Hey m@tes, as y'all know, this instance has been anti-corporate GenAI positive since it's creation and as such we've typically allowed such content to be posted freely. However in the last few weeks we've had a bunch of drama from GenAI haters who insist on coming into our comms and starting slap-fights. This caused us to vote on a new rule to have the mandate to clear out this constant friction. This worked to an extent, but I think we can help foster a better community with the larger threadiverse.
One issue a lot of anti-GenAI people keep bringing is that while they can block dedicated comms like !stable_diffusion_art@lemmy.dbzer0.com, they don't have an easy option to avoid GenAI content in random other /0 comms as there's no way to filter it out. This kind of content has been seen to cause a lot of strife, because people complain about its existence, while /0 admins and mods based on the above rule, tend to sanction those complaining. This then causes drama loops with /c/YPTB and /c/FuckAI etc.
There is a good point to be made here that while we don't mind GenAI content in /0, there isn't a reason to not help others avoid it. So we want to institute the following soft rule by now:
Simply tag your posts which consist of primarily GenAI content with the [GenAI]
tag in their title. Not only will frontends like Tesseract will natively parse this as a tag and display it accordingly, but people who dislike such content, can simply filter it out of their feeds. Eventually lemmy will add tags which will make this tagging more seamless, but for now a manual tag in the title will suffice.
This rule only applies to posts in non-explicit GenAI comms. The assumption is that people can simply block those comms completely anyway.
As I said, this is a soft rule for now. Soft in the sense that you're not going to be sanctioned for forgetting it, but we hope people will remind you to do so. This is a good-faith attempt by us to co-exist and help others avoid what they don't want to stumble onto, much like [NSFW] tags. So I hope you'll add do a good faith attempt to help us in this. Furthermore, people who come to posts tagged as GenAI explicitly to scold and start slap-fights, will give the admins and easier justification to clean up, since they could have just filtered out that content in the first place.
Cheers

That's much different than see a comment you disagree with, then go to every single post and comment the person has made and downvote it. Then create a fucking bot to downvote it. Which has happened and been documented plenty of times on Lemmy.
I've been banned from communities I never even heard of, much less visited. Seem like places i don't wanna be anyway then.
It's why I dislike the entire voting system. Too many people abuse it and try to generate narratives.
On the other hand, I'm not THAT passionate about it. It's fucking Lemmy. No one has even heard of Lemmy, few people are here, and internet points don't mean anything in the real world. People take all of this way too seriously. They can change the voting system or not, I'm not that invested in it either way. We're already starting to stagment, and I think we are actually going to start getting smaller or start growing way slower.
It's too much for normies to figure out when it comes to joining. So only the nerdiest of nerds and many with compulsive/society issues join here. So it gets overly political and and overly passionate about the smallest things.
After that point it becomes harassment, yes. What I'm talking about here is that not everyone is mass downvoting and they still get banned. Some people are scrolling through sometimes completely separate communities, downvoting a couple things, and getting banned from totally different, unrelated communities. That's the part that shouldn't be okay.
And I agree with you. I think the whole voting system is literally a dopamine chase for most and honestly not really relevant to a constructive debate. It seems Lemmy overcomplicates this by letting people see votes, though like I said, I haven't gone about finding out how. The only thing I like about voting is that it lets me know that people have read what I've written.
Its good that you have that view of being banned, but others can be genuinely hurt, which starts shit like this (this whole fiasco isn't just about AI), and then the whole instance gets dragged into it. Back when I was on reddit, I asked a simple question in a sub. A mod came in and started being completely rude to me for no reason, no matter how much I tried to discuss things with them. It got heated on both sides. The mod changed all his replies to nice, friendly ones and banned me so I got left looking like a clown.
People like that mod are people that do get too passionate about things like reddit and lemmy, and they can be hurtful to others. I'm not just saying that its db0; its mostly power-crazy mods, no matter which instance.
Yeah. There's a very active Lemmy poster who actually screenshots people's history of how many downvotes their comments have. He posts it to make his point. Bad form and he only does it to try to shame people and says variations of "See? We can't take this person seriously, look how many downvotes he has on his record. Obviously people disagree with him! So you should too!"
That right there is how downvoting is getting weaponized. He's done it to me. Several times. And the posts are still up. The fact that that guy, and several others, will look up how many of your comments have been downvoted, screenshot it, post it, and tell everyone how much you are unliked, is pure bullying. And he takes so much glee in it.
Another reason that I think voting should be done away with. If "views" wanna be tallied it up but we can't vote up or down, so we know how active something is, that's fine. But too many people weaponize downvoting/upvoting here.
Yeah, it just seems like an all around bad idea that had good initial intentions of transparency. I've thought about this a lot, honestly. Something like "views" won't really work. I sort of started thinking that a pair of glasses might do. That's it, nothing else.
The glasses symbol would count as a "Read this!" which can be construed as "I read this" or "you should read this", preceeded by the number of people that read it. Heck, just getting rid of downvotes would work. I usually save my downvotes for extremely hateful or prejudiced posts/comments, not comments I disagree with.
In the end, downvotes are the most abused. At least a "# read this" tag would denote the most useful or contributing comments. Sure, people will abuse it for their own benefit, but at least it can't be used to shit on people or communities.
Its not the best solution, but I agree that downvotes and upvotes are becoming archaic relics of a bygone era. There must be a better and more modern solution.
Yea, I actualy am not bright enough to have a solution. I just see that Lemmy is just becoming more and more toxic because of how people are using their votes to control narratives lately.