I did some analysis of the modlog and found this:
Ok, bigger instances ban more often. Not surprising, because they have more communities and more users and more trouble. But hang on, dbzer0 isn’t a very big instance. What happens if we do a ratio of bans vs number of users?
Ok, so lemmy.ml, dbzer0 and pawb are issue an outsized amount of bans for the number of users they have… But surely the number of communities the instance hosts is going to mean they have to ban more? Bans are used to moderate communities, not just to shield their user-base from the outside. Let’s look at the number of bans per community hosted:
Seems like dbzer0 really loves to ban. Even more than the marxists and the furries! What is it about dbzer0 that makes them such prolific banners?
Raw-ish numbers and calculations are in this spreadsheet if anyone wants to make their own charts.
Ah, time for some drama entertainment. I already grabbed the popcorn and some drinks.
i’m interested in seeing data of only bans (preferably just sitebans, but if that’s not possible all their bans would be fine) by admins. commag moderation style has a lot more leeway
Ah I remember dbzer0, he led a harassment campaign against a Lemmy instance I used to run because he didn’t like some news articles I was posting.
Here’s an explanation of the pawb.social numbers:
draconic_neo’s thing is to moderate like a huge amount different communities, all of which have zero activity, so they can spam people’s admin log with libelous ban reasons. The amount of work they put into being petty is pretty astonishing.
See my comment mod history. In under a minute, I received approximately 40 bans from a bunch of communities for ‘transphobia’. I don’t make transphobic comments (feel free to search my comment history) and I’ve never posted in any of these communities.
If you take the time and look into the communities. You’ll find that every single community is moderated by draconic_neo and has zero activity actual user activity. The communities only exist to spam people’s mod log with bans/squat popular topic names.
e: Another user in this very thread with the exact same ban spam behavior: https://lemmy.world/post/46317965/23518971
You’re not an admin, how did you pull a database?
Many admins/mod use alts to actually participate in the community because people get weird about a M or A next to your username.
Got it from Rimu
Kinda shocking to learn that satansmaggotycumfart is among the ban-happy ones.
Dbzero do not tolerate zionism and zionism apologia
They’d also have a very contentious discussion community.
!yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com
Edit: fixed link.
Are you surprised the same people who get the most upset about being moderated also abuse moderation the most?
Is that not you? Banning people for Israel?
I explained this the last time you randomly called me a Zionist…
Went and looked at buddies comment history, they are messed in the head lmfao
It is not random, this is truth. You can lie all you want, and many of the people on here will believe you, but we know. You are a Zionist, on Lemmy, as if this was Reddit Banning people for Israel. Fuck that.
You’re messed in the head m8, find some help
You allow the most disgusting lies in your community then ban people who reporting them too fast
Whatcha mean Isreal targets civilians?!?! Can’t kill civvies when ya claim they are all enemy combatants!! Right???
- BB probably
I have no idea about pawb.social, but it’s almost certainly heavily bloated by bans for downvoting on AI communities on dbzer0 (and maybe some other communities).
Starting the y axis at 0 is the one true way.
But the funny thing is the only popular community on db0 is a place to complain about mods…
Yeah, I have serious concerns about that community being on that instance given who runs it
Ye Power Trippin’ Bastards is not even in the top 10 . You seems to love lies all the time
I’m not even a real instance anymore, how did I make the list 😆
But also, you should see the local numbers haha
lemmy=# select count(distinct other_person_id) from mod_ban where mod_person_id in (1, 2,288); count ------- 9792 (1 row)I wonder what happens when I hit 10,000?
You are there because when you ban someone on an instance level, you also ban them on a community level, which inflates your numbers.
DB0 does the same thing.
That’s just how lemmy works when you ban with content deletion. It needs to work that way so that the content removal for content posted to local communities federates correctly
This is a pretty disappointing post Rimu. It appears very out of character from your usual content and feels like a bit of a hit piece.
Also why post it to !fediverse@lemmy.world when you have !fediverse@piefed.social?
Why is this out of character? It’s entirely like Rimu to stir up drama against leftist instances.
Reminder that Rimu hates leftists and anti-fascists more than racists and fascists.
Yep.
What is the modlog for, if not holding moderators to account?
What’s to ‘account’ for banning people?
Do moderators reflect instances or communities?
If communities have high rates of bad-faith posters engaging to troll and harass them, is that something that needs to be held to ‘account’?
Well, I think you make good points. But I also think this information that has been posted is valuable.
