this post was submitted on 11 Jan 2025
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Lemmy.World Announcements

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founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

There will be a new announcement soon to clarify.

~~Communities should not be overly moderated in order to enforce a specific narrative. Respectful disagreement should be allowed in a smaller proportion to the established narrative.~~

~~Humans are naturally inclined to believe a single narrative when they're only presented with a single narrative. That's the basis of how fiction works. You can't tell someone a story if they're questioning every paragraph. However, a well placed sentence questioning that narrative gives the reader the option to chose. They're no longer in a story being told by one author, and they're free to choose the narrative that makes sense to them, even if one narrative is being pushed much more heavily than the other.~~

~~Unfortunately, some malicious actors are hijacking this natural tendency to be invested in fiction, and they're using it to create absurd, cult-like trends in non-fiction. They're using this for various nefarious ends, to turn us against each other, to generate profit, and to affect politics both domestically and internationally.~~

~~In a fully anonymous social media platform, we can't counter this fully. But we can prune some of the most egregious echo chambers.~~

~~We're aware that this policy is going to be subjective. It won't be popular in all instances. We're going to allow some "flat earth" comments. We're going to force some moderators to accept some "flat earth" comments. The point of this is that you should be able to counter those comments with words, and not need moderation/admin tools to do so. One sentence that doesn't jive with the overall narrative should be easily countered or ignored~~.

~~It's harder to just dismiss that comment if it's interrupting your fictional story that's pretending to be real. "The moon is upside down in Australia" does a whole lot more damage to the flat earth argument than "Nobody has crossed the ice wall" does to the truth. The purpose of allowing both of these is to help everyone get a little closer to reality and avoid incubating extreme cult-like behavior online.~~

~~A user should be able to (respectfully, infrequently) post/comment about a study showing marijuana is a gateway drug to !marijuana without moderation tools being used to censor that content.~~

~~Of course this isn't about marijuana. There's a small handful of self-selected moderators who are very transparently looking to push their particular narrative. And they don't want to allow discussion. They want to function as propaganda and an incubator. Our goal is to allow a few pinholes of light into the Truman show they wish to create. When those users' pinholes are systematically shut down, we as admins can directly fix the issue.~~

~~We don't expect this policy to be perfect. Admins are not aware of everything that happens on our instances and don't expect to be. This is a tool that allows us to trim the most extreme of our communities and guide them to something more reasonable. This policy is the board that we point to when we see something obscene on !yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com so that we can actually do something about it without being too authoritarian ourselves. We want to enable our users to counter the absolute BS, and be able to step in when self-selected moderators silence those reasonable people.~~

~~Some communities will receive an immediate notice with a link to this new policy. The most egregious communities will comply, or their moderators will be removed from those communities.~~

~~Moderators, if someone is responding to many root comments in every thread, that's not "in a smaller proportion" and you're free to do what you like about that. If their "counter" narrative posts are making up half of the posts to your community, you're free to address that. If they're belligerent or rude, of course you know what to do. If they're just saying something you don't like, respectfully, and they're not spamming it, use your words instead of your moderation abilities.~~

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[–] OpenStars@piefed.social 1 points 5 days ago (1 children)

@Serinus@lemmy.world this post seems relevant as to what people are afraid of. I am glad that the admin team is taking time to reword this policy to make more clear what is meant:-).

[–] Serinus@lemmy.world 0 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (2 children)

Is this a piefed thing I'm too Lemmy to understand?

[–] Blaze@feddit.org 3 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Hello,

Any idea when the new announcement will be made?

[–] MrKaplan@lemmy.world 3 points 3 days ago (1 children)

once it's ready.

this post didn't follow our usual process for announcements/changes and lately there have been several other events that required a lot of our attention as well.

we'd love to have posted an update on this topic a week ago already but we haven't finished that within the team yet.

[–] Blaze@feddit.org 2 points 3 days ago

Thank you for your reply!

