Thank you. I’ll consider it.

Do you have other accounts with more activity, specially in this community?

Sorry for the wall of text.

I honestly do not think that your judgment was accurate in this situation, and I think that you jumped the gun; the poster sounds genuinely clueless. However I’m fully aware that I don’t have full access to all the info necessary to conclude shite here.

Large bans don’t decrease your workload, they increase it.

Trolls and bad faith agents might wait for a short ban to expire, but they won’t wait for a large ban - they’ll evade it with an alt account and call it a day, and now you’re playing whack-a-mole with them. With a permaban at least you’re telling them to fuck off, even if they won’t listen.

For more sensible users, the large ban is unfair, and conveys “we still want you here… but we’re too lazy to deal with you thing right now, so shoo”. Other users are not blind, they will notice that the mods overreact to rule infractions and they will avoid reporting things, except for petty reasons. Now you’re bound to fine-comb threads manually to enforce the rules because nobody is reporting shite.

Either way, you’re doing more work than you would otherwise.

A better approach here would be to contain content prone to trigger rule-breaking comments. Megathreads work like a charm for that; they allow you to fine-comb a single thread instead of the whole community. It also helps to bring up the content diversity of the community.

Another thing. I do agree with you that automatically tying that chant to Antisemitism is itself Antisemitic; however you’re taking for granted that all users are on the same page when it comes to that, and both of us know that the media is spamming them with misinformation that conflates Israel with Jewish people. In those situations it’s better to issue an official statement, explaining what will be considered Antisemitism for the sake of rule enforcement. (It helps to inform other users too.)

Let’s roll with your interpretation that the slogan is solely Antizionist. That would make the poster misinformed and incorrect; in this situation, the right thing to do is to talk with the poster, informing them, while checking their profile for potential Antisemitic activity. This also works great when the user is not rational (i.e. a bad faith agent) because it gives you better grounds for a ban.

Another issue that I see is ban length. A short ban is great as a warning, or to tell the user to cool their head; while permaban is great when you want to convey “we the mod team do not you here, fuck off”. A two months ban is the worst of both worlds.

Based on the original post of this thread, this comment, the modlog, and an “innocent until proved guilty” approach, I have no reason to distrust the OP.

As such, what I’m going to say might be wrong, and I’m ready to apologise if it is; but I do not think that it is wrong.

What the fuck, [email protected] mod team? If OP is being accurate, at least one of you is bloody irrational, to the point that the mod is unable to understand the difference between “here’s why this discourse is bad” and support to said bad discourse.

I get that it’s hard to recruit new mods in Lemmy, but remember - a bad mod is worse than no mod. In other words, IMO you guys should seriously consider to review each others’ mod actions and perhaps expurging a mod or two.

OP: your mileage will vary when it comes to Lemmy moderation. Some communities are moderated by sensible people; some, well… you know. Sadly there’s not much that you can do against this, except perhaps avoiding those comms. (inb4 Reddit is not an option in this regard; here, shitty mods are like stepping on shit, but there it’s like drowning in it.)

I also think that mod actions need more transparency. I’m thankful to the developers for the modlog, but I do not think that it is enough. IMO the content being removed should be still visible, when not illegal, with a big (USER WAS BANNED FOR THIS POST/COMMENT) in it.

Also, the current modlog should at least clarify which team was responsible for a mod action - the comm mods, the comm’s instance admins, or the user’s instance admins. And there should be a way for mods to report users upstream to the instance’s admins.

That doesn’t surprise me.

Linux users are biased towards higher technical expertise, and they have a different mindset - most of the software that we use is the result of collaborative projects, and we’re often encouraged to help the devs out. And while the collaborative situation might not be true for game development, the mindset leaks out.

Brain plasticity, window of opportunity, it’s all babble. You can learn new languages just fine as you age; the matter here is how much time you spend using the language.

The reason why adults perform generally worse than kids learning languages is mostly motivational, and not spending enough time with the language. But as an adult you got access to a bunch of resources that kids wouldn’t, such as a decent grasp of grammar on theoretical grounds, that you can (and should) use to your advantage.

Note however that watching sitcoms will likely not be enough to get any decent grasp of any language. (Otherwise I’d be speaking Japanese, given the amount of anime that I watch.) You’ll need proficiency on four levels: hearing, speaking, reading, writing.

For the morons downvoting the post: STOP SHOOTING THE MESSENGER DAMMIT. Problems don’t go away if you hide them, OP is morally right on highlighting the issue.

In addition to what OP said: check the admin and creator of the instance, outright claiming to be a MAP. That’s just a paedophile under another name.

