So we’ve seen the complaints and the reports and boy oh boy are there complaints and reports.

I’ve discussed the account with the other mods and admins multiple times, and while we agree the volume is a lot, it doesn’t point to a botfarm or multiple people using the account.

Obsessive? Absolutely, but not technically rule breaking… Until today.

Today they indescriminately posted the same story three times from three different sources apparently solely to flood the channel showing a decided lack of judgement.

It’s a valid story from a valid source, the original has been kept here:

https://lemmy.world/post/21098916

The others have been removed as duplicates.

I’m also applying a 15 day temp ban on the account.

“15 days? That’s oddly specific! What’s in 15… OH!”

  • MyOpinion@lemm.ee
    69·
    15 days ago

    Good they have been trolling us for a while. Also, thank you for your efforts and you are appreciated.

    • TheAlbatross@lemmy.blahaj.zone
      3712·
      15 days ago

      I dunno if it’s trolling. It’s deluded and obsessive demonstrating a lot of free time, but, like, they’re passionate about it.

      I mean, they have some magical thinking and logic and I don’t think their actions are actually pragmatic towards their goals, but I’m fairly certain it’s genuine.

      Either way, this was the right move.

      Edit: ehhhhhh some other comments have shown they were acting like a troll fairly consistently. Maybe this should have been done sooner.

      • Eldritch@lemmy.worldEnglish
        816·
        15 days ago

        It’s certainly not genuine good faith engagement. But yeah not obvious “trolling” no matter how dismissive and off putting their responses can be. They have some sort of personal need for engagement. And way too much free time to pursue it in. Two things combined with unwillingness to understand or acknowledge the arguments other people make. That come off so toxic.

        • Blackbeard@lemmy.worldEnglish
          273·
          15 days ago

          If “not genuine good faith engagement”, “dismissive”, “need for engagement”, “too much free time”, “unwillingness to understand or acknowledge other arguments”, and “toxicity” aren’t signs that someone is trolling, then can you please share the definition of trolling you’re using? In my eyes all of those things are classic troll behaviors.

          • snooggums@lemmy.worldEnglish
            301·
            15 days ago

            It is only trolling if they do it from the le beaucoup Trolle province of France.

          • Eldritch@lemmy.worldEnglish
            710·
            15 days ago

            Just because it can be, doesn’t mean it is. It’s absolutely taken on more trollish overtones of late. They weren’t always this way. If you want to go dumpster diving, months ago there were moments and posts of introspection.

            It’s not healthy behavior regardless. But I can understand it. I don’t tolerate Leninist/tankie hypocrisy, and feel pretty self righteous calling them out on it. Viewing their silent down votes as affirmation. It would be easy to behave similarly to them. Pestering etc. Hell I have done it in the past. And if I was a person prone to the magical thinking of dogma and ideology I probably still would be. But I value my time, logic, and reason much more. And enjoy it much more to engage with someone, that even if we don’t agree in the end. We don’t talk past each other. But focus on actually having a fruitful discussion.

            • Blackbeard@lemmy.worldEnglish
              133·
              15 days ago

              So, again, can you define “troll” for me? I think you and I are operating based on fundamentally different definitions, and I’d like to see yours spelled out so I can understand the difference.

              • Eldritch@lemmy.worldEnglish
                89·
                15 days ago

                Only after you define a patronizing. And explain why you’ve chosen to ignore what was said. I literally said it’s taken on trollish tone recently. But I don’t believe it’s their actual MO. To be clear I’m not arguing that they should not be banned or trying to defend them. I honestly think there’s much more to suggest mental illness going on there than gleeful trolling. But I see that it’s wildly important for you personally to only see them definitely as a troll. Despite the fact that being undaunted and a bit spammy is the biggest accusation that you have. I honestly am getting much more trollish vibe from you than I have ever gotten from monk all the times I disagreed with them and pointed it out. Which to be clear I’ve largely stopped engaging with them at this point because of the uselessness.

