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 [email protected] moderation philosophy, it makes perfect sense.
Makes perfect sense. Yeah, some people told me about them and I kind of left it alone, for overly long I guess in retrospect. They weren't as bad the last time I had looked at them.
The more interesting question is, why are the lemmy.world mods coming out swinging for this user?
Can't answer that, but it's possible they're simply not aware of their alt history. There's a similarly active user, Microwave, but they're legit; they always post quality stuff with no agenda. Perhaps they're giving "Cat" the benefit of doubt? They also give several other controversial posters a lot of leeway (won't mention them, but you probably already know the handful I'm referring to). Not suggesting any kind of agenda with the LW mods; just seems like they're trying a bit too hard to be "fair and balanced".
This user nukes their accounts, so unless one is familiar with the patterns of their previous accounts, it's difficult to correlate them with no history available. If they're on your instance and you have concerns about them (and they haven't self-destructed yet), you might be ahead to just ban them ahead of time (w/o content removal) so there's record for later comparison.
You hit it on the head. We weren't aware of this user, as we had 0 reports about them until today.
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:
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:
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:
Another personal attack against the user.
Next:
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 @[email protected] 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.