PhilipTheBucket

Sorry, did something I said sound like "I'd like to have an extended debate about this with you?" I think I've laid out pretty clearly how I feel about it and why at this point.

The mods used their power to create the impression of a specific narrative, and you bought it.

Everyone knows I always obey what the mods want to shape, as the narrative. Especially Jordan.

Ozma was "right" in the sense that when history was finally written, they're on the right side of it, and Jordan is on the wrong side. Jordan won the narrative battle, but lost the narrative war. Jordan's ability to control and manage that narrative is perfectly on display in those top comments, but now, the narrative has shifted towards the narrative that Ozma was trying to construct and deliver.

If you accept a whole bunch of reframings of things into other things, then yes, this makes perfect sense. For example, you might say that because ozma can't say his viewpoint 15 times a day, but only as many times a day as other people who are posting a variety of viewpoints including criticism of the Democrats, that means his viewpoint was suppressed, on purpose because Jordan bans any constructive criticism of the Democrats, and so on.

I can't really add anything to what I've said already. You're welcome to have the interpretation you like of what happened. It sounds like you're pretty attached to your current one.

return2ozma has only the power of their rhetoric, their prominence, and the support of the community

The fuck are you smoking?

https://lemmy.world/post/16224102

Top replies:

• "Good move, they were a clown and pointing out that they were arguing entirely in bad faith is correct."
• "Dude thank God"
• "My take is the dude just filled the board with unrelenting misery."
• "I think I agree more with the spam angle than the “only bad news” angle."
• "I blocked him quite a while ago. Poll after poll after poll were filling up my feed at one point. Fuck that shit. You sir, may fuck off."

I can't rightly tell if you are legitimately this bad at remembering / perceiving what is happening on Lemmy, is why you're giving me this whole alternate history where with the power of his rhetoric, he was trying to bring light to the darkness, and the mods just wouldn't allow it so they could shape the narrative, but it's seeming less and less likely that this is innocent mistakenness on your part the longer I talk to you about it.

• "

the Ozma one is low hanging fruit because the mod who did the ban said in precise language that it was being done in an effort to control the narrative

That's not at all what he said. He said, more or less, that Ozma had indicated that he was deliberately trying to control the narrative. Specifically, he said he was seeking out anti-Biden stories and posting them as a sort of semi-automated process, just as many as he could find, to bring "balance" or something along those lines to the narrative. He wasn't all that concerned with whether the stories were true -- just "which side" of the narrative they supported.

Like I said, I actually don't agree with that being a good reason for banning him, although I do agree he should have been banned. To be honest I think the design of a lot of Lemmy's systems, moderation included, is just fundamentally broken. If someone wants to come in and manipulate the narrative (which again was what ozma specifically said he was trying to do), there's not any good way to prevent them, which is a problem.

Also like I said I think if you study this objectively you will see that mod abuse works the opposite of the way you're thinking that it does. I think the vast majority of mods that are trying to manipulate the narrative are ones most people haven't heard of, that are quietly finding reasons to ban anyone who argues too loudly with return2ozma or whatever. But I'm happy to see the data. Personally, after having looked at the way the systems fit together and how people try to abuse them on both sides of the user/moderator divide, and done a certain amount of your same type of numerical analysis, I think the right thing to do is more or less to just throw a lot of the core concepts away (or, maybe better, layer some better core concepts on top of them and bring moderation back to its role as just keeping the porn / spam away and try to depend on higher-level constructs to keep debates on track.)

But it would be important to getting a complete picture to also look at someones posts and maybe try and look at how that impacts narratives.

IDK if you really need to do this. You're welcome to, but I feel like instead of spending any significant time trying to prove any particular way that the existing systems are broken, just accepting that they (in particular the "mods are gods" model) are broken, and trying to make something better, might be a better way.

I thought today partly because of this conversation about making a politics community which was something along the lines of:

This community works differently to how most politics communities work. It has strict rules designed to facilitate productive discussion. You can be rude, to a point, but you can't participate in bad faith:

• If you claim someone said something they didn't say, that's a temp ban.
• If you make a factual claim but then aren't interested in backing it up, that's a temp ban.
• If you're asked one or two reasonable questions about what you said, and you're still talking but you're pretending the questions didn't happen, that's a temp ban.

The idea is to make the discussion productive. Let's see how it works. Maybe this is a fool's errand but IDK how any set of moderation could be worse than lemmy.world.

Other misc rules:

• Reliable sources only.
• No image / video posts.
• Self posts for discussion are fine.
• No personal insults.
• No racism / transphobia / related bigotry.

In that world, you'd be able to ban return2ozma the first time he posted an article about how Biden did some horrifying thing that he objectively didn't do, and someone asked about it in the comments, and ozma said "IDK I'm just trying to bring balance" and posted 5 more articles. For me, I would vastly prefer that over the current moderation structure where it is sort of arbitrary rules and the comments are mostly a bad faith free-for-all where the mods' actions don't really do all that much beyond keeping obvious death threats and things away.