                • Blackbeard@lemmy.worldEnglish
                  95·
                  15 days ago

                  The definition you gave in your initial comment is the definition I use. I very clearly didn’t ignore what you said, have no idea what “a patronizing” has to do with anything, and asked you a very simple question, which you ignored.

                  The fact that after only two replies you went straight to personal attacks tells me I’m unlikely to get anything productive out of this exchange.

                • jordanlund@lemmy.worldOPM
                  106·
                  15 days ago

                  Looking at some of their threads, the trolling type behavior seemed directed at users who were already fairly antagonistic to them to begin with, then it turned in to trolling back and forth all the way down.

      • jordanlund@lemmy.worldOPM
        325·
        15 days ago

        That’s the consensus from the admins and mods. They have shitty opinions, but having shitty opinions is not a TOS violation.

        • EleventhHour@lemmy.world
          411·
          15 days ago

          They constantly troll anyone who responds to them. It’s sheer flame bait with every comment.

          All of the posts and comments that user makes are universally Down voted, and pretty much everyone here hates this user. Why on earth you won’t ban them permanently is beyond any of us.

          I appreciate that you want to give them the benefit of the doubt, but it’s obvious that they’re main goal is to provoke Arguments. Pretty much everyone in the affected communities, like news and politics, can’t stand the person. Nobody wants them there.

          Please permanently ban them, at least from those communities.

        • TheAlbatross@lemmy.blahaj.zone
          214·
          15 days ago

          I think this is balanced and fair. I don’t think they demonstrated any supremely shitty opinions, i.e. racism, bigotry, but their presence was incredibly annoying and they didn’t really participate in useful conversations and moreso used the reply box as a soapbox to say a lot of nonsense.

          Moreover, I think banning until the election shows an understanding and restraint by the administration team that is commendable.

          • jordanlund@lemmy.worldOPM
            103·
            15 days ago

            Yeah, the typical line crossers, racism, bigotry, hatred, genocide denial, etc. get you on the fast track to a ban and they avoided all of that.

            • Blackbeard@lemmy.worldEnglish
              273·
              15 days ago

              …intentionally.

              That’s why moderation sometimes requires judgment calls. When someone is intentionally avoiding whatever the moderation cut off seems to be, then it’s clear their participation is intentionally as provocative as possible without triggering enforcement. In that case it’s the user playing the mod team against the rest of the community because they know your boundaries and can weaponize them to “win.”

              I think it’s troublesome that there’s more firm enforcement against any kind of “denialism” and “bigotry” than there is for demonstrably antagonistic behavior. Lemmy is veering too strongly toward curating a list of acceptable opinions and too far away from enforcing civility standards, if you ask me. That’s a surefire way to create an ironclad left-leaning echo chamber.

              • grue@lemmy.worldEnglish
                61·
                15 days ago

                than there is for demonstrably antagonistic behavior. Lemmy is veering too strongly toward curating a list of acceptable opinions and too far away from enforcing civility standards, if you ask me. That’s a surefire way to create an ironclad left-leaning echo chamber.

                I would argue exactly the opposite.

                First of all, fuck “civility” rules, which in my experience (back on Reddit) tend to result in polite bad faith comments (sealioning etc.) being tolerated while comments calling out bad faith for the toxic behavior it is get removed.

                Second, facts are not opinions, and it’s hardly Lemmy’s fault if Colbert was correct about reality’s bias.

                • Blackbeard@lemmy.worldEnglish
                  10·
                  14 days ago

                  You’re commenting on a thread about a user whose polite, bad faith sealioning was tolerated for months, and whose spamming behavior is the only thing that triggered meaningful enforcement. If that’s what you’re concerned about, you should be in favor of more heavy handed moderation of obviously disingenuous “politeness”.

                  I think sealioning is patently uncivil behavior, no matter the veneer of geniality. I just think that Lemmy hasn’t quite figured out how to strike a balance between moderators enforcing truth and moderators enforcing good behavior.

                • Blackbeard@lemmy.worldEnglish
                  12·
                  15 days ago

                  And decisions to take a more punitive approach to the expression of certain opinions and beliefs than to shitty, antagonistic behavior will ensure that never changes.

