this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2025
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Imagine you worked in a big company, and one day eight months ago the marketing team had a meeting where they were playing a new promotional video loud and you stuck your head round the door and watched to the end of the 1-minute ad, stuck your thumbs up, said "good ad" and left. Then this week, you get an email saying they'd gone through the CCTV footage and found that you'd been in a marketing meeting in the past, so because the marketing team had decided to change the branding, and that everyone who contributed in any way to marketing discussions should be on board, you personally should start attending marketing meetings every Thursday morning at 9:15 to help steer the new vision, and vote on new ads every week. You would be pissed off.
Please do not assume that everyone who ever made a drive-by comment on one of your posts that reached the front page is someone who wants to subscribe to your new community, and absolutely don't come in my inbox to instruct me to go to a community based on the authority of some vote I wasn't in. I wasn't the one making your community lively, it was the people creating engaging posts.
You complain that people wouldn't see your pinned post? Well, it doesn't matter to anyone except people who were going to post. You don't move a community by moving the commenters, you move a community by moving the new posts. Put it in the sidebar, put it in a pinned post, put it in the title of the community (like you have), just above the button you have to press to post. If your post creators move to your new community, great, and if they continue to post great stuff that gets random lemmings like me to comment on something interesting, even greater, but it's absolutely not OK to spam everyone to tell them to go subscribe.
You're not in charge of non-subscribers in any way, and the only authority you have to grab my attention is good content that people engage with.
If you build it, they will come. This is not building it, this is just spam.
It's really really hard to resist the urge to go to the new community and block it. In your understandable desire to build the new community, you have incomprehensibly tried to force people to do what you want. You're not my boss. I just commented a couple of times. Look up Aesop's fable about the wind and the sun.
If I were an admin, I would with no hesitation whatsoever be perma-banning the bot account and temp-banning the humans involved in the decision too.
Spam: don't do it. How on earth would you possibly not realise this was spam? What on earth made you think it was OK to spam everyone who ever interacted even slightly? Why do mods think they're in charge of users choices?
@[email protected] @[email protected]
The part that kills me is that it's spam from your grandma that uses CC: instead of BCC:
100% agreement.
Having automation that requires real human time to deal with, that's spam. If a human had sent each one of those messages, I wouldn't like it, but it wouldn't be spam. At least there's parity, a human created a message for human. But now we have automation, a bot if you like, creating messages for humans. That's spam. No matter how well-intentioned that spam is, it's still spam
First off, there isn't a really bot involved, it's a simple script that collects a list of people that have interacted with the community in the last year as there isn't a way to get the subscription list. Second of all, the tagging only notifies, there isn't any command or authoritative language included in the message. The mods weren't even involved in this instance by the looks of it, I'm not sure by what angle you view the ping as authoritative.
It was also a single ping, not some repeating message that spammed you multiple times.
Spam is unsolicited messages sent to large numbers of users who didn't sign up to receive the messages. You get a lot of it only because a lot of people think their message is more important than your subscription preferences. That's exactly what you did here, and you pasted thousands of user addresses to achieve it.
Another reason that you have a lot of spam is that the people who know how to spam offer their skills to people that want to spam. That's you. A third reason that you have a lot of spam is that spammers who think their message is more important than other people's preferences, and that's you as well: here you are, arguing with people who didn't like your spam.
Everyone involved in this mass spam is completely unrepentant and you all sound like you'd do it again in a heartbeat if you had another important message you wanted to share.
There IS a facility on Lemmy for Important messages that all community members should read - it's called pinned posts. There ISN'T a facility for mods to put stuff in the inboxes of thousands of users, subscribed or not (which is why you had to scrape data and paste it), and the reason is that there isn't is that mods SHOULDN'T be able to message everyone who interacted with their community - their community is the correct place for that.
Frankly, when you next find yourself pasting thousands of usernames to send a mass message in the future, I want you to think "This is spam. I should not spam. Spamming thousands of people makes people cross. I should not annoy thousands of people, even slightly, even if I think it's important. I should not spam thousands or even hundreds of users. This is not the way to get my message accepted. This pisses people off. I should respect these people more than this. I should put a notice up where people can read it if they care and I should not try to force people to care by spamming them."
