Yes, and it’s clear that they wouldn’t have done an outright temp ban for the length of time they did if you didn’t already have the history you did. Quit painting this as “They couldn’t handle me voicing my opinions” when it was entirely “This guy just won’t stop trolling”. No one really cares about your opinions, they cared about you trolling the community. You trying to make a martyr of yourself is ridiculous.

I got a two-week ban in a community (for posting duplicate article from different sources)

Dude, you got it for that AND a history of trolling, even just after coming off a previous temp ban for trolling. Quit lying.

No idea on the song, may have better luck identifying the singer, and working backwards from there? Maybe something by Fine Young Cannibals? Certainly the most notable falsetto that comes to mind for that era for me.

I think we’re talking about different time periods. In the time I’m talking about, before AOL connected with Usenet, the number of high school kids on the actual internet could probably be measured in double digits. There were BBSes, which had their own wonderful culture, but they had trolls and villains in a way that Usenet did not.

It was higher than you think. While an outlier, realize WarGames came out in 1983. I grew up in the suburbs of DC, and by 1986, a number of us had modems and regularly dialed into local BBSes. Basically as soon as we got 2400 bits/s, it started to get more widespread. And honestly since we usually knew the admin running the BBS we dialed into, there were less serious trolling issues. But newsgroups were another matter - usually folks were pretty much anonymous and from all over, and while there could be a sense of community, there were healthy amounts of trolls. What you’re describing is the literal exact opposite of my own lived experience. Nothing wrong with that, and doesn’t mean either of us are wrong, just means different perspectives/experiences.

I definitely don’t think this is true. That’s the whole “eternal September” thing.

I mean, it was my literal experience as a user. And it wasn’t just September, the first wave was June when high schoolers started summer break and spent considerable time online, and then the second wave in September with college kids. Honestly the second wave wasn’t as bad, as the college kids were using their university’s connection and they usually had some idea that if they went too far there might be consequences. Whereas the summer break latchkey high school kids were never that worried about any consequences.

I’m mostly talking about the volunteer internet. I don’t have any active accounts on commercial social media, even for business things.

I know, but that’s part of my point. The things that make online places feel safe, welcoming, and worthwhile are the same regardless if volunteer or commercial. I absolutely loved 2007 - 2012 early Twitter - it actually felt like the best of my old BBS/Usenet days but with much better scope. But I haven’t regularly been on there since 2016-ish, and completely left Reddit in July of last year (despite having had an account since 2009). For me the volunteer and federated social media has the best shot at being a “good” place, but I don’t have a philosophical objections to seeing commercial social media become less horrible, and in terms of understood and agreed upon social contract, I think approaching both with the same attitude should be encouraged.

We don’t need the commercial social media to fail for us to succeed, we need to change how people think about how they participate in online spaces and how those spaces should be managed and by whom.

The old-school internet had a strong social contract. There are little remnants surviving, that seem hilarious and naive in the modern day, but for the most part the modern internet has been taken over by commercial villains to such an extreme degree that a lot of the norms that held it together during the golden age are just forgotten by now.

So, I’ve been online in some form or another since the late '80s - back in the old BBS, dial-up, and Usenet days. I think there’s actually different factors at play.

To start with, Usenet was often just as toxic as any current social media/forum site. The same percentage of trolls, bad actors, etc. That really hasn’t increased or decreased in my online lifetime. The only real difference was the absolute power wielded by a BBS or server admin, and that power was exercised capriciously for both good and bad. Because keeping these things up and running was a commitment, the people making the decisions were often the ones directly keeping servers online and modem banks up and running. Agree or disagree with the admins, you couldn’t deny they were creating spaces for the rest of us to interact.

Then we started to get the first web based news sites with a social aspect (Slashdot/Fark/Digg/etc). And generally there wasn’t just one person making decisions and if they wanted to make any money they had to not scare off advertisers, so that started making things different (again for good and for bad). It was teams of people keeping things going and moderation was often a separate job. Back in the day I remember on multiple occasions a moderator making one call and then a site owner overruling them. It was at this time the view on moderation really began to change.

Nowadays giant mega corps run the social media sites and manage the advertising themselves so they’re answerable to no one other than psychotic billionaires, faceless stockholders and executive tech bros with a lot of hubris. Moderation is often led by algorithmic detection and then maybe a human. Appeals often just disappear into a void. It has all become an unfeeling, uncaring technocracy where no one is held accountable other than an occasional user, and never the corporation, execs, or owners.

Like yourself, not sure how to fix it, but splitting the tech companies apart from their advertising divisions would be step one. Probably would be helpful to require social media companies to be standalone businesses. Would at least be easier to hold them accountable. And maybe require that they be operated as nonprofits? To help disincentivize the kind of behavior we’ve got now.

I agree. In terms of the .world mods and some of the specific cases you mentioned, I think at least part of the problem is that they are often looking at stuff at a per-comment or per-post basis and sometimes missing more holistic issues.

My guess is that a good portion of that comes down to the quality and breadth (or lack thereof) of the Lemmy built-in moderation tools. Combined with volunteer moderation and a presidential election year in the US, and I’m sure the moderation load is close to overwhelming and they don’t really have the tools they need to be more sophisticated or efficient about it. Generally I’ve actually been impressed with a lot of the work they do, though there have been obvious missteps too.