              • Zaktor@sopuli.xyzEnglish
                101·
                15 days ago

                Genocide denialism and bigotry are WAY worse than just being uncivil. I’m fine with a chamber that doesn’t allow bigotry. If you think that makes it left-leaning, that says a lot more about the right than “free speech”.

                • Blackbeard@lemmy.worldEnglish
                  121·
                  15 days ago

                  My point is they shouldn’t allow either. The only thing worse is using a double standard, because it prioritizes assholes you agree with over polite users you don’t.

      • odelik@lemmy.today
        38·
        15 days ago

        Nah. I’ve dealt with these kind of people since BBSs. They’re trolls and get a kick out of the responses.

        They usually have multiple “hidden” agendas.

        First and foremost is to get a rise out of people to get engagement so their message resonates negatively and then is surfaced and viewed by the impressionable.

        Second is to cause strife within the community.

        Third is to get that strife to get people to shift to their viewpoint

        • Eccitaze@yiffit.net
          21·
          15 days ago

          It’s amazing how many people forgot about the classical “get a rise out of everyone with shitty arguments” troll, or forgot that the way to deal with them was to ignore and ban on sight. Fuck, I was practically in diapers when Usenet and BBSes were a thing and I still remember “don’t feed the troll.”

      • MyOpinion@lemm.ee
        501·
        15 days ago

        They are trolling. They love the negative attention here is just one example of it “Wait, do I have 81,000 downvotes now? I thought it was 45,000?! Can you double check. I wanna put the correct number of downvotes in my profile. The link you provided isn’t working for me. Thanks for the updated stats, friend! :)” They purposely post more mild posts and then like today they went for the triple post of troll material. They are playing a lot of people right now. Don’t be one of them.

        • snooggums@lemmy.worldEnglish
          39·
          15 days ago

          Yeah, they are literally bragging about being a troll in their profile when they boast about their downvotes.

        • Eldritch@lemmy.worldEnglish
          715·
          15 days ago

          That’s a much more recent turn. Not that long ago they were asking why they were getting such negative engagement. I think they decided to cling to ideology and take the negativity as an affirmation of their position. Make no mistake, I’m not asking for them not to be banned or anything. I have 100% left community that they’ve been apart of. And will not lament their absence. I don’t think it’s clear trolling.

          • snooggums@lemmy.worldEnglish
            17·
            15 days ago

            This is what falling for a troll looks like. Giving excuses for their trolling behavior as if the troll is really just responding to their environment despite the troll being the one who initiates the conflict.

            • Eldritch@lemmy.worldEnglish
              615·
              15 days ago

              That’s just it though. In a weird sort of way they don’t tend to initiate it. Look at it closer. Try to find an instance of them commenting on a post to community that wasn’t their own. Or did not mention them in some way. It’s oddly rare as f***.

              If their whole intent was to feed off metallic replies. Why would they create and moderate many many different communities to which they post some of the same s*** and get very little response? Often still getting ratioed on what little response they do get. That’s a lot of extra work for not very much troll food.

              If you choose to Define them as a troll. You still have to admit they’re one of the easiest trolls in history to avoid. Which should make you question the label. The behavior is much too erratic and unpredictable for something like a simple troll. Much more indicative of something like mental illness and a bad response to being bullied

              • snooggums@lemmy.worldEnglish
                17·
                15 days ago

                Try to find an instance of them commenting on a post to community that wasn’t their own.

                That is just trolling with home court advantage. They put out the honeypot and get to argue on their home turf for the most part, although they also posted to c/politics.

                Much more indicative of something like mental illness and a bad response to being bullied

                ‘Just responding to their environment.’

                • Eldritch@lemmy.worldEnglish
                  413·
                  15 days ago

                  That is just trolling with home court advantage. They put out the honeypot and get to argue on their home turf for the most part

                  That’s a REAL stretch. I’m not saying they aren’t fucking annoying. They’re really, FUCKING, annoying. But being annoying doesn’t imply trolling. I’ve met people who’s basic speaking tones and patterns annoyed me. But it was less something they did intentionally and more a malfunction of who they were. And in this case, despite monk making a spectacle of themselves. People sought them out far more than monk intruded elsewhere.

