Is the bot/troll situation getting worse?

Submitted ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨haui_lemmy@lemmy.giftedmc.com⁩ to ⁨fediverse@lemmy.world⁩

It feels like the amount of both, divisive posts and ghoulish comments is rising again.

One could argue that the world has a lot of divisive stuff going on and lemmy just talks about it. But the way people post about stuff seems more oot and hateful than it has been in the past.

Not saying it is that but if I wanted to bring the Fediverse down or at least keep my customers from going there, I would sow this stuff as much as I can.

I’m blocking ghouls left right and center atm but if I ever asked a friend to join lemmy, I’d hate to think of what they would see that I dont anymore.

Do we need stronger moderation?

Maybe ban politics from c/memes?
Become a little more stringent on “dont be a jerk” rules in communities?

One thing that really bothers me is the collapsing “discourse”. Trying to mend fences and keep the conversation between sides going ime leads to nothing but downvotes and shitstorm.

I feel like a little more interaction (instead of intervention, at first) of the moderators would do wonders there.

Thanks for reading this rant. Have a nice day.

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Comments

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Stamets@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Politics is banned from c/memes@lemmy.world

And speaking as a mod, report things. The vast majority of things I’ve dealt with as a mod were ones I saw myself or things friends sent on discord. People need to utilize the report function more often if they want moderation on things. We’re not psychic.

As for being more stringent on the not being a dick rule, no. There’s a base level of civility we expect but if we start getting super stringent on what constitutes being a dick, that’s imposing moderator will on community and its what most of us left reddit to get away from.

Lastly, it’s the Internet. Assholes exist everywhere. You are not going to escape it, ever, if you’re using public servers. It’s pretty much required to accept that fact just to use the Internet. Moderators do not exist to prune and preen social media to make it more comfortable for people. We remind people to follow the rules and act upon those who do not. If you’re not breaking the rules then we’re not going to “interact” because we have our own lives and our own posts we are interested in.

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- MrGG@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Hello again Mr. Stamets! ❤️
  
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  - Stamets@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    <3
    
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- TurboDiesel@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  
  imposing moderator will on community Rich, coming from the mod that banned me (permanently btw, when he usually gives out 1-day or 1-week bans) because I hurt his fee-fees.
  
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  - PakledBrain@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Stamets is the worst kind of power user. Spams garbage everywhere, argues with everyone. Fragile as glass.
    
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  - Stamets@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I don’t remember you but the modlog says you were banned for homophobic comments. So I’m gonna go ahead and say that nah, you weren’t banned for calling someone out on a joke 👍
    
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- haui_lemmy@lemmy.giftedmc.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Thanks for elaborating. I didnt know the report button is not used often. Good advice. Will do just that.
  
  As for moderation:
  
  I‘m a mod myself (both here and on reddit) and I don‘t necessarily agree that its imposing to ask people for civility if a discussion gets heated and kneejerk reactions start popping up. But I‘m thankful for every mod that does the good work and even more so for you openly commenting about it. You’re doing important work.
  
  Then there is „the internet“ which I think is like the world. If we were in a postapocalyptic hellscape, we‘d have no rules, no communities. Only fight to survive. But we aren’t and we do have communities and rules. Therefore, I‘d say we‘re still responsible for the stuff that happens in our tavern (for lack of a better analogy). Are we to keep the guy in the corner from saying things we dont like? No we shouldn’t, but we definitely should keep him from starting a bar fight.
  
  This is just my opinion. Feel free to debate me on it. :)
  
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  - theneverfox@pawb.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I’d love to debate you on it, but you’re not giving me much to work with.
    
    Generally, a mod willing to debate me is a mod I want around
    
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- MBM@lemmings.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  
  that’s imposing moderator will on community and its what most of us left reddit to get away from.
  
  Now I’m curious how common this is, because it’s not at all why I left. I left to get away from Reddit the company. If anything I think Reddit subs tend to be moderated too leniently (which is good for Reddit, because hate is engagement)
  
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  - Stamets@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    That’s fair. It depends on the communities. Places like Tumblr and Pics had effectively no moderation which left the entire place just a shithole. But then you had places like WorldNews and StarTrek where the mods became specifically known for stirring shit and causing a boatload of problems. Hell, one particular moderator of StarTrek is the reason that so many other communities splintered off.
    
