Lots of identified issue with ranking for stories and comments with current Lemmy. That is one of them as well as the negative votes/comment count when an item is removed. Hoping that the 0.19.x branch of Lemmy will solve some of those things.
Does bring up other questions too though:
why is a removed comment/post still visible to standard users?
why do certain places still show the content of the removed item?
why aren’t those removed items at the bottom of the list to begin with, if shown?
Etc. No answer for you specifically right now but Ill put it on ‘the list’ to track down and try to have a Beehaw solution for.
The nuclear: destruction of all traces of a post/comment is probably only useful in extreme cases like CSAM. Otherwise it’s useful for users to be able to evaluate mods to verify there are no shenanigans to establish trust. A user should be able to see the modlog and then see most removed content from a transparency PoV, one hopes.
And I think lack of transparency is an issue. I just raised an issue about that.
My friend, lack of transparency is not something that Beehaw has ever been accused of before. In terms of evaluating mods, neither mods or admins are on users payroll. There’s not really a concept of users evaluating mods or mod decisions for Beehaw. However, you may be interested in the modlog which is public.
Can you explain a bit more about how or what is causing this lack of transparency?
The transparency problem can be seen in the foss modlog. Before subscribing and investing effort into a community, I take a gander at the modlog to see whether the mod is overly energetic and eager to control. Some people like that mod style but some users prefer to avoid it. So if you look at the latest entry in the foss modlog, users should be able to visit the post to determine whether it was a sensible moderation move. They should be able to confirm “yes, this is off topic, so I am happy to participate in this community”, or “no, I will move along”. It’s not about payroll. It’s about users having transparency on moderators.
In the case at hand, an apparently off topic post was removed from the timeline (fair enough, if truly off topic). Yet it was civil and in line with beehaw site rules, so there is no sensible reason to be as disruptive as to suppress conversation in that thread. When something is off topic for the community timeline, it’s merely an organizational problem of clutter. Action beyond removing the link from the timeline is over interventionalist. What’s the point? It’s bad faith to suppress a civil discussion.
I don’t know if I’m hitting on a beehaw problem or a lemmy problem. If Lemmy only gives blunt instruments that lack the capability I describe, then the lack of transparency is a #lemmyBug.
users should be able to visit the post to determine whether it was a sensible moderation move.
Lemmy does not offer that capability in the slightest. Their codebase is open source, please feel free to contribute to the improvements you’d like to see.
If you want a “transparency workaround”, it may help to know that Lemmy is kind of a wrapper for Mastodon, with Lemmy “communities” just being Mastodon users who “boost” some comment (Lemmy “post”) and the subsequent replies. Check a Lemmy discussion from some Mastodon servers, and you may notice not all of them honor Lemmy removal requests, leaving copies of posts, comments, discussions, etc… even copies of some CSAM.
Yet it was civil and in line with beehaw site rules, so there is no sensible reason to be as disruptive as to suppress conversation in that thread. When something is off topic for the community timeline, it’s merely an organizational problem of clutter.
If you want to contribute some code, an idea would be enhancing the cross-post feature, and allowing posts to get “moved” from one community to another (from Mastodon’s point of view, a simple matter of a different “Lemmy community” user boosting the same post).
I appreciate the background & history… and the workaround sounds quite useful until Lemmy evolves more.
If you want to contribute some code
Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. I would have to fork it just to get it out of MS Github and into an ethical work environment. And from there I would have to learn 2 or 3 new languages IIUC. I’m merely a user, or tester at best, trying to just get an understanding of the problems… not even yet at the stage of digging through existing bug reports. When I wrote what you quoted, I did not even know yet if the tool was limited or if it’s malconfigured, or if a mod wasn’t making full use of the software. PenguinCoder hinted in another thread there is a thread hiding option in one of the Lemmy forks but did not elaborate. Superficially that sounds like a more appropriate mechanism for an off topic thread if it works the way it sounds.
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