                  I won’t miss them. But some of the behavior has definitely been obsessive and bullying towards them. Regardless of their actions or what you think of them personally. Maybe you like that fact. Maybe you don’t. For me personally though it feels like pretty shitty behavior all around and no one to really root for. When I stopped engaging with them. I stopped having issues with them. They didn’t follow. Didn’t harass others the way they were harassed. That’s not justifying or defending their behavior. Whatever lessons they learned they learned the wrong fucking thing. There’s no question about that.

    • jordanlund@lemmy.worldOPM
      1011·
      15 days ago

      Oddly, on a personal level, I have no beef with the guy. If we were local we could probably go out for beers or something.

            • abff08f4813c@j4vcdedmiokf56h3ho4t62mlku.srv.us
              12·
              10 days ago

              jordanlund wrote,

              Oddly, on a personal level, I have no beef with the guy.

              So I was just pointing out another example where this user could have tried to troll or inflame me, but instead went with the “no-beef” approach, for whatever reason.

              After seeing how that user banned DMs, I don’t see how anyone could be against the current permaban. I was just pointing out that somehow I was one of the rare few who somehow got along with that person while they were still here.

        • Cephalotrocity@biglemmowski.winEnglish
          146·
          15 days ago

          I think @[email protected] is right. The Monk has many beliefs that I either agree with or at least understand where they’re coming from. If there had been full duration Democratic primary, or any of the 3rd parties been even remotely competent/had a chance, or the voting system been a universal Ranked-Choice Voting system or better I’d probably support them. But he refused to see reality to the point I think it is fair to argue a dishonest agenda at best.

          Regardless of the cognitive dissonance saying that gives me, I think it was a good thing for the community, and perhaps Monk too, that a break was mandated.

          • abff08f4813c@j4vcdedmiokf56h3ho4t62mlku.srv.us
            11·
            12 days ago

            I think we have the same view on this, except I don’t have cognitive dissonance over the ban - the ban was for a repeating behaviour of reposting/repeat posts, rather than the person’s stubbornness over the whole spoiler effect/FPTP means only two real choices thing.

            Also, it’s temporary and just one magazine (rather than, say, the entire instance).

  • taiyang@lemmy.world
    34·
    15 days ago

    Oh holy fuck it’s only 15 days away! Anxiety!

    Also having seen the guy, makes sense you can’t ban bad takes (or at least, shouldn’t) but my sense is he just likes to be infamous. Hell, this is a post about his banning, even! He’s probably loving the attention.

    Still, I’ve got my Lemmy heroes — obsessive posting can be used for good, like a certain maneuver named after a certain starship captain.

  • Rhoeri@lemmy.worldEnglish
    25·
    15 days ago

    You gotta know they’re absolutely loving this shit right now. An entire post dedicated only to them? Where they are the topic of discussion? That’s probably the biggest badge of honor someone like them could earn here.

    I’d wager it’s bookmarked and will be read several times a day for months to come.

  • Doomsider@lemmy.world
    341·
    15 days ago

    “I’ll keep posting what I want, when I want, where I want, and respond to people how I want. Whether it is “working” or not. Thank you!” - Monk

    This is when I realized it was all in bad faith and I stopped giving him the benefit of the doubt.

  • DaddysLittleSlut@lemmy.world
    51·
    14 days ago

    I posted this to him actually

    My background is psychology, developmental, business, design and more. Currently learning communication. He removed my comments for “off topic” when about he mentioned worker rights. Thus is one the most important

    Video to him

  • odelik@lemmy.today
    432·
    15 days ago

    I think the bigger issue here is the indiscriminate obvious trolling.

    The fact that it took “bad judgment” and not the reading between the lines for their sealioning and bad faith arguments and faux “friend” comments points towards the need for strengthening our community standards.

    Allowing people to come in and troll under the guise of “I’m following the rules lolololol” makes the mods look like rubes.