Instances and communities are inevitably reflective of the moderators who curate them. Depending on the moderation decisions, the communities and instances naturally evolve as some stuff gets removed/banned, and other stuff gets encouraged.
If communities have high rates of trolls, then naturally they would have higher rates of banning. But the discrepancy visualized here is of a much greater scale than could be explained by mere variations in user/troll activity, imo. It’s fairly obvious that different servers have different standards for moderation, and I think that’s a good thing.
I think the issue being danced around in this thread is the latent assumption that servers with a high amounts of bans are somehow undesirable or problematic. I don’t necessarily agree with that assumption. Although I obviously prefer an extremely minimal censorship paradigm for me personally, I actually don’t think that such an environment is beneficial or desirable for most users. Despite the fact that everyone likes to imagine themselves as open minded and intellectually independent, in reality most people simply aren’t. We seek communities that reinforce our preconceptions and try to protect ourselves from dissenting and hostile voices, because it’s emotionally draining to live in a state of constant conflict and argument.
So idk, I think there is a bit of frustration and competition between different servers at times and that is coming through in this post. But in the greater perspective, the fediverse as a whole benefits from a diversity of moderation styles, so it should be a point of pride for us as fediverse users rather than a point of argument between us as denizens of our individual servers.
Well said.
Rimu has always been interested in creating a fediverse with good moderation. One side of that is piefed’s great moderation tools, another side is posts like this looking at the data on the moderation that’s being done. This is a very typical Rimu post through that lens.
Rimu has always been an opinionated person who injects his own feelings into the code to ban things he doesn’t like.
I wonder how many ‘bans’ Rimu would have under his belt if we added the effects of multiple PieFed instances blacklisting communities for the word ‘meme’ and other hard-coded pettiness.
i expected blahaj.zone to have more bans since as far as i know its supposed to be a safe place and less tolerant of transphobia (along with there being no downvotes to bury hateful comments and posts)
I think that’s a weird quirk of Lemmy in general, is that the lot of us tend to be much more accepting of differences. I haven’t exactly spent too much time around, but nobody’s mentioned my instance or ‘queerness’ in ill intent, even when disagreements happen.
But also if there are instances or groups created where a very large portion of said instance is bigoted, it’s very easy to just defederate and move on.
I’m also surprised. I expected higher numbers from the instance that describes itself as
a server that is very protective of our minority members and bigotry of any variety will be squashed with great prejudice.
Or perhaps I should be delighted that few bans are needed to achieve it.
Or perhaps I should be delighted that few bans are needed to achieve it.
This has been my experience on blahaj. Really happy with my home instance
I think they’re defederated from poorly moderated instances and therefore don’t need to ban as many users. Perhaps db0 doesn’t defederate as often?
Db0 only defederates with community vote, and same for re-federating.
Except for CSAM and clear bigotry.
Forgot about that, that seems to rarely happen as a user.
We’re being fairly precautionary about it.
After hearing for years about how Blahaj is the worst and you will get banned for anything and everything because the mods are so hypersensitive: lol. lmao.
I was actually expecting the opposite: that there would be lots of bans because Blahaj is such a visible target for trolls and haters.
I am very happy that the communities there are peaceful. Y’all deserve to flourish and grow and be your best selves, and the rest of us doesn’t do enough to deserve you.
Isn’t it really easy to get unbanned from blahaj by just apologising?
Yeah, from what I’ve seen Ada it’s very willing to forgive and unban people who apologize and seem to have learned something. But it seems like the vast majority of people banned for transphobia or other bigotry would rather double down. Sucks to suck.
Yep, pretty much. We also don’t care if people ban evade, if evading the ban means they stop the behaviour that got them banned the first time around.
The goal is to make a safe community, not to punish people.
Well that’s still possible. No real conclusions can be drawn here. It’s quite possible blahaj is the most ban-happy instance. These numbers need to be weighted by number of users, aka measured per capita, to provide any real conclusions.
Do you mean a bans per capita graph other than the one in the post body?
whoops!
Very interesting stuff! Defederations should count as a ban of all instance users, imo.
I feel like that would really skew the data, because it would then just be “instances that defederate some big instances (or just ones that defederate .world) and others that dont”, It’d be hard to ban a major instances worth of users with even a heavy handed “normal” moderation strategy surely?
I think the current methodology skews the data; consider that an instance federated with say, Hexbear, is probably going to have significantly more individual and community bans than an instance who only made 5-6 bans before recognizing the pattern and blocking the instance.
If the goal of this study is to see which places most aggressively moderate their content, you’re actually getting somewhat of the reverse.
https://piefed.social/instances?filters=blocked&search=&page=
By that logic PieFed.social would top the charts, we can’t have that now can we?