[–] OpenStars@piefed.social 1 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Here is the link to the post from Lemmy.World directly:-)

[–] Serinus@lemmy.world 0 points 5 days ago (1 children)

I don't understand what you're trying to say or why. I'm generally not clicking random youtube videos.

[–] OpenStars@piefed.social 3 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Innuendo Studios has several fantastic videos - I dare say just about the main thing I even highly care about on YouTube these days, even though there are so very few of them. The Alt Right Playbook in particular is a wonderful series. This latest one seems so very highly related to the subject matter of this post, where extremists bury reasonable people behind an avalanche of false statements, each one of which must be rebutted properly, despite how the statements themselves did not have such care and attention put into them.

Side-note: I love how PieFed and Tesseract both provide YouTube previews to help decide whether to click or not - speaking for myself it helps me decide!:-)

Anyway, I'm sure you know all about the subject matter, but the language used in this linked video (or just search for Alt-Right Playbook and choose the latest one) I thought might be particularly helpful to have watched in drafting the next response of this announcement. The flat earth bit especially is off-putting to people bc it conjures up the vaccine disinformation issue that genuinely cost people's literal, actual lives. Though I didn't take from the announcement that this has suddenly become a place where such dis/misinformation was "welcomed", and yet people reacted as if that is what it was saying... so I hoped the video would help bridge that gap between what was intended to be conveyed vs. was managed to be received by some, who seem to just be so very scared and anxious about so many things beyond ~~their~~ our control these days.

[–] Serinus@lemmy.world 0 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I'll take a look. And yeah, the intention was the opposite, to poke pinholes into those crazy, reality-denying philosophies.

[–] OpenStars@piefed.social 1 points 3 days ago

Great! Not an easy task indeed, though oh so necessary...:-)

[–] ptz@dubvee.org 82 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (48 children)

We're going to allow some "flat earth" comments. We're going to force some moderators to accept some "flat earth" comments. The point of this is that you should be able to counter those comments with words, and not need moderation/admin tools to do so.

I get that those are examples, and I am pretty sure I understand the problem this is trying to address. Like, I get that.

But, aside from the aforementioned "many root comments in every thread", where do we draw the line with regard to misinformation and/or trolling? Are we expected to refute every crackpot claim and leave misinformation, conspiracy theories, and the like on display? I feel like that's just a recipe for gish-galloping mods to death while opening the door to mis-information.

What if, to use the recent example from Meta, someone comes into a LGBT+ community and says they think being gay is a mental illness and /or link some quack study? Is that an attack on a group or is it "respectful dissent"? According to common sense and the LW TOS Section 1, it's the former. According to how this new policy is written, it seems to be the latter.

Again, I understand what this is trying to accomplish, but I feel the way it's being handled is not the best way to achieve that.

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[–] veganpizza69@lemmy.world 58 points 1 week ago (1 children)

they’re free to choose the narrative that makes sense to them, even if one narrative is being pushed much more heavily than the other.

This just translates to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean or "reversion to mediocrity". Much like 🤬🤬🤬🤬it's /all, every time that mainstream spills into a community it ruins it and brings it closer to the mainstream.

In biology, you may recognize some of these phenomena from biochemistry: osmosis and diffusion. The demand to disable the "semi-permeable membrane" ends the purpose of the compartment.

Either the invading posts/comments get removed or the influx of participants (including voting) has to be rationed somehow. Doing neither is not a discussion about narratives, it's a mobbing. It's the opposite of promoting discourse, as that setup heavily favors the "mainstream" narrative, the status quo.

I should mention that I've been a moderator of internet communities since before Web 2.0 and I find the moderation tools for Lemmy type platforms to be terrible. If the expectation is to not have practical moderation, but instead to separate into fedi-islands and block the problematic networks, well, that would be a very blunt way to get to the same goals. Instead of having moderators individually ban users, you have admins ban entire networks of users.

