I’m going to use three examples.

  1. Reddit, High Moderation the absolute worst: I’ve seen many people including myself get wrongfully banned from that website, It has the strongest moderation possible that feels a bit authoritarian. It tracks your device with an ID and your IP albeit for 100 days. I’ve seen people getting banned because they were protesting against “ICE” as “Violence” I’ve known people getting banned on r/suicidewatch because when someone reports you on Reddit sometimes there’s a bot saying “Hey, we are here for you” which is again crazy ironic that they don’t have a team handling these sort of issues, not that it’s their job to do so but due to Reddit’s aggression with Bots and Filters it feels like hell.

I posted a NSFW themed meme on an NSFW community and within seconds the post was removed due to Reddit’s filters leading with a permanent ban, What are Reddit’s filters and what classifies as a “filter” who knows. I sent an appeal saying that my alt got banned wrongly (same email) but I know that they won’t bother to check. Leaving someone with no choice other to start clean again which is against their rules as a Ban Evasion however I still believe it was a wrong decision so I’m worthy of another chance.

You can argue after Reddit’s controversies with r/the_donald and a subreddit where there were people literally dying on camera, Reddit enforced harsher rules which is understandable, but what they still don’t understand is that in case there’s a mistake you need to have better ways of communicating with an actual person, the appeal message is 250 Characters long and that’s it. There are literal Nazis there who haven’t been banned but I did just because of a meme.

  1. Lemmy, The Perfect Middle Ground: This website pretty much is in line with what I believe, that there should be moderation but without any stupid filters, karma requirements and power tripping mods, Is it because it’s a much smaller community than reddit? Maybe. Will the rules ever change if Lemmy gets much more popular, Who knows?

  2. 4Chan. The wild west: Almost to zero moderation, which to me is a bad thing because there will be people who will abuse that system and post illegal stuff and be borderline mental, I don’t think I need to say more about that website.

To be fair there’s still moderation, for example after the GamerGate drama posts on /v/ about specific people or e-celebrities is prohibited.

  • litchralee@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    1·
    5 days ago

    Related to moderation are the notions of procedural fairness, including 1) the idea that rules should be applied to all users equally, that 2) rules should not favor certain users or content, and 3) that there exists a process to seek redress, to list a few examples. These are laudable goals, but I posit that these can never be 100% realized on an online platform, not for small-scale Lemmy instances nor for the largest of social media platforms.

    The first idea is demonstrably incompatible with the requisite avoidance of becoming a Nazi bar. Nazis and adjoining quislings cannot be accommodated, unless the desire is to become the next Gab. Rejecting Nazis necessarily treats them different than other users, but it keeps the platform alive and healthy.

    The second idea isn’t compatible with why most people set up instances or join a social media platform. Fediverse instances exist either as an extension of a single person (self-hosting for just themselves) or to promote some subset of communities (eg a Minnesota-specific instance). Meanwhile, large platforms like Meta exist to make money from ads. Naturally, they favor anything that gets more clicks (eg click bait) than adorable cat videos that make zero revenue.

    The third idea would be feasible, except that it is a massive attack vector: unlike an in-person complaints desk, even the largest companies cannot staff – if they even wanted to – enough customer service personnel to deal with a 24/7 barrage of malicious, auto-generated campaigns that flood them with invalid complaints. Whereas such a denial-of-service attack against a real-life complaints desk would be relatively easy to manage.

    So once again, social media platforms – and each Fediverse instance is its own small platform – have to make some choices based on practicalities, their values, and their objectives. Anyone who says it should be easy has not looked into it enough.