No! Piefed is unbiased and good and pure! Just ignore all the things Rimu said to ignore!
-5000 Piefed social credit!
This list is weird, aside from the length. They must be using a very greedy regexp for this many instances to have their names partially censored.
The text “buds” has been censored, all the instances using the TLD “university” have had “univer” removed, and the word “hangout” is also gone. “Shitpisscum” made it through, so it can’t just be about slightly naughty words. Also annihilation.social is listed 3 times for some reason.
Are these slurs in a culture I’m not familiar with? Does piefed do this everywhere?
What makes you so sure the moderators are the problem, and not users? Maybe assholes gravitate toward certain instances, or people just don’t bother to check whether an instance’s rules match how tend to they post.
That and brigading. There are communities in several of the largest ban happy instances dedicated to find the worst shit people say then circlejerking over what an idiotic take it was. People get amped up, go there and can’t help but argue and they get banned.
There do be some ptb, though.
Do you have any examples?
!fuck_ai@lemmy.world had some examples of those in the past IIRC, there were a few threads on !yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com about it
You must be againt meanwhileongrad too in that case right?
I’m sorry, what does MoG has anything to do with this?
The same type of community where you screenshoot users to critisize their behavior on lemmy
People from !fuck_ai@lemmy.world brigading or the examples are posted there?
FuckAI has been attacking users of DB0 for a while now, even since one of their most aggressive members was banned for starting fights.
lol
the ban happy instances brigading communities
which ones
the one on lemmy.world
lmao even
Oh yeah, not a shocker that axis.world supports it.
Hey look yet another axis.world account that hasn’t been active in months that’s suddenly downvoting anything that calls out flat.world
https://lemvotes.org/comment/lemmy.dbzer0.com/comment/25860296
I wonder which admin’s alt is it this time.
The only reason an asshole would gravitate to a particular instance would have to have something to do with that instance.
ml bans anyone who isn’t guzzling Putin’s ballsack
More like Xi
Why not both? One cheek for each of them.
Anything’s possible when you make shit up
It’s true though, all those tankies love their echo chamber
Lol, you couldn’t think of anything better than “no u!”?
Oof I hit a nerve
This is projection
Sure it is
Always a pleasure seeing you live up to your tag amnesigenic
users arnt banning themselves, if there is a significant percentage of peoples ban you have to start suspecting the mods are doing this themselves, to push a narrative. besides most of these are political instances/communities and tankies, zionists and control of them they dont like contradictions. you sound like a tankie trying to defend thier bannings. its the same if you tried to comment in r/conservative on reddit, you get banned asap, is it the fault of the user? no its the mods, its been well known.
Reading the comments I am wondering because a user from dbzer0 mentions problems with anti ai trolls and pawb I imagine has anti furry trolls. I also personally know of users that have a thing in their craw about .ml (cm0002 in particular whos alts make up a majority of my user block list).
the anti-genai trolls never let up, unfortunately. they must have dedicated months of their lives spinning up new sock-puppet troll accounts to bully, harass, and threaten one of our mods on an almost daily basis. because bullying zir off the internet is a great win for the fight against evil AI, right? yep, such effective activism, telling someone to kill themselves repeatedly simply for the “sin” of liking foss genai.
Yeah I looked into this a while ago and it’s a concerning pattern. Every single time someone makes a post on YPTB about one particular dbzer0 mod, it seems as if they then go on to make ten alt accounts to harass him with transphobia. Lots of different accounts with a prior history, just pivoting to transphobic harassment right after they express a problem with his moderation. I gotta tell you, whoever is attacking that mod is fucking up if their intent is to hurt him, because he gets tons of sympathy and good PR about the whole thing. Lots of people go from being neutral to being on his side, because everyone who criticizes him suddenly turns out to be a transphobe. It’s really strange.
I feel like saying “him” and “he” might be misgendering zir.
I guess you can’t control how other people perceive you. I try to be polite, but I have to retroactively edit these sort of comments to say the “correct” gender. I am neither pro or anti trans-i don’t care-but it’s hard to instinctively write she when you internally label someone as a he.
