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.
Analysis of potential causes aside, thank you for sharing such interesting data!
Interesting that you chose ban when your favorite move is to just delete users you don’t like from the database on piefed.social and won’t show up in this dataset. Of course, you won’t see this reply because of that.
Me, scrolling through the comments:
Could you make a graph with defederations? I suspect that plays a role
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.
Db0 users calling lemmy.world and feddit.org “ban happy” are gonna have an aneurysm.
So very anarchist of them policing their instances heavier than literally any other.
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.
Alternative view: Why is dbzer0 the only instance that holds people accountable for their actions? Why are all other instances letting things slide?
Why are furries so ban happy? Holy shit.
“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.]
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.
I am banned from a bunch of blahaj because I said that they were as bad as ml once.
No, you were banned from blahaj because you were arguing that DEI is bad, and that there is no such thing as stolen land, because “everyone does it”
Ada being the awesome woman she is once again. Thank you.
Maybe you shouldn’t call for banning anal a Barry.
You deserve it. Blahaj is not as terrible as ML
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.
I think they’re defederated from poorly moderated instances and therefore don’t need to ban as many users. Perhaps db0 doesn’t defederate as often?
Db0 only defederates with community vote, and same for re-federating.
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
Blahaj is overall a fantastic instance, it was my first home.
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.
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.
