I tend to browse /All and by New on Lemmy. I went to respond on a thread on !vegan@lemmy.world to thank someone for a recipe that looked good, and found out I had been banned.
Odd, considering I hadn't posted to that sub at any point in the past. I checked the modlog to find that "Mod" had banned a bunch of people citing "Rule 5."
Their Rule 5 states: Bad-faith carnist rhetoric & anti-veganism are not allowed, as this is not a space to debate the merits of veganism. Anyone is welcome here, however, and so good-faith efforts to ask questions about veganism may be given their own weekly stickied post in the future (see current stickied discussion).
I (and hundreds of others) seemingly broke rule 5 of this community without ever posting there. What is going on?
And my apologies if this isn't the place for this, but I had no idea where else to post the question.
If the mods are using one of those bots, then I think it's downvotes that you receive, not those that you offer. Reading that post, these people seem absolutely okay with even the most rushed of judgements, it's only the popularity contest's results inside what will fast become an echo chamber that seems to matter.
On the other hand, mods have also been known to mass-ban anyone who downvotes them personally, so maybe? Or perhaps they modified the Santa bot (I'm seriously not making that name up!!!:-P) to ban anyone who has ever downvoted anyone on any post (or certain posts that they liked) within that community. In a sense, it's their community so they can do as they please, but also... dayum.
It's ridiculous to look at the modlog and see it in real time
It's like they are inviting us to find out what will trigger it haha
In case the author of that bot ever reads this, can you just perma-ban me from any community that you are associated with? I don't want to be constantly dropping in and out of all sorts of communities I've literally never heard of based on one comment here or there that I made, or didn't make, or whatever. And I'd like to preserve the ability of the modlog to actually be functional, e.g. it currently shows (on my instance) that I've never been banned from any community ever, though a few extra entries in it won't be too damaging.
To everyone else, it sure would be nice if such practices were opt-in rather than have to go to great lengths (like DM a mod) to be able to opt-out. e.g., why not have an application process for people who want to subscribe, and then kick them out whenever they don't meet the criteria? This mass-banning of a significant fraction of the entire Fediverse (they admit that at one point they banned 3%, and iirc this was before more than doubling, almost tripling the score threshold to avoid that fate) just screams of self-important leeches who care about avoiding doing any manual efforts to moderate their community, at the expense of everyone else that they have decided to involve. Notably unwillingly bc nobody here seems to have offered CONSENT to be part of these experiments in artificial unintelligence.
If Trump was on Lemmy, this is exactly the type of thing he'd do. First divide everyone up into who is loyal to his brand or not, and second deny anyone the right to speak who does not fall into the former category. Which is... urg, fine, but don't pollute my ability to read my own modlog for the entire Fediverse in the process!!