RetroFed196 Moderation Team Change
Jorunn (she/her)Over the past months it has become increasingly apparent that the 196 moderation team has a member who does not align with the goals and values of the rest of the team.
196 has a very clear stance on tankies and other authoritarians. No authoritarian apologia of any kind is allowed in our space. It’s not our intent to tell leftists how to be leftist, but we’re not willing to allow somebody we so fundamentally disagree with to moderate our community.
Based on this stance we’ve decided to remove Kittenzrulz from the moderation team.
Why demote Kittenzrulz123?
Kittenzrulz has consistently been opposed to the condemnation of tankies and has made several worrying statements that show that there’s a deep ideological gulf between her and 196.
Furthermore it should be noted that kittenzrulz has not taken part in moderation decisions on lemmy for months, while she is only somewhat active on the matrix (as a mod). This will not be a major change in that sense.
The following is a list of screenshots that should help to showcase what we mean.
spoiler
This one is from yesterday
Demoting Kittenzrulz123
First to be clear we’re not banning her from the lemmy community or the matrix space and she is free to continue to interact with all of us. We still want her around as we think of her as a friend who we care about and want to see happy and healthy, though we understand this decision might cause kittenz some stress.
As of this moment kittenzrulz is no longer a mod of 196. A vote was held and all mods that voted voted in favor of demoderation, with a few mods abstaining (either due to not having an opinion on this or due to being inactive).
And just to make sure everybody is on the same page, this is not a condemnation of kittenz as a person. People can disagree on things and still get along, we’re just not comfortable letting her make decisions on our behalf and want to prevent any further problems we see as a likely outcome.
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please try to remember that nobody should be rude to kittenz, while we disagree with them they dont deserve any harrasment
I appreciate both you and Jorunn for spearheading this. I know it wasn’t an easy thing to do.
I second everything both of you said. I implore everyone to not make this situation worse for her than it already is.
Post text be like “we’re worried kittenz may be a tankie” meanwhile the attached screenshots are all “I’m an unironic tankie I use that word to describe myself I’m not a tankie but I love the USSR I think using tanks to crush dissent is good”
Yeah I think you maybe did the right thing
Thanks for the transparency :)
A mod team sensibly policing their own to uphold their own ideals? Basing their decision on repeated patterns and evidence??
Fuck and color me impressed.
Seeing how the first thing Kitten did after being demoted was to take over an anti-authorian community, you did the right thing.
Why does it read like the ⚪white censored excerpts are pugjesus?
This is good, thanks for being transparent. It sucks when this has to happen.
Big W for providing receipts.
fck, nya finally, mreaow
Ouite, and might I add: fuck tankies.
Hi erin! I’m erin!
two erins
Just woke up, I guess this is how I find out
🫂
Consistently based comm.
Fuck the authie red fash enablers.
You know the classic “I’m not racist but” lie racists tell? A lot of people with bad opinions try to pre-emptively cover their ass with a lie, then go “but” and share their actual opinion. Reading through the examples with this in mind… Yeah, I’m glad she’s no longer a mod. Good call.
Where can I see these examples?
EDIT: Damn, I’m stupid, didn’t see the spoiler-ed part lol
Good, tankie bullshit is exhausting.
this is a very chungus decision by the moderation team
This shouldn’t have been an announcement. Its fine to remove moderators and enforce standards within the team, but you can handle these situations gracefully and quietly. The exact individual makeup of the mod team isn’t relevant to most of 196’s visitors, especially in this case where you claim this won’t be a major change to moderation.
It seems disingenuous to claim this isn’t a condemnation when you’re dumping screenshots and pinning this post for maximum visibility. I agree with many here that transparency is important, but similar to modlogs, this should be posted somewhere those interested can find it rather than shouted from the rooftops.
You can and should separate amicability without involving all of us.
oh i’m actually a fan of giving explanations for mod decisions.
A moderator holds quite a lot of power. Which is why sadly, power hungry people tend to want to become moderators.
A way to ensure that power isn’t being misused is by being extremely transparent. This is the 196 mod team being transparent. I like it.