There is no getting away from the need for moderators. Musk proved that again since he took over Twitter. Zuckerberg is proving it again now. You're not building a protopia by hampering moderation, you're building a cyber-wasteland. Any success with that will be temporary, like a pump and dump: you get a period of growth and a honeymoon, and then the critical mass of assholes is achieved and they turn everything to shit, and then most users have to start searching for greener ~~pastures~~ food forests to migrate to. Another term for that is unsustainable, it can't last.

The point of this is that you should be able to counter those comments with words, and not need moderation/admin tools to do so.

Rationality is much more complex than you think. The experience of the COVID-19 pandemic should've taught you that already, first hand. The simple model of persuasion by presenting reasonable arguments and evidence is wrong. There's an entire field looking into cognitive biases that show how irrational humans are. How exactly do you plan to argue with people who believe in "alternative facts" and "post-truth"?

All I see in the article you posted is a lack of experience in dealing with bullshit, a lack of understanding of the viral or memetic nature of bullshit.

It’s harder to just dismiss that comment if it’s interrupting your fictional story that’s pretending to be real. “The moon is upside down in Australia” does a whole lot more damage to the flat earth argument than “Nobody has crossed the ice wall” does to the truth. The purpose of allowing both of these is to help everyone get a little closer to reality and avoid incubating extreme cult-like behavior online.

It's disheartening that you haven't learned yet that flateartherism is a variant of creationism, another religiously inspired pseudoscience.

[–] Sunshine@lemmy.ca 19 points 1 week ago

Well said the majority will often want to oppress the minority.

The phrase “common sense” is flawed as the majority have been wrong about certain topics in the past like lobotomies being used to “correct problematic behaviour”.

[–] irotsoma@lemmy.world 58 points 1 week ago (8 children)

I couldn't care less about flat earthers. It's the lack of moderation of hate speech that prompted me to leave Meta products. When the speech is specifically designed to harm others it's a huge difference from just harming themselves and their willing peers. Allowing spreading that LGBTQ+ people are mentally ill or that Autistic people need to be fixed rather than accepted, or that all immigrants are bad people, those things are not just bad science (though that's part of it). They are designed to have those people ostracized or murdered. That is not "respectful disagreement". That is pure hate-speech, even if the person saying it truly believes it. It is detrimental to the community and if that is allowed here like on Meta now, I'll happily leave as a proud LGBTQ+ and neurodivergent person among other things that current "political discourse" (i.e. acceptable hate) is being allowed to spread.

[–] Serinus@lemmy.world 15 points 1 week ago (12 children)

Our original ToS hasn't gone anywhere and will still be enforced. Hate speech is not respectful. None of this means discrimination or hate speech is okay.

  1. Attacks on people or groups

Before using the website, remember you will be interacting with actual, real people and communities. Lemmy.World is not a place for you to attack other people or groups of people. Just because you disagree with someone doesn't give you the right to harass them. Discuss ideas and be critical of principles. Show the respect you desire to receive.

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[–] WrittenInRed@lemmy.dbzer0.com 54 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

I posted this in another thread but I also wanted to say it here so it's more likely one of you will see it. I get the intention behind this, and I think it's well intentioned, but it's also definitely the wrong way to go about things. By lumping opposing viewpoints and misinformation together, all you end up doing is implying that having a difference in opinion on something more subjective is tantamount to spreading a proven lie, and lending credence to misinformation. A common tactic used to try and spread the influence of hate or misinformation is to present it as a "different opinion" and ask people to debate it. Doing so leads to others coming across the misinfo seeing responses that discuss it, and even if most of those are attempting to argue against it, it makes it seem like something that is a debatable opinion instead of an objective falsehood. Someone posting links to sources that show how being trans isn't mental health issue for the 1000th time wont convince anyone that they're wrong for believing so, but it will add another example of people arguing about an idea, making those without an opinion see the ideas as both equally worthy of consideration. Forcing moderators to engage in debate is the exact scenario people who post this sort of disguised hate would love.