    For me it was a lot of heavy handed moderation. The lack of moderation was frustrating too, don’t get me wrong, but I guess the communities I was most active in were ones where people were constantly pointing out how the moderators were terrible people.
    
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- Lifecoach5000@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Are there any app notifications or email options to let yo know about reports? I modestly mod a couple subs and I have never found a way to reliably get report notifications unless I log in through a browser based front end.
  
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  - Thekingoflorda@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I heard that someone was developing a tool to enable this
    
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  - Stamets@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Personally not familiar with any but I can ask around
    
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CosmoNova@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Election year in the US and EU while Russia is invading a neighbor and China possibly preparing to do the same. There couldn‘t have been a worse time for LLMs to be so accessible, capable and fairly unregulated. The perfect conditions to make this year the worst for internet content we‘ve ever seen. By a landslide. We will look at the last 10 years and feel nostalgic on how good these years were with their little bot armies, cute clickbait and adorable fake news.

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- doidera@lemmy.eco.br ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  
  Election year in the US and EU while Russia is invading a neighbor and China possibly preparing to do the same.
  
  Interesting you don’t mention Israel doing a fucking GENOCIDE and the USA supporting it.
  
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  - Xtallll@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    This is the kind of commitment the post is taking about.
    
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  - WidowsFavoriteSon@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    No, the US is not supporting genocide.
    
    When the Jewish people took the motto NEVER AGAIN what, exactly, did you think that meant? Did you think it would mean “oh please, Sir, don’t hurt us please?”
    
    Hamas, seeking the elimination of the Jews of Israel decided to find out, and used their own population as shields.
    
    You reap what you sow.
    
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  - GilgameshCatBeard@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Give it a rest.
    
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  - GBU_28@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    They event, while deplorable, doesn’t really generate new bot flow. The same conference and Russian style bots are already up and running.
    
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- haui_lemmy@lemmy.giftedmc.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Oh wow. Thats a bleak but very convincing outlook you have painted. Lets pray this doesnt come to pass.
  
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- rglullis@communick.news ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  The cheaper and easier it gets to produce and distribute content online, the more I am convinced that we will need to start requiring people to put something of actual value at stake to let them join a social network. The sad thing is that, aside from simply charging money for access, there is nothing that I see that could be used but not abused by governments or corporations.
  
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mozz@mbin.grits.dev ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
A lot of it depends on the instance. I think there's a little bit of a smartest bears type of problem going on, with a lot of the bad-faith content coming from just ignorant and abrasive people being sincerely ignorant and abrasive, not anything that's a bot or a deliberate troll.

Personally, I've done some rounds of unsubscribing from tech and politics subs on lemmy.ml and lemmy.world, and when I've done that my amount of toxic content and interactions went way down. I think the prevalence of the exact same thing on the tech subs points to it probably being just a bad-person problem in large proportion, although I'm sure deliberate malfeasance is at the root of some of it also.

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- haui_lemmy@lemmy.giftedmc.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I agree that some people just are original jerks. But those still cant roam free in a community. Its like making a bar and knowing that people are getting mugged in the restroom. The bar owner or personnel (even if its a coop) need to intervene.
  
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  - mozz@mbin.grits.dev ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Well.. that's why I used the smartest bears analogy. I've noticed the mods are usually pretty on top of removing content that's genuinely personally insulting or racist or what have you. But there's a wide, wide grey area of someone whose post is discussing "the issue" in a technical sense, but just comes at it from a perspective of "here's why I am right and you are wrong and not only that you're clearly not smart enough to see my side and I can't believe I need to explain it to someone again" with 0 interest in learning anything on their side. IDK if it's reasonable to try to remove comments or ban people for that behavior, but it definitely doesn't lend itself to a good discussion, and it's common (probably majority) particularly on lemmy.world and lemmy.ml.
    
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- Black_Gulaman@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I browse All and block any subs or users that are toxic. After a month. My All feed is enjoyable and I get the benefit of not missing any new subs or content that pops up.
  
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- Blaze@discuss.online ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  
  Personally, I’ve done some rounds of unsubscribing from tech and politics subs on lemmy.ml and lemmy.world, and when I’ve done that my amount of toxic content and interactions went way down.
  
  Maybe that’s a recommendation we should make to everyone
  
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echo64@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
People here are blaming politics. I don’t think that’s it. The quality of comments and discussion here has taken a massive nosedive for the past four months or so, no matter what the topic is.