Everyone talks about Lemmy needing to grow in terms of users and activity, but without better moderation tools and likely some core framework changes, I think that would be a disaster. We have all the same complexities of some place like Reddit, but with the addition of different instances all with different rules, etc (not to mention different approaches to moderation).

Good points. I also think the fediverse and Lemmy, in particular, could be attractive to certain bad actors in terms of misinformation and astroturfing, and vote manipulation would certainly help with that. I think some people think we’re safer here from that because of smaller size, etc. - but I think Lemmy users are more likely to be willing to engage (as we wouldn’t be here without willing to take leave of places like Reddit), and influencing the conversations on Lemmy could be a significant boost to someone looking to share misinformation or make a difference in very tight elections.

On the whole, I think that’s one of the reasons Lemmy needs better built-in moderation tools than what might otherwise be thought appropriate based on its size. And an overall maturity of the platform to protect against that kind of manipulation.

Yeah, the ratio of upvotes to comments looks a little unusual IMO

This shows so many gross misconceptions and with such utter conviction, I’m not even sure where to start. And as you seem to have decided you like to get free stuff that is the result of AI trained off the work of others without them receiving any compensation, nothing I say will likely change your opinion because you have an emotional stake in not acknowledging the problems of AI.

I inherited brain structures that are natural language processors. As well as the ability to understand and repeat any language sounds. Over time, my brain focused in on only the language sounds I heard the most and through trial and repetition learned how to understand and make those sounds.

AI - as it currently exists - is essentially a babbling infant with none of the structures necessary to do anything more than repeat sounds back without understanding any of them. Anyone who tells you different is selling you something.

Hopefully not too pedantic, but no one is “teaching” AI anything. They’re just feeding it data in the hopes that it can learn probabilities for certain types of output. It “understands” neither the Reddit post nor the scientific paper.

But that’s the whole point - the source linked in the original post is deemed to be reliable by their own determined tool. So why is a mod nitpicking the text within the linked article? It’s either a reputable source or not. They kept stuff from the New York Times about the Oct 6 attacks even though that didn’t have good sources, and they throw out anything from Fox News even if it’s factually correct.

The mod made a mistake and didn’t seem to realize that the Ukrainian Pravda (legit, privately owner, reliable) is different from Russian Pravda (owned by Russian Communist Party, propaganda) - and keeps coming up with excuses why he did what he did. It’s sad

Now you’re just being intentionally obtuse:

Official Ministry of Defence page with the same numbers:

https://www.mil.gov.ua/en/news/2024/09/24/the-estimated-combat-losses-of-russians-over-the-last-day-1400-persons-61-artillery-systems-3-anti-aircraft-systems/

“Data are being updated.”

Obviously a rough English translation and more precisely should probably be “Data subject to change” or “Data continues to be collected”.

Just like any military stats are reported across the world.

That’s why they should be falling back on the reputable sources as shown by their own MBFC bot instead of playing backseat journalist and questioning individual sources within an article.

Dude, really? Did you not see the links I provided from the official Ministry of Defense site or the verified Facebook account? The other news sites providing the same information?

At this point you seem to only be arguing in bad faith because you don’t want to admit you couldn’t tell the difference between Russian Pravda and the Ukrainian Pravda. That was the only thing mentioned in your comment on the removed post, and everything since then has seemingly been posturing.

This is so disappointing - I’ve been a vocal proponent of the job you mods are doing and supportive of your efforts to use what tools you have to help with a difficult job, and you’re just being completely unreasonable about this.

Yeah, thought the same. That’s partly why I bothered to try and explain what was going on - it seemed out of character.

Honestly, I still think he saw “Pravda” and thought it was the state-run Russian Pravda and made his decision off that - and has been rationalizing all that ever since rather than admit a mistake. Look at what he commented on the deleted post:

Source: https://old.lemmy.world/post/20121671

Yeah, especially since they linked to the post in the article and you could see it was a legit verified account belonging to the Ukrainian General Forces. They did exactly what any good journalist should do.

My biggest problem is the mod is now seemingly reviewing news article sources personally. If an article’s source is judged to be generally very reliable by their own MBFC bot’s source, then a post linking to that source shouldn’t be removed citing that sources unreliability.

Honestly, I still think he saw “Pravda” and thought it was the state-run Russian Pravda and made his decision off that - and has been rationalizing all that ever since rather than admit a mistake. Look at what he commented on the deleted post:

Source: https://old.lemmy.world/post/20121671

That’s a strawman. We’re not talking about comments. We’re talking about why you removed a post from a reputable source. You’ve said because it was 1) from Pravda (apparently not realizing all Pravda’s are not the same); and 2) because the article used a FB post as a source.

Just to do a baseline reset here - can we agree that the news article linked to was from a news organization that is generally regarded as reliable, including by the MBFC source your own bot uses? And can we agree that the Facebook post linked to was from the official and verified account of the Ukrainian forces? And that it matches both their website data and other verified social media posts?