Does it stir up some drama? Maybe. Is this outcome more preferable over the Tesseract case, where “moderation action” wasn’t being made aware to the the user? 100%.
Moderator actions are public. They are all documented in the modlog, including promotions and removals of moderators. This is nothing like the tesseract situation. All mod actions are all logged, and published in the standard place where anyone expects to find them, and are free to review at any time.
I think moderators upon removal should have the option to leave quietly and on their own terms. I don’t think the reasons for their removal should be made into a big public spectacle in a case like this where their conduct wasn’t even egregious enough to warrant a community ban at the time.
While modlogs leave a paper trail, they make investigation easier. However, few have the time necessary to routinely check the logs, right?
Removal of a mod and a mod leaving on their own are very different things. Removing a mod is a drastic action. There has to be declarative transparency regarding this instead of people randomly happening upon this piece of information sometime in the future.
Also, a removed mod could be bitter. If they hit first with accusations, then things get complicated.
I feel like there’s got to be a decent middle ground between a pinned post that pushes this in front of everyone and requires further mod comments to try and stave off harassment and silently letting anyone who notices find the mod logs and make their own judgements of everyone involved. Like, in the absence of an actual announcement I think people would absolutely come to their own much more inflammatory conclusions if/when they noticed regardless of what the removed mod does, and the removed mod could make things into an absolute shit storm (which they don’t appear to be trying to do as far as I can tell, to their credit). But on the flip side, the way this post is set up is also an escalation in its own right and represents a more aggressive use of power by the remaining mods than was absolutely necessary.
If blahaj.zone has an instance business forum then making the full statement there (where it won’t get pushed out of sight as fast as the 196 churn would do to a non-stickied post) and linking it may have been wiser, since it preserves the immediate statement without shoving it to the top of everyone’s plate, and would still allow a stickied post on 196 itself if the situation escalated and it became more necessary.
I dunno, mod shit is hard and I’m glad I get to armchair quarterback it rather than actually making these decisions in real time. Props to the full mod team for keeping the chaos of 196 from turning toxic and destructive for however long it’s been here.
Eh, the OP says they haven’t made moderation decisions in months. I would feel differently if this were stopping some active abusive behavior, but in this particular case I think they could’ve just left quietly.
Does that place exist?
Changes to mod teams are recorded in the modlog. It would be ideal to attach comments or explanations there, but it doesn’t seem to be an option. Blahaj meta seems to me like a reasonable place to make disclosures about team changes. There are many threads about the more technical, back-end side of the instance made there. It seems like a reasonable place for this.
The way the rules are being enforced as well as who is enforcing the rules are just as important as the rules themselves IMO, if any of the above 3 change it should be made aware to the users. In this case idk if it would even be condemnation, considering she doesn’t seem to mind being a tankie at all.
I need the tea
Based, keep up the good work.
Lemming to tankie pipeline is so real. I guess it makes since that’s why the devs made Lemmy in the first place. And now we all contribute to their recruitment strategy by making Lemmy more appealing to leftists who aren’t (yet) authoritarians.
It certainly doesn’t help that so many on Lemmy participate in watering the term down, and making being anti-tankie look like an immature position
I’ve been away from Lemmy’s political discourse for awhile now since I was focused on making gaming content real on here. Is it really that bad nowadays? Do you have any recent examples on your mind?
It seems to kinda come in waves, and I don’t actually think I’ve seen it very recently, but I’ll keep this thread in mind and report back when I come across it! It tends to crop up in the comments on c/leftymemes, but doesn’t last long before getting moderated
I hope you’re right!
I’m fairly new to Lemmy. So far, I love the moderation approach of much of Lemmy, “don’t be an assholr and especially dont be a Nazi”.
I think people that come here are attracted to that, they’re also distrustful of social media. It’s a breath of fresh air to come here and be like, “phew, no Nazis” but then you get excited whem you find places like Hexbear, and you’re like, “ooooo openly leftist” and if you’re already distrustful of social media you might believe you’re brainwashed by capitalism and be willing to give the idea of authoritism communism a try because you’ve been lied to about SOME of the left.
