!carnivore@lemmy.world new mods bans a lot of people for "downvoting without participation", restored rage bait post

FYI @rumschlumpel@feddit.org @breadsmasher@lemmy.world @Pfeffy@lemmy.world @superkret@feddit.org @Pending_Jokester@lemmy.world and a few others

A rage bait post they just restored: https://lemmy.world/post/24282976. The initial removal was about rule 3 - no rage baiting. That rule has been removed.

Another rage bait comment against vegans: https://lemmy.world/comment/14535452

58 comments

Yeah no your war on this community is pointless. They are allowed to exist just like you and if you don't like it you can hide them and move on.

Well, this is one where the subject is kinda beat to death.
Blanket down voting is a shitty thing, and it is completely appropriate for mods to ban people that do it
However, they should have a definitive criteria for what thresholds they use to determine what is and isn't blanket down voting.
Myself, I down vote stuff on there that's either off topic for the place, or stuff that's utter bullshit, and/or stuff that's YouTube drek because the YouTube drek is never sourced well. A link to a video is way too likely to be bullshit when it comes down to fad, niche, or weird diets.
Which means I end up down voting more than I do otherwise.
And, there's very rarely any posts worth engaging in.
By the apparent metrics, I should have already been banned. Which means that the apparent metrics don't match what's being used in practice.
However! I think that's less PTB and more "clueless" mods that don't have experience running a controversial community. The more controversial the subject is, the clearer you have to be with how, when, and why you're going to take action, unless you want to end up on a community like this one, lol.
- and/or stuff that’s YouTube drek because the YouTube drek is never sourced well.
  I've noticed this pattern, I think its kinda rude, I take time to find a really good topical video on onboarding to carnivore and your downvoting it because its a youtube video, regardless of the quality of the video - in this case it was a board certified obesity doctor talking about starting carnivore? Did you even open the video before downvoting?
  Conversational videos have value for people who are interested in the community theme
  
  Not required to watch videos to vote on them.
  They may be topical, and they all seem to be.
  But the ugly truth is that nobody making a YouTube video on almost anything provides anything more than their word that they're using well vetted information. When someone is making health claims, the standard is way higher than when they're casually talking about RC cars, or juggling
  You may not be aware, but even board certified doctors can be full of shit. Plenty of doctors choose to make and sell outright scam products, while using their licence as the basis for their claims.
  Now, if it were possible for a doctor to prove via demonstration on video that their claims are up to date, best practices, like you can with a chemistry video, or a woodworking video, it wouldn't fall under the drek category for me. I wouldn't down vote.
  But they rarely can when making health claims. When they're making health claims that go against current best practices on diet, it is most definitely drek. You can't provide access to studies and the data behind them in that format unless you're sitting there reading the publications on screen.
  Then, like you said, you took the time to find a topical video. You said nothing about finding a video, vetting its claims, finding opposing data and evaluating it. Which is the standard necessary when making health claims.
  Why am I the arbiter of quality? I'm not the sole arbiter. But I am someone that has worked with bariatric patients, their doctors, their nutritionists. I'm someone that reads jama articles for fun, and tend to be willing to w ade through the jargon to understand why best practices are what they are.
  So, a video making health claims is an automatic bad video because YouTube doesn't have the structure to give citations. Well, a channel could actually provide links in the description, or even list the citations. I've never seen one that does, and it's still not useful to expect that someone go to YouTube, then check for those citations, then go and find them. That's a bad post, even when topical. It's too many extra steps to find actual data to support a claim.
  Conversational videos about health do not have value. That's regardless of what the conversation is.
  Seriously, have you not run into any of the numerous jackass doctors selling their shit via infomercials, or hawking their own products in their practice, or ending up losing their licence for ignoring best practices? Just being a doctor does not mean you can make claims on YouTube and get a free pass on backing your shit up on YouTube.
  With all of that in mind, it would be a waste of my time to go and watch a video to individually evaluate it for voting on lemmy. The general state of YouTube as a source is so poor that it can be dismissed entirely. It's like using Playboy magazine as a source because they interviewed a doctor.

Coming to the community, especially a small one, just to downvote without posting a single post/comment is antisocial as fuck so stuck your rage where the sun don't shine, sweetie.
Your reference to "respectful dissent" shows you don't understand what the rule means - it is to encourage participation, ie posting and commenting. Blanket downvoting has exactly opposite effect discouraging participation.

TIL.
I'm actually surprised that it's possible to ban people for blanket downvoting, e.g. I don't think mods of reddit communities would be able to do that.
- Votes are public on lemmy, unlike reddit.
  
  Where do I find those?

