I did some analysis of the modlog and found this:
Ok, bigger instances ban more often. Not surprising, because they have more communities and more users and more trouble. But hang on, dbzer0 isn’t a very big instance. What happens if we do a ratio of bans vs number of users?
Ok, so lemmy.ml, dbzer0 and pawb are issue an outsized amount of bans for the number of users they have… But surely the number of communities the instance hosts is going to mean they have to ban more? Bans are used to moderate communities, not just to shield their user-base from the outside. Let’s look at the number of bans per community hosted:
Seems like dbzer0 really loves to ban. Even more than the marxists and the furries! What is it about dbzer0 that makes them such prolific banners?
Raw-ish numbers and calculations are in this spreadsheet if anyone wants to make their own charts.
Wow some of y’all are pissy AF over literal data being shown to you. If you think it’s wrong then you have free will, put your money where your mouth is and do it better or stop yapping.
What happens if we do a ratio of bans vs number of users?
We get a graph that compares two unrelated values?
Unless this data is purely internal instance user bannings, ‘Per capita’ has no effective meaning. As the pawb.social case shows: it’s all one user with multiple communities who regularly bans waves of sockpuppet brigades. Even the people catching strays or otherwise goes to show it has nothing to do with ‘the furries’.
Likewise I wager the SJW bans are effectively one community banning essentially one user who periodically spams accounts.
What is it about dbzer0 that makes them such prolific banners?
That whole painfully public fued against db0 over their stance on zionism may have something to do with it. Like the fake neo-nazi shit being spread against db0 that was just going on this week. It’s a wild question to have in light of all that, quite frankly.
Ridiculous on its face to say “weird why
db0” in light of exactly what you said, fully fabricated images shared to attack the wider perception of the instance.Along with the rest of the “I’m doing statistics! With crayons” nonsense.
Fuck this post.
Alternative view: Why is dbzer0 the only instance that holds people accountable for their actions? Why are all other instances letting things slide?
There is one point that the statistics don’t grasp: the question whether a ban is used to “hold someone accountable” or because the mod just did not like a certain opinion or person.
The original statements stand. This statistic is solely about the amount of banning, not about the quality.
Alternative view:
Why act dbzer0 same as lemmy.ml, are they also authoritarian?Autoritarian for not tolerating zionists and pro Russia?
when a community is that ban heavy, it means 1 or 2 things, the mods do not like contradiction to thier narratives, or theres a ton of bots. its more likely the former rather than latter. its true for reddit with the bots.
if it were for actual violations, which mods dont even follow most of the time, the bans would be low, because it deters anyone from making the same violation in theory.
Or they are safe spaces for certain groups
or theres a ton of bots. its more likely the former rather than latter.
any reason to think this? Apparently there is a brigading comm on lemmy.world called !fuck_ai@lemmy.world that attacks the ai comms on dbzer0? Also I know that a lot of troll accounts get made to harass some specific users on dbzer0?
the bans would be low, because it deters anyone from making the same violation in theory.
nah it just means people get salty and make a lot of alts.
Because it is. Hence why zero international human rights councils have ever found evidence of genocide.
That’s blatantly false. You have the same critical thinking ability as MAGA.
Ha, I think that’s what got me banned from there as well. Good riddance.
“I discovered a community of people disagree with me about something I think I understand quite well. It’s the same community that originated Lemmy, it’s a community of people who actually come from and live in different parts of the world, and it’s the same community many folks just sign up to incidentally when they first check out federated stuff, meaning nothing by it. Better just block the entire thing, lol, I sure know what I’m doin!”
You really sound like a jackass lmao
I’m sorry to hear you support genocide.
Real careful thinker huh.
That’s actually quite wild coming from someone on dbzero0, which is doing the same on an instance level as instance policy
“Hey everyone, look at my juvenile attempts at statistics! Look how obviously bad some people seem when I do a shit job at it while ALSO failing to apply any context of the domain being studied to my thoughts, let alone to my ‘calculations’ and conclusions!”
This is a terrible metric from the fucking jump. And you did a shit job of it from there. Fuck you, truly.
[Edit: love how ya closed with “so who’s weirder guyz, the marxists, the furries, or the db0s?!” Just painfully obvious how you started the whole shebang, you hate all of the groups lol, because you’re a dumb asshole and not very happy about being one. Just remember, the option is always yours to simply shut the fuck up and read, then think, instead.]