Even if the person posting it genuinely believes the statement to be true, there are studies that show presenting someone with sources that refute something they hold as fact doesn't get them to change their mind.

If the thread in question is actually subjective, then preventing moderators from removing just because they disagree is great. The goal of preventing overmodedation of dissenting opinions is extremely important. You cannot do so by equating them with blatent lies and hate though, as that will run counter to both goals this policy has in mind. Blurring the line between them like this will just make misinformation harder to spot, and disagreements easier to mistake as falsehoods.

[–] SubArcticTundra@lemmy.ml 37 points 1 week ago

A common tactic used to try and spread the influence of hate or misinformation is to present it as a "different opinion" and ask people to debate it.

Very good point

[–] Viking_Hippie@lemmy.dbzer0.com 53 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)
[–] CityPop@lemmy.today 40 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (19 children)

“A Lie Can Travel Halfway Around the World While the Truth Is Putting On Its Shoes.”

This policy change will only reward bad actors. This sort of behavior needs to be stopped ASAP, simply correcting the record after the damage is done is not enough.

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[–] Squorlple@lemmy.world 40 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (7 children)

A zero tolerance policy against zero tolerance policies against intolerance and mis/dis/malinformation? The explanation was a bit figurative language heavy.

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[–] realitista@lemm.ee 39 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (21 children)

I don't have the time or desire to go around arguing with every tankie troll on the platform who says that the Ukraine war is the west's fault or that the Holomodor or the Uyghur genocide or Tienamen Square massacre didn't happen. They are too numerous and it accomplishes nothing.

I simply block them. Which leaves them to troll everyone else and spread more misinformation. Mods in communities should have every right to ban trolls as well, otherwise they will strangle said community and drive all sane people out.

I'm all for a good spirited conversation but that's not what they want. They just want to drown out all conversation with their narrative.

Why not add subscribable block lists like Bluesky has? Then it would be easier to accept such a policy.

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[–] simple@lemm.ee 36 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

We’re going to allow some “flat earth” comments. We’re going to force some moderators to accept some “flat earth” comments.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law

So basically you're saying people should be allowed to post blatant false information and everybody should try their best to tell them they're wrong rather than doing the sensible thing of stopping false information spreading in the first place.

People who would post that stuff would never argue with good intentions and would often argue in bad faith. What you're suggesting trolling should be allowed, moderators and community members need to waste their time engaging with controversial content nobody wants to see, and threads will have even more people fighting in them. Who decides when wrong info and propaganda posts are allowed to be removed? LW admins? You won't be able to keep up and are guaranteed to incite distrust in your community either way.

I'm with reducing echo chambers and taking action on bad moderators that abuse their positions, but making the blanket statement that basically translates to "flat earthers are now welcome here whether you like it or not, get ready to see posts unironically arguing about why flat earth is right in your feed" surely can ring some bells on why this is a bad idea.

This is like the third time LW tried to be front-and-center in deciding how conversations should happen on Lemmy. You are the most popular Lemmy instance and most content is on your instance. This isn't an experimental safe space instance to dictate how social media should work. Please understand that any weirdly aggressive stances you take affects everyone.

[–] Sunshine@lemmy.ca 35 points 1 week ago (2 children)

I respectfully disagree with this policy change as debate communities have their place in allowing discourse on topics.

[–] Zaktor@sopuli.xyz 28 points 1 week ago (6 children)

Yeah. not every community needs to be a debate community. It's perfectly fine for some communities to be fan communities where the expectation and intention is like-minded people discussing a shared interest or world view. Someone going into a "marijuana" community and saying "marijuana is bad" is just trolling, not engaging in some higher philosophical exercise.

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[–] YarrMatey@lemmy.dbzer0.com 19 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Because the one thing a vegan community (meant specifically for vegans) needs is carnists coming in to troll everyone into debating them, it's just a little dissent that totally won't turn the community into a hostile environment /s

[–] Nosavingthrow@lemmy.world 16 points 1 week ago

Let me come to the vegan group to discuss finer points of slow cooking a brisket, I really think it will convince you. You have to tolerate me, just debating, bro.

