This one is both upsetting and weird.

So there was a user on ponder.cat who’s been spamming posts. Like a lot. 58 per day, on average. Not 58 comments. 58 posts.

I started seeing a little scattering of reports about it, mostly just figured it was the mods’ business to deal with, and then finally today I actually really took a look at what they were doing and realized it was way over the top. Pretty much everyone in the comments agreed when someone brought it up.

A 25 day old account with 1,400+ posts? What the actual fuck? My entire goddamn feed is this one account…

Touch grass. Good lord. You’re carpet bombing multiple communities with repeats of the same crap.

The user was not receptive.

lol.

I guess people here do not know how to block an account.

:)

Is that a compliment or a rant?

May I introduce you to Lemmy block function.

If you don’t like my posts then block me and you will never see them again. As simple as that.

That’s a bunch of bullshit. The voting was about as you would expect. I said to the user:

That’s not how it works. If you’re interfering with the average Lemmy user’s experience, you don’t get to claim it doesn’t count because each individual person would be able to block each individual problematic account, if they wanted to have a good experience. Honestly, these people have a point. You have been posting an average of 58 posts per day. That’s too much. I post a ton, and that’s about 10 times more than me, and I’ve gotten multiple complaints about posting too much in particular communities. The handful of times it’s happened, my reaction was “Oh my bad what sounds like an acceptable level” and then to more or less stick to an acceptable level. Getting snarky with people who are asking you to cool it is very bad. Please stop posting so much. Anything about 10-15 posts per day starts to feel really excessive to me. Definitely don’t be dismissive about people’s complaints to you about it.

They rejected my suggestion, so I sent them a DM that was a little more direct about it: Stop doing this if you want to keep your account on my instance.

Then, for some reason, they deleted their account on their own.

Well, that was weird, but at least it’s all resolved and we can all get back to what we were doing. Or wait… what’s happening now?

I wasn’t expecting “making sure we make a safe space for the spammers by banning people who complain about spam” to be an important moderation duty, but I guess in the bizarro world that is !news@lemmy.world moderation philosophy, it makes perfect sense.

https://lemmy.world/modlog/1347

@Ghyste@sh.itjust.works

  • JonsJava@lemmy.worldEnglish
    710·
    1 day ago

    By the time we received complaints about your comments, the user in question (cat) had already deleted their account.

    I don’t have time to track down every post of theirs to check for sources. We tend to do that when people report posts.

    The post that was reported that was submitted by cat was this one:

    https://a.lemmy.world/lemmy.world/post/25907073

    Nothing wrong with that post. The reason given in the report:

    WTF is this power user stuff? That's a lot of freaking posts in less than a month

    Again, prolific posting isn’t against any rule. The post didn’t break any rule. Why would I remove that?

    Now, on to the reason I gave a temp ban.

    Comment:

    
What the actual fuck? My entire goddamn feed is this one account…

    Attacking the user for posting? You may not like them, but again, we only received one report on that user. Apparently their content, while aggressive, broke no rules, and upset nobody until today, according to my reports and mod logs.

    Next:

    Touch grass. Good lord. You’re carpet bombing multiple communities with repeats of the same crap.

    Another personal attack against the user.

    Next:

    I’m not blocking an account that could easily pivot and start blasting multiple communities spanning multiple instances with subversive information.

Much better to bring awareness to such ridiculousness. The motives of an account with such activity should be questioned. ESPECIALLY since all posts are in news and politics communities.

    Another person attacking them for posting. Do we attack Flying Squid, Admiral Picard, MicroWave, or others for contributing more than other users? Again, they broke no rules, and we received our first complaint about that account today.

    There were a lot of people attacking that user, and a lot of reports on the comments attacking that user. Those are just a few examples.

    Yes, I moderate, but I have a ton more going on in my life, so I’m not always on Lemmy to see what’s happening, and I do rely heavily on reports to find points of pain in the communities I moderate. I also rely heavily on the rest of the moderation team, as well the great tools that people like @ptz@dubvee.org make.

    If you go through the posts in this community, you’ll see tons of places where I personally have worked with other users who had complaints. We try to be fair, but attacking users is a violation of our community rules.