Can you sense the salt in my overall feelings lol

Well, I wasn't the one who said it was easy (and IDK that digging through the modlog is the easiest way even for someone who is sure that it happened to find out when it did), but sure. Here are all the posts from Dec 2023 and Jan 2024 that were removed that had "poll" in the title:

7554770 | 2023-12-29T13:56:49.802793Z | Sarah Huckabee Sanders lowest approval rating for governor in last 20 years, Arkansas Poll says | https://www.thv11.com/article/news/politics/sarah-huckabee-sanders-lowest-approval-rating-governor-20-years/91-c76da35b-4704-46de-abc0-0a42ee19ea95
2806047 | 2023-12-29T13:18:36.770457Z | Trump Fan Who Threatened Poll Workers And Officials Sent To Prison | https://crooksandliars.com/2023/08/trump-fan-who-threatened-poll-workers-and
2461059 | 2023-12-29T13:18:19.629020Z | Donald Trump Has an Absurd Amount of Support From Republicans Who Believe He Committed “Serious Federal Crimes”: Poll | https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/07/donald-trump-ron-desantis-2024-poll
3653177 | 2023-12-29T13:16:15.792290Z | Democrat Adam Frisch leads against Rep. Lauren Boebert in poll for 2024 race | https://www.denverpost.com/2023/08/22/adam-frisch-lauren-boebert-poll-2024-race/
10024810 | 2023-12-29T13:08:37.582079Z | Trump Shares Poll Result Predicting 'Revenge' And 'Dictatorship' As Top Priorities | https://www.huffpost.com/entry/donald-trump-poll-dictatorship-revenge_n_658beb48e4b0cd3cf0e41a98

I was assured there would be some that showed Biden behind in the polls, that the mods were trying to cover up...

It's a silly thing to get hung up on, but it helps to demonstrate that the person I'm talking with is talking about some situation that didn't happen in reality.

I think it's a pretty normal thing for one person to say "Anyone who tried to criticize Democrats gets banned" and one person to say "When did that happen?" It's not like I am hounding you to do my math homework. It was only in your mind that it blew up into a "task" for you to come up with an example.

Like I say, this is why I don't really go to lemmy.world. The rules are different. People make proclamations about how it is, and then get all bent out of shape if someone expresses skepticism, like it's a horrible unreasonable thing.

Feel free to take as much time as you need. I understand that finding examples of what you're talking about might be challenging. I support you in the mission.

(Edit: Oh, also, we're not on a phone call. Stepping away from Lemmy instead of replying to me, if you don't have a reply yet, is sort of implied in the asynchronous nature of the thing.)

return2ozma was banned because he was posting a nonstop flood of articles, and admitted to the mods that he basically just searched out bad stories about Biden and posted them whatever they were (even some ones he didn't try to defend any kind of factual accuracy of), to bring "balance."

I actually don't agree with making that the criterion. I think it's of a piece with lots of types of lazy and unproductive moderation that happpens on lemmy.world. But, I definitely agreed with banning him, for the same reason that I would expect to be banned if I went to your favorite community and posted 15 stories a day about "Five things you won't believe about what Biden accomplished during his term in office!" It's not about the viewpoint being prohibited from anyone expressing it (and, of course, the fact that we're having this conversation and you haven't been banned for expressing criticism of the Democrats is an obvious counterexample to you trying to say that's banned on LW). It's about one person spamming to try to promote it.

But I'm not trying to do additional work on your behalf right now. I just had a long day and I'm done working for now.

You said anyone could do it, you said it was super easy, just from memory. We'd be having a different conversation if you'd said "Anyone who felt like taking a bunch of time away from their job could probably put together a script to comb through the whole database to find the single example you're looking for, because I'm sure at least one exists, although I can't do that whole endeavor right now I'm confident that it would work if someone did do it. I'm very tired and such a thing would be horrifying and unfair if someone asked me to do it. I just know some other person who had a lot of energy to spare could."

I mean any one could go find some examples from memory that they experienced.

Could you find some examples from memory that you experienced, for me?

I feel like we keep having the same conversation here.

Are you genuinely, seriously, trying to pretend that Joe “We beat Medicare” Biden was the better candidate to beat Trump? Bruh.

What? No, not even slightly. I'm saying that the people who are extensively hand-wringing about how these specific Democratic candidates fucked everything up, should be sparing at least one or two words for thirty years of Democratic fuckery laying the groundwork, the media pretending that Trump was a controversial but ultimately capable businessman who would fix the economy that was hurting them so badly, and any particular thing the Democrats did wrong was justification for having a multi-week freakout, and also the fact that most Americans get their political news from TikTok and Facebook if they get it at all.

Biden was old as fuck and it was a massive problem, even before the debate. I'm saying that none of the most serious problems got solved when he was replaced. And look... they didn't.

I think this might be a massive gift to people who want the internet to remain free and unrestricted.

The more people you drive into the underground, the less well you'll be able to regulate. Usually, it's a cautionary tale about carelessly over-strict regulation. But, I guess it can also be an uplifting tale about carelessly over-strict regulation, depending on what you're trying to regulate. Lord knows, we need to be teaching people how to dodge around local internet restrictions and monitoring right now.

I specifically am building it to document the relationship between how moderation operates as a power structure and structures narratives of the community. Its a work in progress but I've shared components of it with others (SatansMaggotyCumFart, for one, who wanted me to use it to do an investigation of UniversalMonk).

I think this is 100% an excellent idea. I am firmly convinced that you'll find it works the opposite of the way you're saying it does here (you'll find that there are certain types of topics where flamewars develop, and some mods whose names aren't really commonly spoken tend to sanction participants on one and only one side of the flamewar, more or less, the "pro-Democrat" side.) But I'd be happy to wait and see what the data on it is. Who knows, maybe anyone who spoke poorly of Biden was getting banned and it happened all the time but you really do need to build a whole analysis tool to give me even a single example.

I would appreciate if you repost this to maybe one of the debate subs that I think someone started. Its probably better to house the discussion there then to create an endless series of responses.

Agreed. Like I said, aside from all the backbiting about who said what before the election and whose fault it all is, there is actually a useful conversation to be had about what can even happen in American politics that's good right now.

So anyone can look it up, but in order to look it up, you'd have to build some tools and it's a whole project?