I think it’s pretty simple, the terrible won. Everyone who wants good quality discussion left quickly when people started to act terrible. They didn’t come back. So now we’ve created the toxic enabling environment that is enabling it hard today.

You can fix it with moderation, but that’s a lot of work, and people get really angry.

I’m pretty close to just cutting my losses on lemmy. It’s heading in the same direction as reddit but with less moderation, and simply because it’s smaller, the awfulness is more visible.

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- rglullis@communick.news ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  
  Everyone who wants good quality discussion left quickly when people started to act terrible.
  
  That, and the fact that simply there isn’t enough good discussion to begin with. This community kind of has movement because it’s a meta-topic, but for everything else it’s mostly "let’s pretend we are superior than redditors because we found our way here and “let’s pretend we are not in Reddit for all the other niche communities that we are still interested.”
  
  I think the biggest mistake in the execution of the protests is the effort was spread around “going dark” for as many subreddits as possible. It would be a lot more effective if we got one big-ish niche and told them “let’s focus all our efforts to get you out of Reddit and migrate completely to any other alternative.” Go for something completely random but with commercial interest, like /r/sneakers, and if a moderate success of getting 15% of the user base to Lemmy would translate into 500k signups.
  
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  - Blaze@discuss.online ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    
    That, and the fact that simply there isn’t enough good discussion to begin with. This community kind of has movement because it’s a meta-topic, but for everything else it’s mostly "let’s pretend we are superior than redditors because we found our way here and “let’s pretend we are not in Reddit for all the other niche communities that we are still interested.”
    
    That’s a real issue. Hopefully it will get better over time, but sometimes at the moment it feels like shouting into the void.
    
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- GBU_28@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Strongly recommend using the block more. Be your own mod
  
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  - echo64@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    that works for me, but I want to have good conversations with others, that’s kind of the point. Blocking terrible people doesn’t get that to happen
    
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- MBM@lemmings.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  It feels like Lemmy has also become less… diverse? At this point I think the default assumption is that every user is a white, cishet, male, tech nerd from the US, which wasn’t as much the case in the earlier days.
  
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- awwwyissss@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Agreed, except I don’t think people starting to act terrible was the main problem. I think it’s mostly bots.
  
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- redcalcium@lemmy.institute ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Some people do actively looking for fights instead of have meaningful discussions. I noticed them less and less now though, so either the mods got them, or they blocked me because I often call them out.
  
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- haui_lemmy@lemmy.giftedmc.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I can see that. I will probably just start blocking communities and instances that have one of the extreme stances (either freeze peach absolutism or why you not outraged?!)
  
  I‘m not going to leave lemmy or the fedi since there literally is nothing else, and especially not something with this much potential.
  
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nicetriangle@kbin.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Yeah I've encountered a few accounts lately who either have mental health issues or are bots designs to stir discord. Their entire posting history is divisive shit stirring.

Funny how every 4 years the internet gets markedly nastier. I wonder why???

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- haui_lemmy@lemmy.giftedmc.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Yes. Exactly what I‘ve seen as well. The election year thing might be the reason though. I know a couple people with mh issues. They’re no problem. These accounts either belong to severely deranged individuals or bots.
  
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  - nicetriangle@kbin.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Yep I remember this pattern of behavior distinctly from last time.
    
    One of the big ones that sticks out is you start seeing a lot of people claiming to be democrats or left aligned showing up all of a sudden and being big time concern trolls and talking about sitting out the election and/or claiming that there's no difference between voting democrat or republican, which is demonstrably absolute horse shit.
    
    And just a lot of added vitriol. It seems like even politically unrelated discussions get meaner and more argumentative. I expect it's just gonna get worse as we get closer to November. It's only the beginning February. Ugh.
    
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  - GBU_28@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Not discrediting mental health issues, but being “severely deranged” is a mental health issue
    
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CherenkovBlue@iusearchlinux.fyi ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Out of curiosity, can you specify the topics or give specific examples of this shitty behavior you speak of? Without examples it is impossible to determine if you are discussing behavior that is straight-up pathological (e.g. name-calling) or people having a different opinion.

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- haui_lemmy@lemmy.giftedmc.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Okay, I did mention it in another comment but I didnt do so in the main post. Thanks for pointing it out.
  
  I‘m talking about name calling, ad hominem attacks, ridicule, twisting words, bad faith arguments. So, mostly abusive language/rhetoric, not disagreement or different opinions.
  
