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Is there anything that can be done about troll powermods?
(media.kbin.social)
I logged into Kbin today to see 18 notifications where the same guy banned me from all of their magazines for downvoting them.
I was only subscribed to 1 of those magazines, but it's still annoying to wake up to 18 ban messages from someone who got easily angered from a downvote.
(Side note: IMO, this is why being able to see downvotes is bad. Even if anyone could see them by spinning up their own instance, that's a lot of work compared to pressing 2 buttons.)
I've blocked the guy, but is there anything that can be done to stop this from proliferating across the site?
I actually disagree with this being an example of why seeing downvotes is bad. I also think it's good we can see which mod is doing the banning; I've noticed the standard lemmy moderation log doesn't show that. This kind of transparency allows for poor behaviour to be discovered more quickly and remedied with less speculation about who did what.
Edit: For example, I can also see this person has gone through your entire comment history and downvoted every comment. I didn't see any troll-like comments from you though. I hope this person is doing OK mentally, but this isn't OK community leader behaviour on their part.
Edit 2: I can also see that OP has downvoted every single one of the other person's comments too. On the same day as the other person did to OP. Uh... I don't know what conversation spawned this entire exchange, but I dont think that downvoting all someone's comments outside of their contexts is productive.
Edit 3: And for the couple of other accounts who are going through the post histories of the people involved and downvoting because of this thread? Also not helpful behaviour. Be better.
This is why we can't have nice things.
This is exactly why transparency is great. These people are ridiculous and lose credibility. Keeping everything visible is the best defense against manipulation
Agreed, if somebody is spam downvoting comments (Which is honestly quite the pathetic act), then people should be able to see that, and block/report them
Unfortunately, blocking doesn’t actually do anything aside from stopping up from seeing their comments. Someone I blocked is still able to see, reply to, and downvote my posts. It’s frustrating, to say the least.
Additionally - and I don't know if this has been fixed - if you're a mod and you block someone, you also don't see posts they make on your magazines.
So they can easily go in and make spam posts and you - as a mod - would never see it.
Which is the exact opposite of how it’s supposed to work. Blocks are seriously broken right now.
On the other hand, if one of the actual spammers were to just block downvoters and their downvotes, this would allow them to more easily evade detection as bad faith content creators. It's hard to say how that should be remedied beyond more moderation, which would require more unpaid mod labour and time. And relies on moderators always making fair and sensible decisions.
People and communities are tricky. Why do we all got to be so damn tricky?
The whole moderation process is still getting a revamp. There's a fair few black holes where the system needs to be tightened up. Being an open source project it just all takes time. Be great to get it to a polished level where blocking / banning feels refined :)
Yeah, and being able to see who downvotes you will hopefully lead to people being encouraged to actually leave a comment if they disagree instead of just downvoting everything they disagree with they see. People still are not aware that downvoting is public, so still fall into old habits of using downvote as a I disagree or I don't like you option.
I avoided some of the finer details because the downvoting isn't the point - the bans are. Especially from so many magazines.
But - to give the full story:
I have a Tampermonkey extension which hides posts after an upvote/downvote. Because of this, I'm voting on basically everything in my subscribed feed.
I downvoted something of his - I don't even remember what, exactly. I made some comments and noticed when checking replies later that I had been downvoted on a bunch of them.
Curious, I checked to see where the downvotes were coming from - all of them were this guy. I checked their profile and saw that I had already downvoted one of their posts, hence my guess as to why he was mad.
Usually I'd let these things pass, but I found it a bit childish and I was feeling petty, so I did it back to them. You can judge me if you like; I'm not exactly proud of stooping to that level but I was already in a sour mood that day.
I haven't been on Kbin for a couple days, but I checked back this afternoon and saw 18 messages, all of which said "you have been banned." Evidently they got angry and decided they weren't going to let me participate in any of their communities.
I got pissed at this and banned him back - which is, again, perhaps childish on my part. At the same time, I've been a mod for a long time across multiple platforms, and I have a low tolerance for BS at this point. I've seen folks like this start spamming communities in retaliation to perceived slights - something like that happened on the first forum I ever ran, way back before Reddit even existed - and frankly this guy has already proven to be acting in bad faith.
One reason why I didn't delve into details is because this is going to devolve into petty he said/she said arguments, which frankly isn't the point.
The point is that this guy got pissed off at something I did and decided I wasn't able to participate in any of their communities anymore. Like I said, I was only subscribed to one of these communities anyway - so it didn't really affect me - but I worry what would happen if these weren't small communities. What happens if a powermod that runs multiple big magazines decides to ban people for perceived slights?
I know this was a issue on Reddit (awkwardtheturtle), and I'd hate for it to be an issue here, too.
It actually seems to be central to the point. If I take your account as the truth, it appears that by using the dislike functionality to leverage your personal UI extension side effects, you have actually had the effect of delegitimising this person's contribution. Because downvotes on kbin also affect everyone's content sorting.
This person may have felt harassed by those actions, even if it wasn't your intent. While you have asked for us to excuse your actions as childish retaliation and an attempt to defend your communities from bad actors, you have also cast the exact same actions from the other person as being "troll powermod".
That seems problematic. If i were in your position, I would look at modifying the tampermonkey extension to provide a hide function which only affects your client. And also retracting downvotes which it created, as a show of goodwill. I hope you can both get past whatever it is that happened here.
Downvotes not having reasons attached allows for a lot of room for misinterpretation and uniformed assumptions. Instead of hiding the downvotes, perhaps we could all just be more mindful of how we use them.
I hope you all have a better time from here on out.
The shit stirring dickhead inside of me really just wants to downvote you for no reason now.
Have at it, friend. We all let the intrusive voices win sometimes. 😉
I do want to call out some concerns here. I'm not excusing op's behavior, but indiscriminate downvotes is the kind of thing I'd say we don't want here and I'd say you're both in the wrong even if one of you is farther down the path.
The script is causing poor behaviour by subverting the purpose of the up/down vote system.
The downvote button should be used to indicate a post doesn't add to the conversation. It isn't a dislike/disagree button, your supposed to comment in those situations.
I try to put effort into my comments, when they get randomly downvoted for no reason it can be upsetting.
Obviously you upset the mod and they overreacted, but your behaviour triggered the event.
yes. systematic downvoting is a good reason for a ban.
the script excuse is not great, because OP knew they were downvoting content.
All of the downvotes/upvotes are public via the ActivityPub protocol. That's part of the system. Hiding it on the front-end for kbin only obscures the mechanism.
That's just the limitation of the current technology.
I feel the downvote is equally as important as the upvote, sometimes bad posts and comments just need negative reaction