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.
Holy mother of God that modlog. It’s almost up to 80 pages in 12 months 🤯
That being said, people who downvote AI content can be quite overwhelming on this platform. Our community !imageai@sh.itjust.works was very vibrant in the early days but seems to have been slowly crushed by the neverending stream of downvotes. It’s pretty discouraging when you go through the effort of creating and posting something and it gets randomly downvoted by anonymous accounts that seem to have been created just for the purpose of downvoting. But that’s just kinda how it is I guess, I’m not sure if anything can be done about it.
All things GenAI deserve to be downvoted. That’s why you might find it downvoted.
I’m ambivalent about it. I’m no fan of AI, but on the other hand people were having fun in that community and it seemed pretty harmless to me. I think when it comes to AI, it’s probably more reasonable to go after the companies who are spending billions developing it, rather than the common people who are just using it because it’s there and it’s free.
Nothing about genAI is harmless. Copyright theft, environmental disasters, hardware inflation, AI psychosis, general dumbing down of society, and causing the next Great Depression are harmful, for starters. Using it because “it’s there and it’s free” does not abdicate them from responsibility for promoting an incredibly harmful technology.
I don’t believe in free will so I can’t really hold average people responsible in such a basic way.
Ultimately, trying to solve the problem by going after the end result just isn’t going to work. Even if you want to blame the end users personally, you’re not going to solve anything without going after the source of the problem, which is the development of the technology in the first place, along with the availability and lack of regulation.
You could make similar arguments about using computers or social media in general tbh. The crux of the problem isn’t that people are using the tools that are made available to them, it’s that tools are being made available without properly considering the long term negative consequences, and only with a view towards short term profits.
LOL what!? Please elaborate because this sounds like a fundamental, much deeper problem than what we’re discussing.
I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean. I’m not “going after the end result”, I’m just holding the responsible parties responsible.
Development would end tomorrow if people stopped using it.
Uhhh no, I don’t think so. You could make similar arguments regarding computers in the context of consumerism and lack of ability or willingness to repair or demand repairability, yes.
Not in general. All the major platforms, I can and do make a very similar argument.
Incorrect, it is both.
In short, I subscribe to the validity of modern science, which tells us that an animal is an assortment of cells, the behavior of which is (ultimately) described by the laws of physics, which are deterministic. Philosophically, I would fall into the incompatibilist camp, which maintains that determinism and free will are not compatible.
This is a succinct explanation of the incompatibilist argument.
You may also find this article informative.
When I say going after the end result, I mean going after the consumers rather than the producers. It’s similar to punishing drug addicts rather than drug dealers. A futile effort.
Another comparable situation would be trying to get consumers to stop using plastic straws and expecting that to solve climate change.
They might both be problems, but only one of them is the crux. The reason why supply side is the crux is because it’s the only side that we have some control over. We don’t have control over the private behavior of the billions of individual humans on this planet. We can’t really control demand without commiting some major human rights violations. But we do have some control over what businesses are able to do legally.
Yeah, so, you’re trying to have a different conversation than I am. You’re trying to discuss how to solve the problem, whereas I was just discussing who is responsible.
Every individual has control over themselves. Saying otherwise is not only ignorant but super easily disproven. I myself do not have any devices without DP because I deliberately seek them out, because I know HDMI is bullshit. We can make the decision to avoid HDMI just as easily as we made the decision to choose it.
I wasn’t even aware that there was a reason to avoid HDMI. I have always used HDMI for everything. How does that factor into your moral high horse?
Am I the problem? Am I responsible?
I think you’re making an easy mistake to make. You see an account with no comments and assume it was created by some shadow organisation just to downvote things. But what you need to understand is, 99% of users on any social media are lurkers. 90% of people just browse. 9% of people browse and vote. 0.9% of people browse, vote, and comment. And 0.1% of people actually make regular posts. So 9/10 people who downvote your posts, just organically, are people who never comment. Because that’s how social media works.
Rimu’s Piefed moderation tools can help somewhat. Rimu put in an “attitude” score that shows how often a user up/downvotes. But even that can mess up. When I told one friend about piefed’s attitude feature, She said “But I only vote when a post is actually breaking the rules. So I can be punished for voting? Okay, then I just won’t even vote on piefed”. That’s the truth about this stuff: There are billions of people out there using social media in a way you will never be able to relate to. Because everyone is different.
yeah that’s exactly why i don’t think the attitude score helps
Nah, I’m aware of how many lurkers there are. I’m not assuming that the accounts were created by some shadow organization or something.
But from the perspective of people who are actually getting downvoted, it just feels bad.
I get it. But in cases like that, I think it’d be fair to argue that people are using social media in a counterproductive manner. Like for those who only downvote and never upvote, I question that behavior. All of those posts and comments that you enjoy don’t just come out of nowhere, people are actually putting time and effort to create them. And the only reward they get is upvotes.
Furthermore, upvoting is the way that you push quality content to the top, so that other users will notice the better content instead of missing it. It’s a critical part of what makes the whole community work. So if you systematically ignore the upvote button, you’re not being a responsible user of social media, you’re more of a leech that contributes very little and takes the contributions of others for granted.
And I don’t blame people like that at all, because traditional sites like reddit are so oversaturated with content, much of which is made by bots as well. So in that context, upvoting doesn’t matter nearly as much. So I think people simply don’t understand that even as a lurker, your upvotes and downvotes have consequences. It may seem insignificant for one person, but on the scale of thousands of lurkers, in the context of a relatively small userbase like we have here, it becomes clear that they are playing an active role in shaping the direction of the platform as well, despite not saying a single word. I only came to understand this after spending time on Lemmy, so I don’t expect people to just instinctively understand it. Which is why it’s important to educate them.