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  - umbrella@lemmy.ml ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    how do you differentiate what you perceive as bad faith vs disagreement and differing opinions?
    
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amio@kbin.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Being a jerk is extremely subjective - someone could brand you much worse than that just from a polite disagreement from your side, that they don't want to deal with. Aside from anything else, this is a highly "techie-y" space with a ton of strongly held opinions and ideals, and misunderstandings when communicating/discussing them happen. A lot. It will keep happening. People will look like asses without necessarily doing so intentionally.

Now, outright trolling, spamming, shitting on discussions with obvious bad faith participation, consistently derailing unrelated threads with one's hobby horse, obvious flamebaiting and so on... great. Reporting and removing more of that should be a priority everywhere.

Banning politics from any non-political community that can be persuaded to do so also sounds like a great idea on general principle. Politics is poison (particularly what passes for it in the US), and it would be polite to not shove it down the entire fediverse's throat. Every geographical sub is politics, every news sub is politics, there are dedicated politics and politicalmemes communities, and still it's fucking everywhere else also. Asklemmy and NoStupidQuestions are full of thinly veiled soapboxing (which leads to a lot of awfully stupid questions). People who want to JAQ off to politics can easily make their own community for that (that way, the rest of us can block it, as intended), or else keeping it in their pants would've been kinda polite, idk. Seems odd to insist on posting political stuff everywhere.

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- haui_lemmy@lemmy.giftedmc.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Your post is one hell of a ride. It starts very lenient and then says exactly what I was trying to say but worded much better. Thank you very much. That is both a very good explanation and one I happen to agree with fully.
  
  Because I‘m an admin IRL, autistic and sometimes rude myself. But namecalling, trolling and shitting on peeps is too much even for me. I feel like saying that using certain brand is a stupid idea is rude but no big deal while going on about people and groups makes me squirm.
  
  Have a good one. :)
  
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  - amio@kbin.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Thanks, and you too. :)
    
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Quetzlcoatl@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Being old enough I used to wear an onion on my belt heres my perspective. I see it like back in the day we had radio and tv. Radio often played songs you didnt like. I remember thinking how awesome it would be to have a station that only played what I liked and no “shitty” music. But alas, when a shitty song came on you changed the station or turned it down. Same with tv. They were a public good and we had to tolerate what others preferred. I see it as my personal responsibility to curate my lemmy experience and thankfully theyve given me the tools to do so. It takes 2 seconds to block a shitty user and instances that arent to my liking. This was difficult on reddit due to the size and firehose nature of it but its quite effective here, for now. Do I see comments I dont like? All the time…once. Then that user is blocked. Hopefully people who dont like the cut of my jib have blocked me as well so their experience is better tailored to them. If your expectation is the radio station never plays a shitty duran duran song youre gonna be disappointed.

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- haui_lemmy@lemmy.giftedmc.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I completely agree. Thats why I like the fediverse so much.
  
  But if your favorite radio station started to host lets say very divisive content more often, wouldnt you be a little upset since they had been a stable installation in your life? Would you not call at the station and feedback them? Would they not want to hear if something they did was a very bad move from their audiences perspective? I know I‘d want to know if my customers/audience was very upset with me, ideally before I‘m alone, screaming into the void.
  
  Just my take ok this :)
  
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- IndiBrony@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  A shitty Duran Duran song? You take that back!
  
  Unless you’re talking about modern Duran Duran, in which case please continue.
  
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- awwwyissss@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  That analogy doesn’t work for malicious state-managed LLMs.
  
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Zuberi@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Yes, lemmy.world is a mess right now

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- haui_lemmy@lemmy.giftedmc.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I‘m very happy that I‘m not totally alone with that opinion.
  
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- TexMexBazooka@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Lemmy.world is absolutely wild. I had a comment deleted that was a response saying we shouldn’t nuke innocent people, I had a comment removed saying confederates are bad. I don’t know what the fuck their mods are smoking.
  
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- p03locke@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  It turns out that trying to push one server to be the by far the most popular Lemmy server, maybe, just maybe, might be antithetical to the concept of a Fediverse.
  
  Welcome to The Consequences of Their Actions!
  
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blahsay@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
You’re not imagining it. I’m pretty sure you can see regular work from propaganda teams on lemmy. I’d love to see the backed logs to confirm it.

They tend to work in very hostile teams to brigade topics.