Did you ever have someone email hundreds of people at your organisation with something that was important to them but wasn't to most people? And then someone presses reply-all and says "I don't want to be on this list". That's the world of behavior you're in. Stop it.
You're blowing this out of proportions, and again, this doesn't have anything to do with the mods, if you're going to reply to my message, at least read it first.
You're also making a bunch of wrong accusations. This was a community migration, you got pinged because you have interacted with the community. I was asked to help notify people of the migration, this isn't something regular that clogs up people's inboxes. You gotten one (1) ping from the script, your replies have taken 10x the amount of time the ping did.
I don't know which bit of your message you think I didn't read. I think you misinterpret my disagreement as lack of comprehension.
We disagree about what spam is - you seem to think that spam is by its nature repetitive, whereas I think that spam is by its nature unsolicited and unwelcome, using addresses scraped from something that isn't an opt-in list. This isn't because I didn't read your statement that you only sent one unwelcome and unsolicited inbox message, it's because you think it was OK to do it and no big deal and I think it was absolutely not OK to do it, that you should have realised that pinging thousands and thousands of users who ever commented might piss some of them off and that you should have realised that this is EXACTLY what spammers do.
We disagree about how annoying it is or isn't to be told/asked to do something we have no interest in doing by a group of tens of people who decided that thousands of other people should do something. It's OK for you to not be pissed off by that, but telling me that I'm wrong to be irritated by that because "you" lack the authority to tell me what to do comes incredibly close to seeing the point whilst missing it entirely. "You're wrong on a technicality" isn't a great way of responding to someone who finds something you or your friends did irritating.
I was factually incorrect that you're all mods of the new community, only one of you is. But again, arguing that I'm wrong about who did this isn't a great way of winning the argument you're having about whether it's annoying or not, and isn't a great way of making me less pissed off. In fact I was usually using the word mod simply because this is the sort of message that a mod should just pin at the top of their community.
I made precisely two accusations in that post:
(1) Like other spammers, you thought that your message was more important than people's subscription preferences, so you did just like them and sent unwelcome unsolicited messages using scraped messages.
I stand by that accusation and I don't see how you can honestly deny it, even if you disagree about my use of the word spam to describe it.
(2) Everyone involved in this mass spam is completely unrepentant and you all sound like you’d do it again in a heartbeat if you had another important message you wanted to share.
You all still are arguing rather than apologising, so I stand by this accusation too. (You're not even using the politician's non-apology "I'm sorry if some of you feel upset".)
Never claimed it was regular, never claimed people's inboxes were currently clogged up, but I'm telling you this: if every pinned post on every community that I ever commented in this year was an inbox message, my inbox would be in a similar spam-to-useful ratio as my email inboxes are. The only reason people aren't complaining about all the spam in their inboxes on lemmy is that afaik, it only ever happened twice, almost no one does it. If everyone on lemmy behaved like you, our inboxes would all be flooded with spam. This should be a strong hint to you that you are the double start of something terrible that I want to not happen to lemmy. I imagine you'll want to claim that this was an important message because it was a migration message, but again I need you to hear that you don't get to decide what's important to me, you just pin the message on your community like everyone else that thinks they have an important message does.
You all are crap at apologising and all keep arguing with people that are cross with you already, trying to explain that they're factually incorrect and therefore have no right to be cross. How did you think that was going to calm folks down?
It's like you all took a course in conflict de-escalation and chose to do the opposite.
No, I'm referencing you mixing the moderators into this when I've told you they got nothing to do with it. I'm literally trying to take the full responsibility for this instead passing it off to the moderators.
I prefer honesty and dialogue over the corporate spiel. Sharing my view points and getting counter arguments is how you learn about people opinions beyond the their rage comments. I've already said sorry to the lemmy.world administrators that contacted me about the issue and have no problem saying that in this instance, the pinging was a mistake. I've also told you that it wont happen to your instance again as I've spoken to one of your admins.
Do you want that sort of thing? You make it sound like I'm wrong for engaging with people who disagreed with the pinging instead of passing off some fake apology and not engage further.
Yes, that is a wrongful accusation. I only wanted to help someone who asked for help with their migration. I do not think my message is more important than other. Pinging does not suppress other people's messages. Everyone can ping, it's built in feature meant to be used. Just because you disagree with the usage, doesn't make your unrelated accusation true.