[–] Rentlar@lemmy.ca 28 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

This policy to me seems as an attempt to sensibly resolve the power trip problem, but it appears a bit vague and there is still room for improvement. There are some communities where this makes sense but I think there are others where it does not. Moderators are volunteers and I think they should have a degree of discretion how they run the community. You're the admin so do as you will, but may I suggest:

Where a one sided narrative is strictly being enforced that world admins don't appreciate, would it be better to just move/rename that community to better reflect it? Such as moving the example community mod to a new community called "marijuana is bad", to better reflect the variety of views the moderator is looking for? I know a pervasive issue is a single poster/moderator just posts and enforces a one-sided view, but perhaps the root of that issue is that the community's name misleadingly looks to be a neutral place when it is not being run that way.

I say this because there are places that are not intended for neutral discussion and are meant to be more supportive of one group.

LGBTQ+ safe spaces are a prime example, but a different example about more trivial matters would be, say, Premier League football clubs.

If someone makes a Chelsea fan community, someone else coming in to say why Liverpool is better can be removed, as it should be more of a Chelsea echo chamber. Whereas in a Premier League community, blocking Liverpool posts and only allow Chelsea supportive posts would make sense to get admins involved to have it be more open and neutral.

Personally I think it would be better to enforce a policy of ensuring a community's moderation matches the intent implied by the name of it. The policy as it stands feels heavy-handed on moderators.

[–] Zaktor@sopuli.xyz 17 points 1 week ago

I very much agree with this. Having single-viewpoint communities isn't the problem. Sometimes that's what people are looking for. It's when that isn't clear and/or the community is parked on a name that shouldn't be single-viewpoint that there's a problem.

[–] mp3@lemmy.ca 26 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

We’re going to allow some “flat earth” comments. We’re going to force some moderators to accept some “flat earth” comments.

In general I would agree, but if the community moderators decides to set some ground truths (aka an echo chamber), I don't think the admins should be involved.

Allowing these posts and comment despite these agreed upon ground truths (ex: the earth is round, vaccine works, eating animals is unethical, etc) is only going to generate noise by having to refute these again and again instead of fostering productive discussions.

I say let the communities handle their own affairs, and the admins should only intervene in severe cases.

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[–] Ensign_Crab@lemmy.world 25 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

Do these "flat earth" opinions that we're meant to treat with unearned respect include bigoted opinions? Because this is dangerously close to being a "don't sass the nazis" policy.

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[–] can@sh.itjust.works 23 points 1 week ago (5 children)

!linuxsucks@lemmy.world is about to get heated.

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[–] ElectroVagrant@lemmy.world 20 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Is there some context that could help clarify what's led to this change?

Similarly, could you provide clearer examples, and how this is intended to fit into the existing Terms of Service/Rules? Despite the length of the post, the way in which it's written leaves this change too ambiguous to be easily understood, which I think is evident both from the voting and commenting patterns.

In my opinion, my questions should have already been addressed in the post, and I think may have helped reception of this change (supposing at minimum it's to curtail some abusive moderation practices).

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[–] dantheclamman@lemmy.world 20 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I appreciate everything the .world admins do. As a mod of a community here, I also agree with the general concept of letting the community downvote posts that aren't actually harmful in terms of hate/abuse. That being said, I think it would be wise to reformulate and reduce down this post to a straightforward announcement: what events precipitated this policy change, what are going to be permitted kinds of content, and what is not allowed. This post is just a kind of wandering philosophy right now.

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[–] kylian0087@lemmy.dbzer0.com 18 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Happy i migrated off of lemmy.world some months ago with the piracy mess.

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[–] FrostyTrichs@walledgarden.xyz 16 points 1 week ago

Good fucking luck.

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