Tankie instances make you question reality. Unfortunately, normal instances don’t seem to correct tankies.
Idk, I think of Watership Down a lot. Going from a shitty post capitalistic briar to a Utopia seeming authoritive briar the bunnies kinda find it OK. Until they don’t. Eventually, spoiler alert
spoiler
__the bunnies and a badass bird do make their perfect briar but it doesn’t really maintain without an educated populace. Something about birds are bunnies too
Idk, I should reread that book. But I think its applicable here
Which doesn’t really happen.
Tankies like that Alsaas troll and her tankie promoting leftymeme comm are more of an issue :)
Oh wait, don’t you mod that comm too?
Alsaas is a transmed who thinks being a ML trans woman who simps for Stalin means stalking wouldn’t have had her killed.
She’s hopelessly lost
Yep! Looks like we have pretty fundamentally different perspectives in general, as we also apparently disagree on what “troll” even means
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Ok
Im not even subscribed to 196.
Transparency is always good, but sometimes less is more.
“Given some ideological concerns, kittens has decided to step back from moderating this community to pursue other opportunities.”
No need for corpospeak here. Kittens was a bad fit for a community that is very much opposed to authoritarianism, and the public receipts are a necessary step to make sure such decisions are as transparent as possible.
I personally disagree with tankies as much as i disagree with fascists (2 sides of the same coin of authoritarianism if you ask me), but i have no hate against them. I am still very happy that there is so much evidence regarding the ideological distance between the community and kittens.
People should be judged by their words and actions, transparency is good of the past week hasn’t made that abundantly clear on lemmy.
No point in sugar coating when someone gets the boot for fucked up opinions, and being cagey about it would just fuel dissent and speculation.
Fuck anyone who excuses murder of civilians and DEFINITELY fuck anyone who tries to downplay literal fucking genocide.
some of the included screenshots are kittenz just straight up saying things that are simply correct which kinda undercuts the decision a bit i think..
Like what? Please elaborate.
shocker .ml tankie thinks other tankie is right.
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LOL, bro wanted to be the textbook example of why everyone hates tankies.
I do not understand, and I meant that part literally, what it is that makes people hates “tankies”. I genuinely do not know what I have written that would make people hate me but I understand that any further discussion is likely to get me banned.
Please do not reply to me with an explanation, at least not here. I just wanted to clarify that when I write “I don’t see why people …” I mean that literally. I don’t understand it. It’s frustrating to be shown the door so rudely by people you think would be on your side without knowing why.
The problem with tankies has nothing to do with them being communists, and everything to do with what they justify and defend. You mentioned in your comment that the worst mistakes and excesses of Marxist-Leninism can happen under any ideology, which is true. However, defending and justifying those things is also not allowed for the exact same reason. It doesn’t matter if someone is justifying “Operation Wetback,” or the ethnic displacement Kazakhs under the USSR; the Ken State Massacre, or Tiananmen Square massacre. Bad things are bad no matter who does it, and defense of such things will never be allowed, regardless of ideology.
Rule breaking tankie behavior has never been about their particular ideology, only about more universal standards that we apply to everyone. If your beliefs necessitate that you give “critical support” to the terrible actions of particular governments, then maybe you need to ask yourself why? Why do you need to justify terrible things just because you think they have our best interests at heart? Is it really that necessary to define what is right and wrong by who does it? That is something I do not understand; I don’t get having such loyalty to an ideology.
Watch Hexbear’s slop thread linking to this post misread all of this and say you’re actually a fascist transphobe.
They really think Blahaj is a transphobic honey pot.
Ok but the sidebar literally says that “Proselytization, support, or defense of … Nazism, Marxism-Leninism, Maoism [is not welcome]”. So forgive my confusion here please but to me these are contradictory statements. If I defend the actions of the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam or the South African Communist Party is that bannable? Because it gets mentioned right after Nazism and I should think that any defend of any Nazi party would get one banned immediately.
