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
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?
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
catwas 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 @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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
Goddamn, Phil, I didn't know you roasted coffee.