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Does anyone else notice an uptick of extreme troll accounts? (lemmy.world)

submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

333 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I swear, ~~every time~~ most of the time I see someone being particularly rude, ignorant, and inappropriate on a post (usually political in origin, or they swing it to being political) I click on their profile and see it has been created that same day.

They are only there to sow discord. Only to piss people off. Idk if we can just report them (for what?) but I'd like to try exposing them before responding and interacting..

I am guilty of gobbling up the bait. I've started looking at profiles of people that piss me off exceptionally and noticed they're burner bot loser accounts.

I guess i just want to say I've noticed it!

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

Those sound like extremely edge cases and are not a good reason to not justify not reporting anything.

Moderators are volunteers and most of them simply want to make their communities better, so they do take these reports seriously. Plus at this stage Lemmy lacks robust tools to help them accomplish this. The very least general users can do is flag problem comments and accounts to help them out.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (3 children)

There’s posts about mods complaining about users using the report button as a “super downvote” you go to those posts, there are people legit trolling in them and the content is still there.

The excuse is, Lemmy needs content, so they are very loose and liberal in applying moderation like that against users that add content.

I’ve had an admin defend a mod when I reported them with “they aren’t as bad as some of the others”. So Lemmy admins know they have moderation issues, if they fix it, they lose their content and their free labor. So they just turn a blind eye and let the mods do what they want, which is quite frankly nothing. And when asked they report you to the admins. They really only deal with illegal stuff unfortunately, since they have to or they can get in shit personally.

Trolls unfortunately add content, which is desperately needed. Some communities deal with it, larger let it go for discussion and metrics sake. Lemmy isn’t perfect, and we should be able to discuss its darker side.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Are you talking about Lemmy.ml specifically or Lemmy in general?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

Ugghh that’s a good point, this was .world for admins, but the moderation issues seem to be non instance specific.

Also makes me wonder if some of the trolling is dealt with and its federation issues then…

Still, the amount of trolling comments, and users being banned for pretty frivolous things isn’t a good look.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago (1 children)

There's also a fine line between legitimate trolling and having unpopular or dissenting opinion. I've seen plenty of threads where 2 or more people are arguing about a given topic, and while the unpopular opinion isn't being inflammatory or breaking any rules, they still get their comments removed after being down voted into the ground. It's happened to me as well.

My only contention with this is finding a way to foster conversation without censoring opinions just because they're not widely shared. As long as the argument is in good faith, mods shouldn't be removing content they don't agree with, only those that are inflammatory, overly insulting, blatant trolling/shilling, or breaking community rules.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

I think it depends. You can be a really polite Baptist preacher being very earnest in !196 about how you think people should behave, and that’s just not what they want. Even in a discussion thread, writing a nonspecific defense of FGM, for example, is going to be offensive enough to probably disrupt the conversation, and I can see removing it.

I’m not suggesting that’s what’s happening; just saying that I like your idea, with some tweaks

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

Trolling is simply noise and garbage to dispose of when it becomes an attack on the person. It brings nothing of value and it diminishes the value of everything else it pollutes.

[–] [email protected] -3 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Trolling is simply noise and garbage to dispose of when it becomes an attack on the person.

Trolling doesn’t ONLY require personal attacks…. That’s the issue, mods only step in when things progress too far and have reached that point….