    • jordanlund@lemmy.worldOPM
      157·
      15 days ago

      When it comes to moderation, I’m of the opinion that it should never be a “read between the lines” interpretation. If we’re going to take action as severe as a ban, it should not be open to interpretation.

      For example, I remember a comment that was reported and removed for referencing the whole disingenuous question “when did you stop beating your wife?”

      Reported and removed for call to violence, and I had to explain to the other mod that “no, no, they’re making a point about asking disingenous questions…”

      Post was restored.

      https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loaded_question

      • Riccosuave@lemmy.world
        51·
        15 days ago

        That was my comment. I’m both a little embarrassed that got referenced after so long, but was also impressed in the moment that someone took the time to actually understand the context in which it was made.

        So, I’m torn on the issue of what the appropriate course of action would be in the instance of UniversalMonk, and when it should have been taken. I see the validity in your argument in regards to not moderating in the gray area due to the abuse & power-brokering that comes along with it.

        At the same time, in order to create a healthy community long-term I think there needs to be some way to enforce a more black & white standard that dissuades people from engaging in this kind of behavior because it drives away legitimate users who care about the platform.

        I don’t necessarily have a good solution for that, and again I do appreciate the complexity of the situation from a moderation standpoint.

      • go $fsck yourself@lemmy.worldEnglish
        21·
        15 days ago

        When it comes to moderation, I’m of the opinion that it should never be a “read between the lines” interpretation. If we’re going to take action as severe as a ban, it should not be open to interpretation.

        The problem with this is that it allows people to ride the line of what is acceptable and get away with things that effectively poison the platform with toxicity.

        It’s very similar to what Trump did, and now look at the state of the entire US politics system now.

        By allowing people to toe the line by not technically breaking the rules, it still adds to the overall toxicity of Lemmy.

        • jordanlund@lemmy.worldOPM
          83·
          15 days ago

          Oh very much so, which is why I, and other mods, were paying very close attention to what they were doing.

          Reports fall into two categories:

          “Oh, this guy again, can we ban them yet?”

          and:

          “Oh, god, it’s the person who reports everything…”

          The weird part is in the latter case, you can’t just ignore ALL their reports, no matter how much you want to, because there is that 1 in 10 chance they’re right. LOL.

      • abff08f4813c@j4vcdedmiokf56h3ho4t62mlku.srv.us
        2·
        12 days ago

        I agree with this. The rule applied to justify the ban seems to be rule 3 - by posting the same article from multiple sources, it’s a repost. And IIRC this user has had articles removed in the past for the same reason (in fact leading up to new rules, e.g. the ones against linking to aggregators and the one that was put in place related to posting 19 articles in a single day) - so the multiple posts removed criteria was also met.

      • odelik@lemmy.today
        31·
        15 days ago

        Yes, but when there’s literally thousands of posts and comments to build the “between the lines” data within a 30-day time frame what excuse is there?

        When somebody is trolling so hard that it’s causing strife within your community it should be addressed. Identify the behavior that isn’t desired and enforce existing rules around it or create a new one and warn the person that they need to operate in good faith within the rules or they will be ousted as an antagonistic troll.

        • jordanlund@lemmy.worldOPM
          620·
          15 days ago

          In cases like that the default position is to allow the downvotes and individual user blocks to do the job.

          • Pichu0102@lemmy.worldEnglish
            13·
            15 days ago

            The problem with individual user blocks is that if someone submits enough of the links in a community, blocking them means blocking most stories and discussions so you can’t really read or participate in the community without leaving them unblocked.

          • Blackbeard@lemmy.worldEnglish
            331·
            15 days ago

            I think that would carry more weight if downvotes had some kind of meaningful effect on the user’s engagement with the platform. As it stands they’re purely symbolic.

            Additionally, deferring to user blocks does two things: 1) It decreases the chance that the problematic behavior will elicit meaningful criticism or pushback from more engaged participants, which amplifies its unchallenged visibility/effect on marginally engaged lurkers, and 2) it puts control of the dialogue squarely into the hands of committed trolls, rather than the community or the community’s moderators. Blocks don’t do anything to change or improve the community, they just allow people to filter their own version of it.