This post assumes that a meaningful amount of defed instances are caused by simple lack of agreement. Often, it’s an orthogonal matter - it boils down to instance A actually understanding something about the userbase of instance B and saying “I’m not dealing with this shit, it’ll make the instance worse for its own users”. For example: the typical user of B might be disingenuous, or preach immoral prescriptions, behave like a chimp, or be a bloody stupid piece of trash that should’ve stayed in Reddit to avoid smearing its stupidity everywhere here.

Are instance admins too eager to pull the trigger for defed? Perhaps, in some cases; specially because it handles groups of users instead of individuals. But those cases are better addressed through actual examples, not through a meme talking on generic grounds.

And then when you do show them a license in Spanish:

• “Nope, we don’t accept licenses in español, only in castellano”
• “Che, here’s your bloody license in cahteʃano”
• “Nope. It needs to be in casteyano”
• “Sos boludo?”
• “Sos? LALALA NOT LISTENING TO YOUR VOSEO LALALA”

Then they eventually give Spanish up, because there’s too big of a chance that people will actually show them a license in Spanish regardless of the arbitrary restrictions that they might put. They go for Majorcan instead. No, licenses in Catalan or Valencian are not to be accepted, they must be in Majorcan and only Majorcan. As they learned from German tourists: “zi us ploi, full una zeaveza”. (They also buried some clauses 30m deep in the sand. A good thing that they didn’t need to dig the holes, the tourists did it for them.)

But there’s still some chance that someone might enforce copyleft against them, so they stick to Portuguese instead. It must be spoken loudly, and you need to use the right rhotic. They never say which, but no matter which you use you’re doing it wrong, be it [ɾ ɹ ɻ r h x χ ʁ ʀ ɣ], you’re doing it wrong and thus you can’t enforce it.

And at the end of the day they switch back to English, and then they start “ackshyually” to prove that the free license was actually costless (free as in free beer), not unchained (free as in free speech).

Specifically about generative bots: the bots themselves are no threat. And they would be still no threat, even if they worked far better or far worse than they do - because they simply output text. The actual threat is some bloody irrational (assumptive, gullible, oversimplifying) individuals in positions of power might get really lazy, use the output for decision making, harm people with their idiotic decision, and then blame the tool for what was ultimately their decision. But frankly? This sort of trashy individual has been a plague to humankind since the dawn of time, with or without large language models.

a Haiku bot falls into your “triggered by accident” category (any post that is 17 syllables).

Only if opt-out, as the original Haiku bot in the defunct site. OP however made it opt-in, so in order to trigger it you need two conditions - to actively subscribe to the bot and post a 17-syllables comment. The first one won’t happen on accident.

a Haiku bot also does not add any new contextual information (it just duplicates a comment).

Arguably it highlights that the post has 17 syllables in a shape that is suitable to build a haiku with, but in general I agree with you. It is not the kind of bot that I personally would inscribe in my comms, nor that I’d use myself.

Even then, a few people like this sort of gimmick, so there’s some subjective value for some people. (Certainly not for both of us.)

so I’m asking OP: “why create a bot to spam lemmy with low-value duplicate content, if you don’t even like that bot yourself?”

OP himself answered it - “I wanted to try something easy to learn bot development on lemmy and a few users were waiting for this and so here I am!”

It’s a low-hanging fruit, and a few people wanted it.

EDIT: just to make my position clear, I think that a few restrictions on what a bot can/can’t do would be great, specially if they come from the admins. IMHO a good bot should have the following requirements:

1. Must be explicitly tagged as a bot, instead of a human being.
2. Must perform a specific, well-defined function.
3. Must only act once explicitly allowed by either the user or the moderators of a community, through a standard approach.
4. Must have a short, succinct output, that doesn’t force other users to scroll past a lot of junk.
5. Should be non-prescriptive in nature; it shouldn’t be telling you what to do.

Again, I wouldn’t use this bot, but I think that it already fits all five requirements.

The issue with bots in Reddit was less about their existence, and more about how unsolicited, forced, and pushy they were, since the administration of that site never imposed some limits on what a bot could/couldn’t do. But at the end of the day they’re just a tool, and need to be treated as such - prevent abuse, don’t just kill the tech.

This is easy to prove by looking at the extremes:

• Roboragi - only triggered by request, subreddit-specific, providing contextual information relevant to the discussion
• CommonMisspellingBot - triggered by accident, regardless of subreddit, bossing you around with off-topic prescription

It’s clear why one was loved, another hated. And yet both are bots.

And OP is simply testing the viability of the tech here, based on what he says.

Because the main instance is a drop in the ocean that the lemmyverse should be, so it makes sense to call it a “millilitre” (ml). [inb4 I’m making shit up.]