I was wondering if there were systems in place for users to report mods who are just ignoring the code of conduct and just abusing their power of moderator as a whole?
I’ve seen that we could get in touch via Mastodon, but I don’t have an account for that unfortunately and I was curious to know if there were other ways
The point isn’t that they received some wild type of “punishment” they can’t come back from. The point is that having what you’re allowed to say policed in this fashion is offensive to the vast majority of people, whatever mechanism “gentle” or not is being used to enforce the policing.
Moderation started out as a way to remove racism, spam and similar blatant abuse. Somehow, it’s grown to the point that people feel they have to hover over the shoulders of the commenters dictating what are the allowed and disallowed types of statements. Most people feel that if they think China has an oppressive government, they should be allowed to say it. And that if they think the US has an oppressive government, they should be allowed to say it. Lemmy.ml is a silly place because one of those statements is “allowed” and the other is not, which is absurd behavior that belongs better on a Fox News comment section or a US State Department web site than it does on the flagship instance of a supposedly FOSS-and-freedom friendly software project.
As a mod, we don’t really “hover”, we do have a queue of reported posts and reported comments and deal with them as they pop up.
Most likely some other .ml user saw the “tankie” comment, reported it, and the .ml mod did the .ml mod thing.
I fail to see a useful distinction between me posting what I think, and a mod seeing it and deleting it, versus me posting what I think, someone reporting it, and then the mod deleting it. In both cases someone’s standing over me policing what viewpoints I’m allowed to express, which is bad.
I actually do get why someone would want to delete “tankie,” since it could be taken as a gratuitous insult. And I do get mod fatigue and running out of care to give as an underlying issue for a lot of this. I think a big part of the underlying issue is depending on volunteer moderators to keep the whole system together and making basically unlimited demands on them. I was just talking about the general censorship problem on lemmy.ml, not trying to say that every case is always power tripping mods.
Both of those statements are allowed in .ml, you just can’t repeat us state department propaganda without extreme amounts of proof to back it up. There is a difference between: “I think China is authoritarian” and “oog boog look remember that genocide that the UN investigated and found wasn’t a genocide where all the ‘victims’ that were touted are now millionaires in other countries after selling a story the UN specifically found didn’t happen… It happened!!!1!1!!1”
Yes that is specifically what I’m talking about, there wasn’t criticism of China, there was “oog think China bad because ( insert thing the UN found no evidence of that literally only the US ever said there was evidence of and they didn’t present that evidence ).”
And here we reach the crux of the matter.
If I think there’s been a genocide in Xinjiang, I should be able to say so. Someone else might think that’s objectively not true, and we can talk about it. That’s actually a really healthy thing, it is an exchange of ideas. Almost no one has a monopoly on understanding the world completely, and so it’s necessary to be able to talk it back and forth. Deciding that we’re going to delete one side of that conversation is good for no one.
I think the model that’s crept into the modern internet where discordant ideas are “enemy” ideas that everyone needs to be protected against, and there’s no point in talking with anyone you disagree with because all the two of you will do is attack each other, is poison.
I’m happy to hear what you have to say, maybe I am wrong about this instance. When did the UN say there wasn’t a genocide and all the victims are millionaires? If you link me to the report, I would like to read it.
Edit: Instead of pointing me to information so I can read for myself and upend my whole worldview, he chose to go back through my history downvoting a bunch of stuff including when I was talking about how to set up RSS feeds. Lol.
Uncritically spreading xenophobic propaganda will of course get you a tut-tut of some kind. As it should.
I have gotten banned from .ml twice for merely stating that Russia shot down a civilian airliner in Ukraine.
What century are you from? The last time Russia had anti air assets in Ukraine it was still called the Ukraine and it was half it’s current size.