            • abff08f4813c@j4vcdedmiokf56h3ho4t62mlku.srv.us
              2·
              12 days ago

              Pyfedi / piefed.social has a take on this that you might find interesting.

              For example, pyfedi allows for anonymous voting, but I believe there’s a planned change (if it isn’t already implemented and live) so that folks with a low reputation (from too many downvotes) can’t use it. By default, comments and posts with too low a reputation are also hidden. This is handled automatically by the software, so no human moderator or admin has to do anything - if enough people downvote, the system enforces the consequences automatically.

              • Blackbeard@lemmy.worldEnglish
                2·
                12 days ago

                That sounds promising. I think Lemmy is young enough that we don’t have simple functionality like modmail or karma-type troll throttling, but I’m optimistic that we’ll start having improved tools very soon. Thanks for the heads up!

          • odelik@lemmy.today
            24·
            15 days ago

            Which makes your community toxic and your job harder.

            How many reports did you get and have to filter through and ultimately ignore? If that’s not an indicator from your community that something needs to change you’re not listening to our needs.

              • EleventhHour@lemmy.world
                211·
                15 days ago

                This very much appears to be a case where it would be reasonable to break from your default. This is not a typical user doing typical things.

                • jordanlund@lemmy.worldOPM
                  73·
                  15 days ago

                  Well, yeah, and I did that when I raised the issue with the other mods and admins multiple times. ;)

              • snooggums@lemmy.worldEnglish
                25·
                15 days ago

                People are commenting about one glaringly obvious troll with a long history of baiting in comments, not calling for widespread bans based on a few posts per user.

                • abff08f4813c@j4vcdedmiokf56h3ho4t62mlku.srv.us
                  15·
                  12 days ago

                  I appreciate both the lenient approach and the transparency.

                  If we wanted an echo chamber, we could have called this /m/VoteBlue or similar and established only pro-Harris posts and comments as a rule.

                  I guess, despite the name, it can still become VoteBlue (after all, on a different website world politics used to be discussed on a sub called AnimeT… ) but I think it’s worth asking - if a genuine and civil commenter of a conservative persuasion joined the sub, how willing would we be to actually engage with that person?

                  See this example - a liberal who once clerked for a conservative Supreme Court justice (Scalia). https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/02/17/im-a-liberal-lawyer-clerking-for-scalia-taught-me-how-to-think-about-the-law/ (or https://archive.is/KauGu )

                  Just because you have vastly different views and many disagreements with someone, doesn’t mean that you can’t engage in good faith with them, or have both sides get something meaningful from the engagement (even if part of the resolution is to continue to agree to disagree on some of the more salient points).

  • Diplomjodler@lemmy.world
    281·
    15 days ago

    Maybe some kind of rate limiting would work for cases like this. Anyway, i doubt we’ll see that one again after the 15 days are up. At least for the next four years.

    • jordanlund@lemmy.worldOPM
      131·
      15 days ago

      Yeah, reddit had something like that baked in, I’m not sure how lemmy could implement it.

      “You are doing that too much, try again later.”

      It seemed to be tied to both the age of the account and the karma of the account. It varies from subreddit to subreddit.

      There also seemed to be a difference if you were subscribed to the community or not.

      But then we’re comparing something relatively new (lemmy) to an established platform with over a decade of development too.

      • abff08f4813c@j4vcdedmiokf56h3ho4t62mlku.srv.us
        3·
        12 days ago

        It’s easy enough to limit for a local user posting. I guess the tricky part is what if this comes in through federation from an instance that doesn’t support limiting. Probably just refuse the CREATE request with an appropriate error code (400?) and message (the “try again later one”) and hope the user’s home instance will report that back to the user.

        • jordanlund@lemmy.worldOPM
          1·
          12 days ago

          Talked about this with the admins and the suggestion is to use some kind of automod, but implementing something like that is a little beyond my ability.

          • abff08f4813c@j4vcdedmiokf56h3ho4t62mlku.srv.usEnglish
            2·
            10 days ago

            Ah - I can see why they’d prefer an automod (they’d not have to worry about configuring or changing the server software in that case).