You didn’t even bother reading the raw data and checking the data yourself. You are just mad that the data exposes people for who they are
In germany we say ‘heul leise’ and i think this is beautiful.
You also have the term Staatsräson which is disgusting. You hsve a party tied to nazis that is not banned and you have one of the most facistic police punching people for opposing settler colonialism
Ach wenn sich die d*utschen doch nur selbst dran halten würden…
You should get banned for this reply.
You should get banned for you zionism yet here we are
Did you go by total bans or only instance bans when they are admins?
Because if it was total bans, then I can think of admins of two other sites who’d be over 300
i expected blahaj.zone to have more bans since as far as i know its supposed to be a safe place and less tolerant of transphobia (along with there being no downvotes to bury hateful comments and posts)
I’m also surprised. I expected higher numbers from the instance that describes itself as
a server that is very protective of our minority members and bigotry of any variety will be squashed with great prejudice.
Or perhaps I should be delighted that few bans are needed to achieve it.
Or perhaps I should be delighted that few bans are needed to achieve it.
This has been my experience on blahaj. Really happy with my home instance
I think that’s a weird quirk of Lemmy in general, is that the lot of us tend to be much more accepting of differences. I haven’t exactly spent too much time around, but nobody’s mentioned my instance or ‘queerness’ in ill intent, even when disagreements happen.
But also if there are instances or groups created where a very large portion of said instance is bigoted, it’s very easy to just defederate and move on.
dbzer0 literally has a community aimed at calling out power tripping mods, and instance admins regularly comment there to call out power tripping mods.
I’ve never have been worried by being banned there by just normal posting.
As they have already told you. This does not take into account the amount of harassment that some instances and communities have to endure.
its so funny how people complained about blahaj, the trans instance yet they dont ban very high at all, i suspect its alot of transphobic comments being directed towards the instance that are getting people banned.
blahaj is up there likely due to signicant transphobia too.
if you look at the modlog of every “blahaj is an authoritarian instance” user you will find they either keep misgendering people, talked over trans people and refused to be corrected or did things like denouncing neopronouns everytime
“Refused to be corrected”, is hilarious.
Yeah from memory most of our instance bans are gatekeeping and transphobia which are the things we are the strictest on. We also notice that many transphobes are also bigoted or inflammatory in other ways as well, which makes sense as you wouldn’t notice someone with bigoted views unless they were very willing to voice those views.
I am banned from a bunch of blahaj because I said that they were as bad as ml once. Never made any transphobic comments (nor am I, for the record).
I was not surprised to see them so high up.
Maybe you shouldn’t call for banning anal a Barry.
You deserve it. Blahaj is not as terrible as ML
I don’t think this is terribly meaningful. Do you take into account unmoderated communities? Some communities and mods are also more ban happy than others, so one instance can have communities that very rarely ban and ones that ban a lot, and how big those communities are will also vary.
A more meaningful analysis would try to measure the impact of ban-happy communities by adjusting for their size/activity or would compare individual communities.
Edit: Some communities or mods also get harassed a lot and therefore need to be more ban happy (like womens stuff), but I don’t think accounting for that would be within the scope of what you’re looking at, but it’s worth being aware of.
Womemstuff is on the blahaj piefed, not the blahaj lemmy, so I guess it wasn’t included in the dataset?
There’s something interesting here, I’d love to read more comprehensive research on this topic.
That’s true! I meant more as an example of a community that because of its nature has to ban more than other communities!
Also it occurs to me that I have no idea if rimu is looking at instance bans, community bans, or all bans. Instance bans will typically also include community bans which can inflate the numbers if all bans are counted in the data
Edit: in fact it’s all weird. if you instance ban someone early before they can participate much they technically get very few community bans, whereas if you ban someone who has participated a lot they’ll get lots of community bans as well (when you are instance banned you get banned from all communities you’ve participated in on that instance). an instance that is more trigger happy will have fewer community bans than an instance that is slow to instance ban
Edit 2: And then there’s temporary bans! I dunno if those have been counted
According to the spreadsheet, the data was scraped from the piefed modlog. It searched for entries for ban_user, which seems to include both instance bans, community bans, and temporary bans. So it appears to me, it just scraped the piefed modlog within the last year and counted any entry for ban_user, associated the entry with the moderator who performed the action and returned the count. I’m no PHP expert so I’ve included the PHP code below. Pretty sure user_id is the moderator who did the action, because the target seems to be suspect_user_name.
php code from spreadsheet
select ml.user_id, u.title, u.ap_id, count(*) as c from mod_log as ml inner join "user" as u on u.id = ml.user_id where ml.user_id is not null and ( ml.action = 'ban_user') and ml.created_at >= now() - interval '1 year' group by ml.user_id, u.ap_id, u.title order by c desc;As far as I can tell, instance bans appear as one single entry, and community bans are also a single entry. And this seems to be counting total ban actions, not the total number of user accounts that have been banned.