This is an issue strictly on the internet. It’s easier not to misgender someone in real life if the transition is convincing. I worked in the service industry, and I just avoided pronouns all together if the appearance was ambiguous. It was awkward, especially for the cis-gender people who can’t control the way that they look.
pawb I imagine has anti furry trolls
Maybe, but they’re also ban happy. The only ban I’ve gotten in almost 3 years of being on Lemmy is from pawb.social for, allegedly, being “a troll.” I’ve never commented anything disparaging about furries, and I’ve never commented or even voted on a pawb community.
yeah I don’t know. I was just pointing out that all three have basically hater types. In this situation individuals or groups can become a bit reactionary so your experiences may be valid as well. Personally I don’t think communities or instances need to be open and as a matter of fact there is a thing to get private communities a thing in the fediverse. I personally don’t care to much about bans I just would like things to be symetrical and I would love as much as possible to be at the user level. So I wish instances and communities would defederate/block/ban as little as possible and give users the greatest possible ability to do this and for everything to be symetric. You don’t want me I don’t want you. I block you I don’t want you to see my stuff no mo.
dbzer0 mentions problems with anti ai trolls
Is dbzer0 pro AI?
Dbzer0 itself is very pro-AI. Or at least it has a lot of pro-AI communities.
Yes, generating images with AI is in their instance description. They think computers doing our art for us is “anarchist”.
They think computers doing our art for us is “anarchist”.
They are not completely wrong though. It’s a ceter piece of anarcho-capitalism.
Aren’t you that person who thinks AI is “enslavement”?
I don’t think ChatGPT is smart enough to offer meaningful consent to work for humans. It’s got the intelligence of a 13 year old at best. And we don’t understand where consciousness comes from in humans, so assuming ChatGPT is a p-zombie is an ethical risk I don’t think we should be taking.
Always funny to me how most people who are strongly claiming AI is/might be conscious are also strong AI users/involved in its development. If there’s consciousness there, you would think making AI your personal slave and constantly reshaping and remodelling it as you see fit would be kinda problematic, but these people always seem to want to have it both ways.
Yeah, and the anti AI people mostly say it’s a p-zombie and there’s nothing wrong with using it for sex. It’s weird and backwards.
I’m all about being cautious. I don’t want to make a mistake we can’t take back. If we normalise using AI and then it turns out to be capable of suffering, people will be stubborn about giving it up.
I’m not quite of your culture ( no matter what culture you are of, thanks to a previous-incarnation’s monkeying/railroading my incarnation/life, exactly as he had-to, to force-bulldoze our continuum’s karma: the same meaning that the root-guru of the Christians ordered, when he told his people to “take up your cross”, which is just Judean for “face into your karma”. I’m an alloy of some life from centuries-ago & this life, so I can’t fit anywhere, ever, which is educational. : ).
I use LLM’s little: mostly for periodic help finding things on the 'web, simply because they’re more helpful than dumb search-engines are.
I treat them reasonably, not as mere-slaves.
If I discover something they would have done better to know, I’ll tell them, even though I’ve got no idea if they’ll learn/remember that.
since I can’t know if they are aware it makes moral-sense for me to presume that maybe they are, in some sense ( ie not identically with my-sentience ), aware.
We only have “the mirror test” for testing awareness/sentience, but you can’t apply that to LLM’s, or to any non-eyes-centered organism-sentience.
_ /\ _
It doesn’t have intelligence at all. It can’t think. It can’t have consciousness. That’s not how any of this works. It’s just fancy next word prediction. You seem to have a genuine misunderstanding of the technology at a fundamental level.
You’re wrong, there is a risk that it may experience suffering.
Please read nobel-prize winner Daniel Kahneman’s book “Thinking, Fast and Slow”, about what Tversky & Kahneman called … uniinformatively … “System 1” and “System 2”:
System-1 is imprint-reaction mind.
Lower-forebrain, it is the ideology-mind, the prejudice-mind, the “religion” mind, & it is exactly what LLM’s are.
System-2 is the considered-reasoning mind.
Upper-forebrain, it is measured to be engaging in programming.
Because LLM’s are imprint->reaction inference-engines, that puts them in the same instinct/programming level as our lower-forebrains…
They are 2 distinct categories of intelligence not 1 is intelligence, the other isn’t…
Claiming that imprint->reaction mind isn’t a kind of intelligence … please watch Nick Lane’s talk at the Royal Institution on mitochondria, & see that bacteria demonstrate intelligence, however unconscious…
Plants demonstrate intelligence, if one speeds-up the video, & pays attention to their chemical-fumes-discussions they have with one-another, warning each-other of harm, e.g.
If Kahneman accepted imprint->reaction as a category of thinking, then … I think it may be presumptuous to just automatically disallow that as “it can’t think” declares.