This is also completely wrong. Blaze have said sorry in multiple comments, one of those comments were even a reply to you, so I really do not appreciate you falsely accusing him of something that is provably false. I've also made it clear in multiple comments that this wasn't the intended outcome of the action, and that the notification would need to be revised if ever done again. How is that not making it clear that I wouldn't do it again?
I'm also not willing to accept the statement that this is unequivocally a bad action to take. I've done it once before and the comments in that instance were all positive, only a single person downvoted the comment pinging users. Based on the feedback from this instance, it clear that it's contextual when it's a good move and when it isn't.
With all due respect, by "people" it's just you. Yeah, some others in here have expressed discontent at this but they did it with a single comment, or moved on by now. Out of however many were actually pinged, it's probably not a notable amount of the overall.
I'd like to add that despite me not really seeing this as an issue, I didn't actually set this up. I was aware of it possibly happening, and saw no problem with it (I didn't know how it would look when/if it did happen - it could've been done via DM for all I knew). But that goes my involvement in it. And no, the instance of "community completely changing url and moving" is practically the only instance in which I would ever not mind or support something like this, so it won't be happening for just any future or hypothetical pinned post.
It's not just me you're disagreeing with.
Sure, you're not the only one. But I would suspect most people didn't care.
Unfortunately, the bot or script can't ping by subscribers. So it did the next best thing: comments. It's not telling anyone to do anything.
It's only a one-off notification, dear me.
Ping by posters, maybe, but actually just don't ping. It's spam.
The net was WAY too wide.
And don't ever tell me what to subscribe to.
Some meeting I wasn't in deciding I had to do something and then sending me messages telling me to do it can absolutely go get lost.
It wasn't /telling/ you to do anything. It was just a "hey, if you're interested". That's it. Ideally Lemmy would have a function native for community migration but this is the next best thing.
The impoliteness of spamming thousands of users completely undoes any politeness that the single word "please" adds to this instruction based on someone else's vote.
Imagine this sent to everyone who ever made a political comment: "You once expressed a political opinion. America has voted, please now subscribe to Trump on Truth Social." It's not even OK if you restrict it to just US based commenters, but it's sure as shit not OK to send it globally.
That was the post on this thread, not the notification that was sent out. The notification just says "Automated migration notification" (and then a list of names). Are you of the opinion that the very announcement in this community is in fact trying to dictate to people that they must subscribe to the new community?
I'm of the opinion that pasting thousands and thousands of user's addresses into your message is spam and I find it incomprehensible that you think you and your community are so important that it excuses it.
I genuinely don't get why someone's notifications are so sacred to them to this extent. This was a one-off event that was done purely to get people migrating over to the new community. Which it seems to have done. Some people aren't bothered by it, presumably because they did subscribe here.
Then you don't understand why people don't like spam. You support spamming. You think your message is more important than my preferences, than THOUSANDS of users preferences, and the fact that you've pissed off a bunch of users hasn't even begun to convince you to even consider that you might be in the wrong here.
As I said, I'm not telling you to do anything. You don't want to subscribe, don't subscribe. You just got caught up on the mail-list because you at some point posted here (in the last X months). It's done now. It won't happen again.
You're defending spamming up and down this thread and arguing with anyone you pissed off. Have a little think about whether that makes the world a better place. And try reading what people say and be less broken record.
Then stop defending it ffs and try apologising instead.
that was scraped, the way spammers do it. "We thought you'd be interested in... " is at the start of an awful lot of marketing crap.
It's just a community notification, not some seedy product or some con or scam. It was always meant as a one-off thing (that's apparently been done before anyway by the same guy to zero issues for another community migration).
Still justifying your actions, still excusing your spam, still being defensive, still absolutely believing you did the right thing despite pissing a bunch of people off, still not apologising.
Skavau is completely unaffiliated with this action (I don't even know him), please don't accuse him of being a part of this. He is just trying to help you understand how you can see this from a different perspective.
Skavau is up and down the thread arguing with people who didn't like the spam and is the mod of the new community. "Trying to help you understand" simply isn't how they're behaving.
I'm not inclined to be told what to do, as you so object to yourself when you believed you were being ordered about.
For context, the previous experience was https://lemmy.world/post/24312613
Feedback there was
Sorry, we're discussing how to handle this better next time, there's a thread on [email protected] about this.