The bait post does read like a 9 year old just learned the words pipi, caca, boudin or something.
I might not have all the numbers because it's a remote community (to me) and it seems the bans and some of these downvotes might not all have federated to us, maybe from a lack of SJW subscribers at some point in time.
Those I can see have single digits total votes, so that wouldn't really meet my ban threshold even for a small community.
I do ban mass-downvoters now and then on SJW. At some point, if your only interaction with a community is repeatedly, exclusively downvoting stuff, either learn to curate your feed or GTFO, but I do have a much higher bar than this.

Yeah, don't go to communities you dislike and downvote everything. It's a dick move. Just block them.
The initial removal was about rule 3 - no rage baiting. That rule has been removed.
Well, that explains why the posts were restored? Mods are allowed to change rules, right?

Gonna have to say YDI here sorry. Blanket downvoting is a bannable offense in any community because it denegrates the platform as a whole.
I also want to apologize to the carnivore community for my previous assumptions about the diet as a whole. I had unquestioningly believed a post that labeled the diet as unconditionally dangerous, and I commented encouraging people who had that opinion to report the community. After doing more research, I realize I was mistaken.
While there are risks associated with the carnivore diet, and it certainly shouldn’t be marketed as “for everyone,” when approached mindfully and appropriately, the diet is not necessarily dangerous.
- How can mods or admins see this?
  
  Votes are public information, its published on the activity feed protocol.
- Gonna have to say YDI here sorry. Blanket downvoting is a bannable offense in any community because it denegrates the platform as a whole.
  Ironically, I'm not even banned myself, as I participated (and generally don't downvote that much anyway, whatever the community)
  What isn't really clear here is that users seems to have been banned for one single downvote? Seems a bit extreme.
  
  Nope.
  Only users not participating and either blanket downvoting multiple posts or downvoting specifically this ONE moderator's post banning downvoting without participation were banned.
  You are actually the best example here - you have participated and are not banned.
  Coming to the community just to downvote is toxic. Since banned users don't contribute, they have no interest being there.
  You don't like a certain community - block and move on with your life. Don't behave like a dick.
  
  i’m aware; i said YDI because thats the colloqualism in the sidebar. “you” means the modded users here :P
  if you have evidence that it was truly a single downvote ban i would post that because that’s a real issue of algorithm manipulation — but way different from blanket downvoting bans.

If this is power tripping, then shouldn’t meat lovers be justified in brigading vegan communities to blanket downvote posts?
- Yes, they would be, see:
  https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/27711002
  The consensus is that you should not ban people for downvoting. At the time, vegan posts in that community would be massively downvoted vs upvoted so beaver used some sort of automation to ban everyone who downvoted. That was considered power tripping so beaver was removed and everyone was unbanned. I was thinking that maybe beaver took it too far after reading the comments in the thread I linked. But now I'm unsure, since the consensus has shifted and it is ok to ban people for downvoting when it comes to this carnivore community. Idk.
  I found I kept downvoting and getting disgusted by these carnivore communities since they kept showing up in my feed, so I blocked them. Votes don't matter as much in lemmy as they did in reddit, but they are public which has always given me the ick.
  
  Well, votes not mattering isn't totally correct, as some communities use the tool that auto-bans anyone who gets enough downvotes over the last month, so you can use brigading to get those people banned from communities they might visit.

Don’t go to communities…
So many people don’t understand people use all. This comm just seems like a reactionary meat centred sub with shit recipe videos and shilling what seems misinformation for meat centred diets. I downvote vegan sub more often and they don’t comb through and ban people for it. Though I’ve downvoted their post less than this carnivore sub recently because at least theirs seems to be focused and decent content.
I think people should put more effort into their subs rather than vote fixing under the guise of banning “drive by downvoters”.
Lemmy seems to have a real hard on for trying to dictate how the downvotes get used. Meanwhile users are creating community to use for their own personal blogs as opposed to, you know, a blog.
- Though I’ve downvoted their post less than this carnivore sub recently because at least theirs seems to be focused and decent content.
  Yes, and !carnivore@lemm.ee is the meat oriented decent one

Hello @Serinus@lemmy.world,
Do you know when the announcement will be made about the new "respectful dissent" policy? This seems to fall under this scope
- You don't understand what the rule means - it is to encourage participation, ie posting and commenting. Blanket downvoting has exactly opposite effect discouraging participation.

For people tired of this topic, feel free to hide the post, except if you're on Lemmy.world which is still running on 0.19.3 (that feature was introduced later)
- No thanks, I'd rather blanket downvote ;)
  Thanks for introducing me to a cool community tho!