Also my comment got removed as “tankie comment” even though I don’t even mention any specific event. So it’s hard to not understand this literally as “Marxism-Leninism is not welcome here, we believe it’s a harmful as Nazism”.
And banning QinShiHuangsShlong as “Tankie” for calling out the racist copy-pasta thereby siding with westerners explaining to him how it’s totally not racist to think its funny that people will get in trouble with the supposed draconian government all but confirmed that this is bullshit. I don’t believe you.
Usually the authoritarianism fantasy and idolization of the USSR and China. Advocating for overt violence is usually another reason.
Oh, whoops, my bad, here’s the door. shows you the door
It’s frustrating that you think we’re on the same side and you refuse to introspect on why you have such dissonance with those you would otherwise align with.
I would think it’s your very robust history of getting banned for saying shit that gets you banned… is the reason you would get banned. Modlog looking like a manifesto and a rap-sheet had a mutant baby…. lets see:
quite honestly, if you don’t understand it yet, you’ll never get it. Maybe, go somewhere else?
Yeah don’t forget the racism for linking readsettlers.org 🙄
The harassment and brigading was bullshit https://lemmy.ml/post/42668945
The trolling was pointing out how Germany is complicit in the Palestinian genocide, something that really hurts the ego of germans who are nationalist.
The russian propaganda is linking a video that is critical of russia as well as Ukraine but Jordan Lund never cared about nuance
The genocide denial is me engaging in good faith with stuff I was given
The ban evasion is me switching to a blahaj account after lemm.ee shut down and forgetting to bring my ban list with me I guess?
That’s what I mean by I don’t understand. From my perspective none of those make sense. I never get banned for being rude (Well aside from calling Germany Genocidesmany, but I think in context that’s justified and not directed at any person). I am most likely to get banned when I actually engage in good faith ironically, which makes me very hesitant to post this comment and which is why I explicitly asked you not to explain, because I don’t wanna get into it but I also don’t just wanna have this standing there. Plus it compounds. The more you get banned (for whatever reason) the likelier it is you will get banned.
I am going to disengage from here if you actually want to tell me something please do it somewhere else, it’s unfair to have this thrown at me and not being able to respond.
kbaaaaiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii
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This is a totally hinged reply (to a thought out sincere comment that doesn’t even mention China) that doesn’t at all have any racial undertones or betray your true feelings about certain peoples /s
Just like how anything calling out Israel is antisemitic, anything calling out China is sinophobic.
Nice strawman bigot. Going to defend happy merchant posters next as simply calling out Israel?
Yep I’m a bigot for not supporting the racism. Not you using it to feign anything.
Wanna tell me how it’s antisemitic to say genocide is bad?
Another fun strawman. Could you please point out where I said anything like that? All I said was that happy merchant posters weren’t calling out Israel but instead simply anti-Semites which is true. In the same way the original comment I replied to was not calling out China but simply being a racist both through using a meme built on racism and using it to imply some crypto-chinese nature of the comment they were replying to that mentioned China exactly 0 times.
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Tankie say what?
ML loves pretending everything is racism towards China, what a weak defence of authority
If that’s not what that reply is then what is it? Keeping in mind that China was not mentioned a single time in the comment they were replying to. It is so clearly sinophobic kneejerk vomit. If when discussing capitalism someone replied with the equivalent of fuck black people despite them not being mentioned a single time would that not be racism? Genuinely baffled that anyone could defend this.
China is always relevant when talking about tankies.
If we were discussing capitalism and someone posted
No one would care, and they certainly wouldn’t be juvenile enough to argue it’s racist to call out a state.
Yeah if you posted that it wouldn’t have the same effect of a “meme” who’s entire background is how funny it is that the person they’re sending it to will “disappear” and laughing about how you imagine you’ve condemned them to some nebulous terrible fate. Not to mind the massive ignorance required to believe such nonsense not to mind laughing about it. Genuinely bending over backwards to justify a random sinophobic lashout. I understand we are “designated evil (serfs/bugs/brainwashed)™” but it’s genuinely disgusting. I wish I could say it’s surprising but my time on Reddit and on the wider fediverse unfortunately makes that untrue.