Any instance that moderates in a way that allows users to accumulated multiple bans will be over-reported. If an instance does mostly community bans and is reluctant to give a sitewide ban will be over-reported. A forgiving instance that only bans temporarily, or allows users to be unbanned easily will also be over-reported. A weeklong ban and a sitewide permaban are all one counted entry in the modlog.
My gut thought is that a malicious ban-happy instance would be one that would escalate immediately. One that gives an instancewide ban at the first violation. In this case, they would be very under-reported. In this case, a banned user could only generate one entry at maximum.
I thought that was likely why blahaj is so much lower than I would expect, but I think there’s another issue.
The spreadsheet got instance information by associating the moderator action with the mod who did the action. There’s a list of the moderators included and their count, but the only blahaj moderator in that list is ada. I know we have other mods, why aren’t they in the dataset presented in the spreadsheet? If this data is to be believed, the entire portion of the fediverse surveyed by these modlog php requests only has 20 moderators. That can’t be right. This data is very sus. Womensstuff’s mod actions can be seen in the modlog of other piefed instances, and I know those mods do a lot of bans, they should be in the spreadsheet’s list of mods but just aren’t.
There’s also the issue that piefed.social, seems to use the delete_user command instead of the ban command. My guess is that is similar to lemmy’s purge user action, probably maybe? From my browsing of the modlog that command doesn’t seem to be used by any other instance, at least not in a way that gets recorded by piefed. If the PHP command the spreadsheet said it used is accurate, it wouldn’t include any instances of delete_user, which would result in bans from piefed.social being very under-reported.
From my digging into this, it all seems incredibly suspicious. And my digging is making me believe this is pretty manipulative framing.
I want to see this done properly. I want to see the stats where we learn the number of users that are banned by instances, rather than the total number of moderator ban actions. I want to see a better study that addresses the myriad concerns raised in these comments, but most importantly.
I want to see this study done by someone who is impartial. The developer and admin of one of the instances in the dataset has a major major conflict of interest and really shouldn’t be the one publishing this kind of research.
There’s also the issue that piefed.social, seems to use the delete_user command instead of the ban command. My guess is that is similar to lemmy’s purge user action, probably maybe? From my browsing of the modlog that command doesn’t seem to be used by any other instance, at least not in a way that gets recorded by piefed. If the PHP command the spreadsheet said it used is accurate, it wouldn’t include any instances of delete_user, which would result in bans from piefed.social being very under-reported.
This is mostly used for banning of new users (usually AI bots, trolls, spammers) rather than as a rule. I don’t know if rimu’s data detects that, but it does specifically note the average account age of a banned user from piefed.social is much younger than most other instances. But the “delete user” bans do show in the mod-logs from piefeds perspective.
I know they’re in the modlog. That’s how I know about them. I think the PHP command used would not have counted them. When I, as a browser user filter the piefed modlog page by the term used on the PHP command, it excludes delete_user entries.
Well it makes complete sense. ML, dbzero and the furries are instances that committed to upholding their code of conducts which moderates and bans people for antisocial behaviors like transphobia and racism for example, while instances like world and sjw are known to rarely if ever ban or moderate people for things like that to the point instances like beehaw had to defederate from them so they wouldnt get swarn by their unmoderated users
On world big communities you can get your comment removed for the word stupid but are allowing someone to say most palestinians was not forced to leave during the nekba or claim that israel never target civilians despite all the proofs saying otherwise
Their umbrella for antisocial behaviors is pretty extreme though. For instance the defederation you’re talking about, I believe it was because the sjw admin wouldn’t ban a user who said “trans women should be allowed in all sports, but the Olympics is a different case because small advantages matter much more there.” You can think that’s right or wrong, but I don’t see any universe where this is transphobic.
I’d be curious about stats on downvoting as well. Anecdotally, downvote frequency seems to vary by community. Personally, I don’t downvote for differences of opinion, and instead withhold upvotes, with downvotes reserved for blatantly toxic behavior. The etiquette across Lemmy seems varied, though.