            Unfortunately, as far I can tell, none of the existing automods out there support deleting posts by a rate limit. It’s not impossible to add this functionality, but it’d take a bit of work and time from a dev.

            For example, I think for lemmymodbot one can modify the User Processor at https://github.com/noenfugler/LemmyModBot/blob/master/lemmymodbot/processors/user_processor.py to accomplish this.

            Under line 8, add this line to create a user/seen hash

            user_post_seen_hash = {}

            and replace the entire execute function with something like this,

            if content.actor_id in self.user_post_seen_hash:
            if int(datetime.now().timestamp * 1000) - int(user_post_seen_hash[content.actor_id].timestamp * 1000) <= 300 * 1000:
            handle.remove_thing(“Posting too frequently, take a break”)
            self.user_post_seen_hash[content.actor_id] = datetime.now()

            (Oh, and at the top of the file, also add above the first line,

            from datetime import datetime, timedelta

            )

            But for lemmy.world (even if just looking at /m/politics) it would likely OOM from the in-memory hash due to the volume of users, so it’d need to be extended leverage the database for the lookup.

            Something similar could be implemented on top of threativore, I think around this line might be the easiest place to implement the check of the username/timestamp, https://github.com/db0/threativore/blob/main/threativore/threativore.py#L285

            Edit: Forgot to add, all the above code changes are completely untested by me, use at your own risk, etc.

      • Maggoty@lemmy.world
        8·
        15 days ago

        Sounds like a bot could do the job. Counts submissions in a rolling 24 hour period and fires a report off if someone goes over. Or it even deletes the post itself.

        • jordanlund@lemmy.worldOPM
          81·
          15 days ago

          For local, lemmy.world users, yeah. I think the confounding factor is federation, but like I say, I raised the issue and we have people way smarter than me!

          • Maggoty@lemmy.world
            6·
            15 days ago

            I was just thinking about reading the name and time on the post and running a counter. Then deleting the posts if they are above the limit.

        • jordanlund@lemmy.worldOPM
          71·
          15 days ago

          I asked in our Discord. I think the limiting factor is federation. I’m not sure how it’s possible to rate limit things in a federated environment.

          Fortunatley we have smarter people than me around!

    • Riccosuave@lemmy.world
      19·
      15 days ago

      If they don’t reappear then I think there is a legitimate argument that it was a coordinated propaganda account.

      If they do come back with the same level of veracity then I think there is merit to the potential mental illness, or neurodivergence argument.

      • snooggums@lemmy.worldEnglish
        131·
        15 days ago

        I’ll bet they have an alt account up and running already in either case.

        • Riccosuave@lemmy.worldEnglish
          8·
          15 days ago

          I mean maybe, but I think it would be pretty obvious given the nature of how and what they post.

      • pooperNickel@lemm.ee
        7·
        14 days ago

        Now that they were banned from politics, their rate of engagement went WAY down. Kinda speaks volumes.

  • Ghostalmedia@lemmy.worldEnglish
    33·
    15 days ago

    I’ve handled users like this similarly in some of the communities I head up here. I try not to touch the content unless it is obvious misinformation and that violates instances rules. That said, if their content and or comments are clearly intended to create discord, pester, or pester in a passive aggressive manor, then they get the boot.

    I wish we had some sort of sort filter that hid aggressively downvoted content and comments. That way the “knights of the new” could bury problematic content.

    People don’t like the idea of mods having to censor users, but they also don’t want their feed full of downvoted posts or infighting.

    • Em Adespoton@lemmy.ca
      8·
      15 days ago

      It would be a nice Lemmy feature if posts and comments under, say, -20 were auto-collapsed. That would allow people to still see unpopular content without everyone having to wade through it.

      • Valmond@lemmy.world
        63·
        14 days ago

        So that the trolls would gang up on posts they don’t like?

        There is no perfect solution, and I guess human moderation is the best one we have.

      • shastaxc@lemm.ee
        8·
        15 days ago

        That’s totally doable by clients. Not sure why they don’t all include that feature. It’s so basic.