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- haui_lemmy@lemmy.giftedmc.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I‘m encountering it this exact moment in a piracy discussion where some very abusive people start arguing for IP and excuse the blatant manipulation by calling limited licenses „buying“ and „owning“.
  
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  - ikidd@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I followed the thread you’re talking about, you might be a bit overly sensitive to what constitutes a conversation on the internet. I don’t find the trolling any worse or better today vs. last week or last year.
    
    You might want to make an account over at beehaw, they like to stay pretty sheltered over there and have defederated from, well, pretty much everyone.
    
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  - blahsay@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    It’s interesting right?
    
    I’m thinking the architecture of the fediverse makes it particularly vulnerable to these sorts of attacks.
    
    I’m pretty sure I’ve spotted bots circle jerking on some subjects also which makes me think there’s a few different sources.
    
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  - intensely_human@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Here’s the thread. The readers here can judge for themselves how much abuse haui_lemmy was receiving: lemmy.world/comment/7230392
    
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  - intensely_human@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    So these trolls’ tactic is to disagree with you about semantics?
    
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- intensely_human@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Do you have evidence of this? Same users showing up at the same times, that sort of thing?
  
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lvxferre@mander.xyz ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I’ve been noticing the same sort of behaviour that you’re talking about. And while I don’t know the cause, I don’t think that it’s caused by trolls or bots. Instead I’m guessing a few potential factors:

Demographic concentration in general purpose, lax moderation instances, tailored to attract your typical Reddit user instead of more reasonable people.

Lemmy+Kbin users being proportionally more combative, entitled, petty, and/or whiny, due to how people reached this platform.

“Powerjanny” mentality being inherited from Reddit, specially given the likely higher proportion of former Reddit moderators here.

General lack of mod tools, forcing moderators to take sub-optimal decisions on how to handle users and content.

Normalisation of witch hunting, making people walk on eggs to avoid being confused with witches, and assuming that the ones not walking on eggs fly on a broom.

Normalisation of stupidity, and subsequent normalisation of oversimplifications, assumptions, genetic fallacies, phobia against uncertainty, decontextualisation, etc.; with those things either making the stupid act in a hostile way, or others act in a hostile way towards the stupid.

Natural reinforcement of behaviour in social groups.

This is already a rather large wall of text and I’m trying to be succinct, but feel free to ask further reasoning on any of those points.

Disclaimers to avoid replies to this comment that would exemplify it
I’m aware that I’m not exactly “gentle” towards users showing stupidity, thus being part of the problem, and in no moment I even implied to be “above” it. By “stupid” I’m clearly referring to able people who behave in an irrational way. I am not talking about disabled people. In fact “the stupid” is better seen as a set of user behaviours than as a specific group of people.
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- haui_lemmy@lemmy.giftedmc.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Good points. Thanks. I see your comment as very reflected and although pretty honest (which is generally frowned upon here I guess) its not mean imo. I like it.
  
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- Blaze@discuss.online ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Very good points, thanks for sharing.
  
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rimu@piefed.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Try to find an instance that bans trolls?

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- haui_lemmy@lemmy.giftedmc.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I am on my own instance and I ban them but if someone joins world, they’re f*cked. I feel like the communities are very lenient which is fine in normal situations but when peeps start shitting on others (be it religion, ideology or others) they should act. Just my two cents though.
  
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  - rimu@piefed.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Yeah.
    
    I guess we can't just direct friends to "Lemmy" in general and instead direct them to beehaw.org, or your instance, or wherever there is the kind of moderation we agree with. From there our friends can see a filtered view of the communities on lemmy.world.
    
    If the biggest instance has a libertarian mod policy that does mean "more selective" instances need to put in more work but on the positive side it does provide a more diverse pool of people and content to sift through.
    
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Scew@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Another place I frequent got rid of the downvote so if people actually disagree with you they have yo use words to make their point. Kinda funny how that solves a lot of issues.

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Ignacio@kbin.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I was about to left Lemmy/Kbin for good when some stupid tankies from Lemmy(grad).ml called me names and harassed me, despite the fact that I'm neurodivergent (like that would stop them from doing such actions, but anyway). And then I started blocking every community and user from those places, as well as any community/magazine about US politics or about any US topic because I don't give a damn heck about that place. And my experience improved really well.

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cashews_best_nut@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Only the wet-lipped and dry-eared are upset by trolls.