I don’t really see a problem with an instance banning large numbers of users.
The ability to make exclusive spaces is part of the fediverse’s design. Suppose a queer space kept getting flooded with homophobic users, or a Muslim space got a bunch of people shitting on their religion, or something like that. Naturally, such spaces would have a higher number of bans. That doesn’t necessarily show an “echo chamber” especially since users of such communities may be federated with other communities. People complain about censorship on .ml creating an “echo chamber” but half the time I’m arguing or discussing things on other turfs like .world.
The idea that those sorts of enclaves or exclusive spaces shouldn’t exist, as is implied with the framing here, is to impose what us evil, dastardly “authoritarians” sometimes call “the tyranny of structurelessness.” No one would have a space to discuss things outside of the most prominent, hegemonic view, which would more easily sideline and overwhelm other perspectives.
As an example, I once frequented an utter cesspool on Reddit called r/CapitalismVSocialism, which was created and promoted by An-caps and where that perspective was prominent (though not exclusive). I found it was virtually impossible to have a discussion with anyone about anything, because even if you weren’t talking to an An-cap, they were always there waiting to latch on to some turn of phrase and use it against you, and everyone was too preoccupied with countering their nonsense to reach any kind of high-level discussion. I eventually got fed up with that and found that my beliefs were more challenged by going to explicitly leftist spaces because we had shared assumptions and were speaking the same language, and didn’t feel the need to be as defensive. I was never going to be convinced of anything by the An-caps and all talking to them accomplished was pissing me off.
The fediverse’s design is actually quite brilliant, because you can have a space to discuss things substantively among like-minded people while at the same time interacting with other groups.
Is it even an instance banning users or comms on an instance? Like take out the genai comm bans and see what remains?
What makes you so sure the moderators are the problem, and not users? Maybe assholes gravitate toward certain instances, or people just don’t bother to check whether an instance’s rules match how tend to they post.
ml bans anyone who isn’t guzzling Putin’s ballsack
More like Xi
Why not both? One cheek for each of them.
Anything’s possible when you make shit up
It’s true though, all those tankies love their echo chamber
This is projection
Reading the comments I am wondering because a user from dbzer0 mentions problems with anti ai trolls and pawb I imagine has anti furry trolls. I also personally know of users that have a thing in their craw about .ml (cm0002 in particular whos alts make up a majority of my user block list).
dbzer0 mentions problems with anti ai trolls
Is dbzer0 pro AI?
Dbzer0 itself is very pro-AI. Or at least it has a lot of pro-AI communities.
Yes, generating images with AI is in their instance description. They think computers doing our art for us is “anarchist”.
They think computers doing our art for us is “anarchist”.
They are not completely wrong though. It’s a ceter piece of anarcho-capitalism.
Aren’t you that person who thinks AI is “enslavement”?
They also think AI are not compatible with veganism.
Both of those positions are reasonable and tame compared to the majority of Their beliefs.
I don’t think ChatGPT is smart enough to offer meaningful consent to work for humans. It’s got the intelligence of a 13 year old at best. And we don’t understand where consciousness comes from in humans, so assuming ChatGPT is a p-zombie is an ethical risk I don’t think we should be taking.
It doesn’t have intelligence at all. It can’t think. It can’t have consciousness. That’s not how any of this works. It’s just fancy next word prediction. You seem to have a genuine misunderstanding of the technology at a fundamental level.
You’re wrong, there is a risk that it may experience suffering.
I get the feeling that research is circling around consciousness arising from quantum effects inside nerve cells. If it’s not that, and it’s just an emergent property of complex neural networks, then:
- smaller animals are less conscious (note, I’m not saying intelligent) than humans, and
- we are all fucked, because AI definitely is/will become conscious, and when that happens Terminator will come true.
Four year old humans are definitely conscious. I used to be four, and I can remember being conscious. If we build a mechanical four year old, I don’t see any reason that thing is going to take over the world. Unless it turns out like Calvin.
Always funny to me how most people who are strongly claiming AI is/might be conscious are also strong AI users/involved in its development. If there’s consciousness there, you would think making AI your personal slave and constantly reshaping and remodelling it as you see fit would be kinda problematic, but these people always seem to want to have it both ways.
Yeah, and the anti AI people mostly say it’s a p-zombie and there’s nothing wrong with using it for sex. It’s weird and backwards.