    • gamermanh@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      41·
      7 hours ago

      We try to be fair

      Patently false given the situation in OP is inexcusable to the point you didn’t reply to the great points made by others

      Thank you for putting yourself as an LE mod so I can easily tag you like the others though

    • Ghyste@sh.itjust.works
      103·
      23 hours ago

      You have a very interesting definition of personal attack. The one thing I said that was personal was “touch grass”, and that was in response to a smartass reply. Everything else stated was factual observation of their behavior.

      I find it hard to believe that your entire mod team didn’t notice this account’s activity, and as Philip advised there have definitely been other reports. If any of your mods were paying any attention at all the sketchy sources were front and center in the community feed.

      It would be daft to turn a blind eye to this and simply block anyone like this account. Hell, according to your own comments even with reports nothing would have been done since on the most technical level according to you no rules were broken. If you can’t read between the lines when accounts exhibit activity like this, Lemmy is going to turn into a propaganda spamverse.

      In the end it’s your community/instance so you do you, but such attitude will not foster growth of the fediverse, especially with desirable users.

    • KombatWombat@lemmy.world
      102·
      1 day ago

      I don’t see why Ghyste should have been punished here. Their comments were critical of the actions of Cat, and encouraged skepticism for their motives. Ghyste had inflammatory wording, but that doesn’t seem enough to warrant action. For the record I don’t think posting a bunch should be something that needs correction even if it does dominate a community 's feed, but complaining about one person driving discussion by themselves is certainly reasonable. If a decent portion of those posts do end up having problems like misleading headlines or bad sources, then maybe action should be taken, but that should be up to mods to judge. I’m more concerned that it sounds like they regularly delete accounts as soon as people start calling them out and pick it back up on a fresh one, since that sounds like ban evasion or legitimate bot activity.

      • spujb@lemmy.cafeEnglish
        110·
        21 hours ago

        Ghyste had inflammatory wording, but that doesn’t seem enough to warrant action.

        For me, not the case. I absolutely hate coming in to a comments section and all the discussion is relegated to inflammatory comments about OP. Just discuss the content, people. I do not go into news stories to see the users’ personal preferences about how often they see each other.

        I’ve said it before: It’s trivial for me to block one inflammatory user. It’s not easy for me to block like thirty people complaining about that one user instead of them just downvoting to oblivion and moving on.

        Or make a meta petition thread. Like there’s so many other options that actually keep the utility of the community and its discussions intact.

    • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.catOP
      122·
      1 day ago

      Attacking the user for posting

      Nobody was personally attacking the user. They were complaining about behavior. Then, when the user refused to change the behavior, they got understandably annoyed about it, but it still wasn’t really an attack. “The motives of an account with such activity should be questioned” is probably about as bad as it got, and I fully agree with that statement.

      Again, they broke no rules

      Politics used to have a guideline about the max rate of posting that was considered reasonable. I have no idea if they still do, but a “don’t spam random stories” guideline is pretty reasonable, whether or not it is written in the rules, and by any possible metric that someone would pick, this user is exceeding it.

      People elsewhere in the comments have weighed in on the “spirit of the rules” difference between heavy intentional posting like the users you listed do, versus heavy random posting with explicit propaganda sprinkled in.

      we received our first complaint about that account today.

      You’ve actually removed stories posted by this user and then reported before, although it was for wrongness of headline. They’ve been getting a steady flow of reports for spamming over the last week or so as they’ve ramped it up, although I think this was the first time one hit your specific communities specifically for the offense of spamming. They frequently get reports for propaganda or other defects in their flood of stories.

      I don’t think “have we seen reports about this person before” is a good metric. Had you received reports about Ghyste before you banned them? You didn’t seem to have a problem banning them.

      There were a lot of people attacking that user, and a lot of reports on the comments attacking that user.

      I can only see reports that were filed specifically against me (for the comments you removed). There were two reports on those ones, and they were both from the same person.

      There were two reports for spam on this post alone, from two different people, as well as all the comments and votes about how it was a problem. They have enough of a steady flow of reports about them that there are always a few of them hanging out in my mod queue.

      Why do the two reports from the same person represent more weight of mod decision than the two reports from different people + comments + votes?

      Yes, I moderate, but I have a ton more going on in my life, so I’m not always on Lemmy to see what’s happening, and I do rely heavily on reports to find points of pain in the communities I moderate. I also rely heavily on the rest of the moderation team, as well the great tools that people like @ptz@dubvee.org make.

      Cool beans. Why did you rely more heavily on the reports for “attacking” by complaining about the spam, than you did about the reports for the spam?