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sturlabragason@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Half of the traffic everywhere is bots:

statista.com/…/human-and-bot-web-traffic-share/

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TORFdot0@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Maybe because I don’t use Lemmy at real bot hours, I haven’t seen them. Maybe see a spam bot every other day.

I also tend to sort by top 6 hours or top 12 hours so a lot of low effort content gets filtered out.

I also don’t consider people who make off the wall comments or hold opinions I disagree with or think are uniformed or stupid as trolls.

The other thing is that I comment with the philosophy that not every comment signifies a response and so if a reply is a troll or in bad faith, I just keep scrolling.

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Varyk@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Nah, things seem okay. I’ve noticed more politics misinformation since it’s an election year.

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EndlessApollo@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
It’s been a little terrifying seeing a shit ton of supposed liberals acting like trump supporters the last couple weeks. Calling anyone who disagrees with them or questions anything about biden fascists, going out of their way to say hurtful ableist shit, calling pro Palestinian protestors Russian plants (one person even calling for them to be executed), chanting “FOUR MORE YEARS!” whenever Israeli genocide is mentioned, lots of really MAGA-type shit. Besides the last thing though, I’ve hardly seen any of this irl. I’ve just assumed liberals have taking a sharp right turn into reactionary shit, but maybe some/a lot of it is a conservative psyop or something. Idk, I still think it’s mostly real, but if I were a hate group on 4chan or a russian troll farm trying to make leftists not wanna vote for democrats I’d be doing exactly this

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ZILtoid1991@kbin.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
As the fediverse becomes more and more of a feasible alternative to corporate social media, it will be inevitable that trolls and spammers will use our platform for malicious things. All we can do is to get better at moderation, maybe somehow bust these farms.

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Sekrayray@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Totally true. I made a totally reasonable comment about a month ago (stated that women shouldn’t be hit on at the gym by randos), and I got downvoted to oblivion and the comment was spammed by 7 different users who essentially acted like I was Hitler. Then they started spamming my comment history and I had to delete all of my old posts.

Seemed like a real person was behind it, but may have been using bots to spam me.

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Mechaguana@programming.dev ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Yeah we should have ignore and reporting lists that is on an invite only basis, which then can be shared by users of said list. If you didnt get invited then you should be able to copy a users reported/ignored list to make the whole fediverse more palatable. Each bunch of list users can then cross reference each potential bad actors. Then each month each admin could implement a ban of thoses accounts and perhaps try to filter new incomers.

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dipshit@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I’ve certainly encountered a few of them myself. I keep reporting them.

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MaximilianKohler@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

if I wanted to bring the Fediverse down or at least keep my customers from going there, I would sow this stuff as much as I can

Agree. And that’s been my experience here too. I made two posts critical of reddit and they each seemed to have been astroturfed by toxic reddit shills.

I think it would require a lot of active and dedicated mods and admins, which I’m doubtful is doable. I don’t know that there’s a fix for this. I wrote in a blog that it might require an advanced AI to moderate everything.

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Blaze@discuss.online ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I’ve seen two trolls recently, but you can see them from very far away, and they post in general ask communities like AskLemmy or No Stupid questions.

On smaller communities, they are not around that much. And I don’t go to news or politics communities.

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intensely_human@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Just so everyone is aware, this is the thread OP interpreted as so abusive it would warrant banning this person across multiple instances.

In this thread, you’ll notice that another user dares to disagree with haui_lemmy. haui_lemmy interprets that as trolling, and goes on a crusade to purge the entire lemmyverse of dissent.

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intensely_human@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Bots are probably increasing in number. Even without improvements in technology, people’s adeptness at using robots will continue to increase.

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Lath@kbin.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
In any given public space, the pendulum swings endlessly. Or is it just a wrecking ball? Can't tell.
Anyway, nothing lasts forever. More so for human relationships else the divorce rate wouldn't be as high as it is.
As products of knowledge and emotions ranging from zero to Infinity, the variety will always divide one from the other at some point. Even twins can grow to dislike each other, let alone complete strangers.
So asking for uniformity is a lost cause from the start. Civility is enforceable up to a point. And chaos is unreasonably violent.

The obvious solution is compromise. Some like to give and take in turns, others to merge opinions into something that all sides agree to or something no one wants. Yet nothing is guaranteed to work because we simply aren't built that way.

Individuals will individualize, eventually. Willingly or not.

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