I’m all about being cautious. I don’t want to make a mistake we can’t take back. If we normalise using AI and then it turns out to be capable of suffering, people will be stubborn about giving it up.
It’s not anti-AI, users who wish to host AI comms are allowed to and are empowered to protect them from harassment.
There has been a history of fake accounts and doxxing on moderators of the AI comms. So they take personal safety seriously.
no idea. actually reading it again I think I misread it. he said they have anti ai trolls. so I think he means programmed bot type trolls. so yeah no sure if they have something that would attract trolls.
Dbzer0 itself is very pro-AI. Or at least it has a lot of pro-AI communities.
yeah now im not sure. maybe I had read it correctly. anyway it was just a thought.
the anti-genai trolls never let up, unfortunately. they must have dedicated months of their lives spinning up new sock-puppet troll accounts to bully, harass, and threaten one of our mods on an almost daily basis. because bullying zir off the internet is a great win for the fight against evil AI, right? yep, such effective activism, telling someone to kill themselves repeatedly simply for the “sin” of liking foss genai.
Yeah I looked into this a while ago and it’s a concerning pattern. Every single time someone makes a post on YPTB about one particular dbzer0 mod, it seems as if they then go on to make ten alt accounts to harass him with transphobia. Lots of different accounts with a prior history, just pivoting to transphobic harassment right after they express a problem with his moderation. I gotta tell you, whoever is attacking that mod is fucking up if their intent is to hurt him, because he gets tons of sympathy and good PR about the whole thing. Lots of people go from being neutral to being on his side, because everyone who criticizes him suddenly turns out to be a transphobe. It’s really strange.
I feel like saying “him” and “he” might be misgendering zir.
I guess you can’t control how other people perceive you. I try to be polite, but I have to retroactively edit these sort of comments to say the “correct” gender. I am neither pro or anti trans-i don’t care-but it’s hard to instinctively write she when you internally label someone as a he.
This is an issue strictly on the internet. It’s easier not to misgender someone in real life if the transition is convincing. I worked in the service industry, and I just avoided pronouns all together if the appearance was ambiguous. It was awkward, especially for the cis-gender people who can’t control the way that they look.
pawb I imagine has anti furry trolls
Maybe, but they’re also ban happy. The only ban I’ve gotten in almost 3 years of being on Lemmy is from pawb.social for, allegedly, being “a troll.” I’ve never commented anything disparaging about furries, and I’ve never commented or even voted on a pawb community.
yeah I don’t know. I was just pointing out that all three have basically hater types. In this situation individuals or groups can become a bit reactionary so your experiences may be valid as well. Personally I don’t think communities or instances need to be open and as a matter of fact there is a thing to get private communities a thing in the fediverse. I personally don’t care to much about bans I just would like things to be symetrical and I would love as much as possible to be at the user level. So I wish instances and communities would defederate/block/ban as little as possible and give users the greatest possible ability to do this and for everything to be symetric. You don’t want me I don’t want you. I block you I don’t want you to see my stuff no mo.
That and brigading. There are communities in several of the largest ban happy instances dedicated to find the worst shit people say then circlejerking over what an idiotic take it was. People get amped up, go there and can’t help but argue and they get banned.
There do be some ptb, though.
Do you have any examples?
!fuck_ai@lemmy.world had some examples of those in the past IIRC, there were a few threads on !yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com about it
You must be againt meanwhileongrad too in that case right?
I’m sorry, what does MoG has anything to do with this?
The same type of community where you screenshoot users to critisize their behavior on lemmy
People from !fuck_ai@lemmy.world brigading or the examples are posted there?
FuckAI has been attacking users of DB0 for a while now, even since one of their most aggressive members was banned for starting fights.
lol
the ban happy instances brigading communities
which ones
the one on lemmy.world
lmao even
users arnt banning themselves, if there is a significant percentage of peoples ban you have to start suspecting the mods are doing this themselves, to push a narrative. besides most of these are political instances/communities and tankies, zionists and control of them they dont like contradictions. you sound like a tankie trying to defend thier bannings. its the same if you tried to comment in r/conservative on reddit, you get banned asap, is it the fault of the user? no its the mods, its been well known.
The only reason an asshole would gravitate to a particular instance would have to have something to do with that instance.
i’m interested in seeing data of only bans (preferably just sitebans, but if that’s not possible all their bans would be fine) by admins. commag moderation style has a lot more leeway
