretty much textbook definition security-by-obscurity. The second anyone knows how it works, it’s useless. It will pretty much exclusively catch people who just wanted to post a harmless meme or something.

    At least (for now) Dessalines isn’t hardcoding his tankie beliefs into Lemmy’s source code.

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    • Blaze@piefed.zip ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Piefed doesn’t shadowban:

      The reputation system doesn’t shadowban content. You don’t get comments silently autoremoved for having a low reputation. You don’t get throttled either.

      https://lemmy.zip/post/58102975/24342240

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      • Zangoose@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        Thanks for clarifying, I guess I misremembered the shadowbanning part. I think I was mixing together the fact that reputation isn’t really transparent (users’ reputation can change by even attempting to upload an image that gets flagged, and the vague error means they’ll probably try multiple times without realizing they’re being moderated) and the fact the communities can autoban any user whose global reputation is low enough.

        I still think the security-by-obscurity approach to moderation is inherently flawed though, and I hate to imagine how the dev approaches actual account security if that’s their approach to moderation.

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