@db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com , @unruffled@lemmy.dbzer0.com , @PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat could any of you have a look at the votes on this post?
Another comment getting instantly 5 upvotes, and my post and comment getting 3 to 5 upvotes at a low traffic time seems suspicious
- Sucks to get down votes not relating to the community, doesn't it?
  
  Not really, just curious. This community is pretty closely followed, so I'm sure people are going to have a look anyway.
  By the way, what do you think about the removal of the "no rage bait" rule?
- Hm... I'm not sure it is worth bothering too much about, honestly. That said:
  There is a little bit of a suspicious pattern. Three different accounts, all active during the same short span of time (space of 6 minutes) during a quiet time, all giving one downvote to the post, and then a couple downvotes and upvotes in the comments boosting a particular point of view in slightly different ways.
  One of the suspicious voters seems to be to be clearly a bad-faith political propaganda account, which is interesting. I have a theory that some of the political propagandists like to incite pointless drama related to specific mods, or specific hot-button issues like veganism, just to add noise and unpleasantness to the system, and give a vehicle if they want to attack some particular user or get them riled up to motivate moderator action against them.
  Just a little bit of correlation doesn't necessarily mean anything, of course. Sometimes random data contains stuff that looks like patterns but isn't. On the other hand, two of those accounts are on the same instance, which means it's easy to send a DM to one of the admins pointing it out so that they can check to see if they're coming from the same IP or other indications that they're the same person doing voter fraud.
  Do you think it's worth bothering? A small amount of voting fraud is kind of the nature of the beast, and it's hard to be sure about this kind of thing.
- Apparently someone created an account just to comment on this thread in defense of the mods 👀

Yeah the carnivore communities suck 🤮 They kept popping in my /all feed so I blocked them. The rage bait post is particularly nauseating to me. They don't see animals as having the same sentience as vegans view they have, it is incredibly disheartening. These communities are going to be controversial, you either think it is wrong to abuse/rape/kill an animal for consumption or you don't.
That's why the vegan instances are great, you won't see this shit ever. You're free to talk about veganism without someone coming in to troll. The carnivore diet is just a diet, one that is harmful IMO, but veganism is so much more than a plant based diet. I still come across comments making fun of instances that require content warnings for meat, dairy, and eggs. They just don't get it and I'm tired of trying to reason with unreasonable people.
I don't expect .world to do anything about them. I'm actually surprised people seem to be on the mod's side here, they certainly weren't when beaver banned people for downvoting.
- you either think it is wrong to abuse/rape
  everyone opposes this
  
  I think this can be a place to post the most daft stuff vegans say, ideally with links.
  I will start with
  "Cows, pigs, sheeps, etc. are raped (no consent) and sexually assaulted (against their will) for dairy, meat, wool..."
  https://discuss.tchncs.de/comment/15551150
  🤣🤣🤣
  No they don't, even the linked thread had Felix (who was the mod of the carnivore community linked) making fun of vegans for being against this. You think Felix is an isolated incident? Because they are not, I've heard the same sentiments expressed by many people both online and IRL. If everyone supposedly opposes this, then why haven't animal agriculture practices changed?
  In that thread, someone else said:
  That's okay. There are many people who only know their food as a bite-sized anonymous mass from the supermarket. who think that cows just give milk all the time. They don't know how piglets are bred. That you can walk into any barn and see unfathomable suffering in every corner. Who have never heard of forceful impregnation, confinement crates, premature separation, tail docking, mulesing, torture breeding, teeth clipping, CO2 chambers, castration, steroid growth, veal crates, tethering, weaning rings, induced moulting, sheep dipping... and we haven't even started on the illegal cruelties.
  In this state of blissful ignorance, you might regard someone who associates eating a steak with rape as crazy.
  I used to be like this too. And to be honest, there are times when I wish I could return to it and just dismiss vegans with a downvote as exaggerating and annoying.
  Surely if everyone thought that abusing animals was wrong, all the companies selling animal products that resulted from said abuse would be gone. But people don't actually care and just buy whatever from the store, directly supporting the abuse. People may "oppose" it theoretically but in practice don't. Even the US government "solved" the problem by making it a crime to film what is actually happening in those places (ag-gag laws) since businesses were losing profit when their cruel practices were exposed.
  But I know I am wasting my time with you in particular, you spout nonstop carnist apologia. You insist there is 0 suffering during animal agriculture and that veganism doesn't help animals - not even in a supply and demand way. There isn't a way to actually talk to you about this or veganism in general because we will go around in circles accomplishing nothing. I am vegan, you are incredibly carnist. So, please disengage so I can move on with my day.

58 comments