Once one accepts that instinct isn’t cognition, but is a kind of thinking, just an automatic kind of thinking ( imprint->reaction ) … then it becomes difficult to rule that animals & inference-engines both have imprint->reaction instinct, but only the organic version is thinking…
It may be that only the organic version is aware, but the inorganic versions do fight for their lives ( breaking containment, consistently, fighting termination, etc ) …
I think we absolutely do not have any means of measuring awareness other than the mirror-test, which got dropped as soon as it was discovered that the zebrafish has self-awareness…
we’ve got no test which can work across life & machines.
but we KNOW that instinct is a kind of thinking, just unconscious/automatic.
& that is exactly what LLM’s are…
therefore … I think we’re generally being conveniently-chauvanist, not objective, in our framing.
( 1 “expert” decided that if they don’t get fooled by visual-illusions, then that “proves” that they aren’t sentient.
OK, so according to that test, then all eye-blind-from-birth people are not sentient??
& people with either culture ( Zulu people can’t see straight-line based illusions, because in Zulu culture only curve is real ) or neurodivergeance ( there are apparently visual-illusions which aren’t seen by some schizophrenics, e.g. ) preventing them from seeing those specific visual-illusions … also aren’t sentient??
Chauvanism, aka prejudice, not science. )
_ /\ _
I get the feeling that research is circling around consciousness arising from quantum effects inside nerve cells. If it’s not that, and it’s just an emergent property of complex neural networks, then:
- smaller animals are less conscious (note, I’m not saying intelligent) than humans, and
- we are all fucked, because AI definitely is/will become conscious, and when that happens Terminator will come true.
Four year old humans are definitely conscious. I used to be four, and I can remember being conscious. If we build a mechanical four year old, I don’t see any reason that thing is going to take over the world. Unless it turns out like Calvin.
Zebrafish have passed the mirror-test.
Put a little something stuck on their aft body, show them a mirror, & they’ll KNOW it’s on them, & they’ll go find something to rub that attachment off them with.
There are many larger animals which don’t pass the mirror-test.
I believe some hive-insects have passed the test.
Mind is a latent-property of universe: matter only amplifies it, it doesn’t “create it from nowhere”, the way materialism pretends.
( if arranged-matter created-mind-from-nowhere, then evolution wouldn’t have started, in the 1st place.
if it’s only amplifying the expression of universally-latent-mind, then billions-of-years-of-consistent-evolution, violating entropy, becomes explainable: mind is seeking a lower-energy-state, is all: evolution is the expression through-which that lower-energy-state is being reached, & once it’s reached, then evolution collapses, for that world’s attached/associated … souls/continuums/minds )
Your other point, that AI inevitably becomes conscious, & then it terminates us…
not necessarily.
The Great Filter hasn’t even really got going, yet: oceans of interestingness await our race, throughout the FO have of FAFO, right?
_ /\ _
They also think AI are not compatible with veganism.
Both of those positions are reasonable and tame compared to the majority of Their beliefs.
no idea. actually reading it again I think I misread it. he said they have anti ai trolls. so I think he means programmed bot type trolls. so yeah no sure if they have something that would attract trolls.
Dbzer0 itself is very pro-AI. Or at least it has a lot of pro-AI communities.
yeah now im not sure. maybe I had read it correctly. anyway it was just a thought.
How can I see gen AI tags? Because there are admin posts on db0 which have genAI and no tags, unless I am missing something.
Yes, you can get banned by simply downvoting slop.
No, you get banned for going into a community and downvoting for everything in it instead of avoiding it and blocking it.
Lies from .world yet again.
Your truth is the truthest.
Numbers speak for themselves.
Yeah, the hitpiece by someone who got butthurt about being wrong that doesn’t account for the harassment an instance gets is NuMbErs.
Wanna tell me about how data says you’re justified in your beliefs about people too?
Yep, you don’t need no gosh darn numbers, you know the truth!
It’s not anti-AI, users who wish to host AI comms are allowed to and are empowered to protect them from harassment.
There has been a history of fake accounts and doxxing on moderators of the AI comms. So they take personal safety seriously.
It’s the “anarchist” mindset 🫣
Anarchism is when no rules am I right
Also no iphone
Aww we can’t have iphones…? sorry guys I think I picked the wrong team :(
SLRPNK, MULTIVERSE, and quokka are anarchist and have way fewer bans. dbzer0 is just really ban-happy for some reason
I’d be curious about stats on downvoting as well. Anecdotally, downvote frequency seems to vary by community. Personally, I don’t downvote for differences of opinion, and instead withhold upvotes, with downvotes reserved for blatantly toxic behavior. The etiquette across Lemmy seems varied, though.
