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.
Straight up bullshit and a completely half-baked, ill-considered, ill-conceived idea. Completely disconnected from reality.
Please do not enshittify please do not enshittify please do not enshittify… Oh well too late
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.
So users should also be able to post about Flat Earth and Antivaxxing on science only channels, by that logic.
No thanks.
What absolutely cowardice. There are no “alternate facts”.
Edit *you actually admit you’re going to forced science communities to post flat Earth? Ok gg Lemmy, it wasn’t that good of run anyway but cya. Russians and flathearhers. Star trek memes aren’t worth enough for me to stay.
The purpose is to allow pinholes through echo chambers with the idea that the odd antivax comment is easier to deal with than the odd “Russia is waging a war of aggression” comment in a pro-Russia community.
One of those stances requires a black box with other ideas kept out or it collapses. That has recently been done with heavy, heavy moderation banning large numbers of people. That’s the kind of moderation we’re looking to rein in.
I’ve focused on the most controversial examples, because to some people (if they’re acting genuinely), that’s what it might look like to them. If you want a flat earth community, that’s fine, as long as you allow people to call it out as a joke once in a while.
The purpose is to encourage discussion where it’s most needed, usually where moderators are preventing it.
If you want a flat earth community, that’s fine, as long as you allow people to call it out as a joke once in a while.
That would be fine, because Flat Earth is a joke and that’s true. It would also be fine to mod it out if they want to have a community of loonies.
But you’re saying you will forcefully make sure that astronomy communities accept flat Earth, medical communities accept antivaxxing and drinking bleach for covid?
Have a think about this again ffs. And do it after you’ve come down from whatever you’ve been smoking.
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's_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.
This is refreshing to see, good on you for daring to do this. There is no reason to fear respectful debate in the absence of an agenda.
It’s really easy to disguise a campaign to wear out moderators as respectful debate, e.g. by sealioning, especially if you’re not working alone. The new rules don’t have any provision to distinguish between respectful debate and bad-faith posts, so it’s not unreasonable to worry that this change will do a lot more to promote bad-faith ‘debate’ than respectful debate.
I agree that it’s a difficult balancing act. Overall though, the role of a moderator is to facilitate conversation in accordance to the rules, not enforce their own narrative on the community. These steps are not perfect, but they are an attempt to try and get moderators to moderate more and dictate less.
Good on yall. See i knew I had faith in you for a reason
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.
No. The ToS still applies.
What a real Steve Huffman post. Really impressive.
Classic .world admins showing their constant incompetence
nice
Well, hopefully this will finally get saner instances to deferate .world as the disinformation hub it’s now openly admitting to intentionally be (and has always been, see the misinformation bot debacle for a previous example), so that’s good for lemmy as a whole, I suppose, in the long term (once .world communities have moved to other instances).
My take is we Admins are just running the community for the users of it and Mods are caretakers of their communities. The idea that communities are a Mods personal fiefdom seems to be a holdover from Reddit and just seems like it can/will lead to power-tripping.
It is generally a good idea to have multiple mods and it should be encouraged for mods to have a back-channel to coordinate (we for example offer a XMPP based chat system for members of our instance) so that less moderation decisions are self-involved and made in the heat of the moment. But ultimately the idea that the mods are the ones that are in control of a community is the least bad of the various alternatives, and certainly admin overreach is more problematic than mod overreach, as people can easily switch to another community if they don’t like the mods’ decisions in one community.
Definitely
I would say just block .world but I think they need exposure therapy. Fuck the police
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.
That being said, I think it would be wise to reformulate and reduce down this post to a straightforward announcement:
Indeed. I know what they mean and why they arrived at this decision, and I agree with it, but I got bored half-way through.
“The moon is upside down in Australia”
Happy i migrated off of lemmy.world some months ago with the piracy mess.
Same here. While I appreciate the work LW sysadmins do, this kind of decision just seems questionable
You’re trying cut back on echo chambers and power tripping mods. I like this, but I wonder how this going to play out.
