Why the sudden increase in removals?

Not trying to start anything, and if this is the wrong place to post about it I apologize, I’m not sure where else to broach the topic, but as a user I’ve noticed an enormous increase is moderator action today and I’m curious if there was some catalyst that the userbase should be aware of. Prior to today, the modlog shows only a few mod actions most days, and previous entire months can fit within one screenview. Furthermore, most of those actions were locking posts or removing and reprimanding specific offending comments. Yet today there is an entire wave of moderator actions, including such vague notes as “Troll Post” on meme posts with significant engagement.

I promise I’m not trying to start drama, I am just concerned as I love Lemmy and want to see it and the community thrive, and I am concerned about the same issues that plague Reddit could potentially find their way here.

That said, I also understand this isn’t a democracy, so if the reply is simply “that’s how it is,” I guess I’m going to just shrug and accept it.

sunaurus,

Just to clarify a few things:

  1. Our mod log will show all federated mod actions, not just actions by lemm.ee mods and admins. So if any other instance is generating a ton of actions, it will also be visible from our mod log. In fact I don’t think there has been any increase recently in lemm.ee mod actions at all.
  2. The mod log does not actually get cleared, there is simply a UI issue in Lemmy which makes it a bit hard to view the mod log chronologically. The UI makes it appear as if the mod log is one single list of actions, while in fact it’s different lists combined together (one list per each action type). You will notice some really old actions even on the first page of the mod log, this makes it seem as if there is a “missing period” in the actions, while in fact you are actually just seeing the first page for each different action type. If you navigate to subsequent pages, you will find all the “missing” actions there.

In practical terms, it’s not really possible to clear the mod log at all, thanks to federation. Even if one instance will delete their local mod log records, those records would still be visible in other instances which they previously federated out to.

Vespair,

Thank you for clarifying, both of those points radically help my understanding of the situation 👍

Vespair,

I will say though, I do wish the modlog included which mod performed each action, as I think would be a good anti-abuse measure, and I am still concerned about a lack of recourse when a mod acts erroneously, such as in the case of removing entire a thread that at best was in the grey area of whether or not it matched a community’s intent. But that’s just my $0.02

spujb,

actual answer: it doesn’t increase, lemmy just stops showing some stuff in the modlog after two days or so. been like that for a while. you can still find older actions using the search tools but if you just start scrolling back it starts to get more and more sparse.

why is this? no clue. so sorry for the half answer but suprised that no one else has commented this yet as i have been aware of it for a while.

Vespair,

Ah, well that dramatically changes my perspective on the matter. Thank you

Vespair,

Yeah stuff from my screenshot is now missing from the Modlog.

Maybe I’m missing something here, but what’s the point of having a Modlog if the Modlog can be cleared? It’s no longer a Modlog, it’s a Mod-presentation-log, which is different.

spujb,

yeah these are valid questions. perhaps it’s a bug?

fartington,

At least the reasons aren’t made up, unlike some moderators here. Hi George!

catloaf,

Or elsewhere. I’m currently on my second ban from lemmy.ml for violating the rule “no ads / spamming”, though I have zero posts on that instance, and none of my three comments from that day are in the same community or have any external links.

fartington,

I got banned for calling a mod George Santos because he lies about everything. I don’t care about the ban but the reason this jackass listed was homophobia. Admins don’t care about it. The public modlog is RIPE for abuse.

Alice,
@Alice@hilariouschaos.com avatar

Yup

Vespair,

No, but at least in the case of the post which caused me to dive into the modlog in the first place, I do believe the judgement to be a bit subjective/arbitrary, as the post was called a “troll post” despite being about a major meme trend and was in the meme community. It was a meme about a contentious topic, and that is perhaps why it has gotten trend-level attention, but the post itself didn’t seem to be specifically bait. Which alone is fine, it’s okay to disagree with a mod decision and it doesn’t make that mod decision wrong or problematic, but that shaky reasoning plus the again, dramatic uptick in mod activity based on the entire previous history of this instance seemed worthy of inquiry to me.

Again, I’m really not try to start drama or trouble, and I don’t care about the specific post in question or any other post, I am just trying to understand before jumping to conclusions. But as somebody else pointed out, it seems like the vast majority of the activity is removing posts of a single problematic user, which is certainly valid reasoning.

fartington,

My point was only that mods can list any reason publicly. If you spam and get banned, they can list the reason as spam or as anything they want such as dropping n bombs, racism, revenge porn, etc. I really don’t understand how no one else can see how abusive this feature is. Maybe I’m wrong and I would love for someone to prove me wrong.

Alice,
@Alice@hilariouschaos.com avatar

Lol Fartington stays salty

fartington,

I am being a Lemmy martyr to bring attention to abusive practices on the mod log lol

Alice,
@Alice@hilariouschaos.com avatar

Lol I know. Be careful though, you can really go into a rabbit hole though with that. I’ve done it plenty of times.

You do know admins can just purge the modlog though right ?

fartington,

I did not know the logs can be purged. That would require the admin to actually care though.

Alice,
@Alice@hilariouschaos.com avatar

I’m sure they do it all the time so know one can see the real reason they ban and remove. I’m telling u. Look at there matrix chat. They talk about that shit all the time. github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/904

https://hilariouschaos.com/pictrs/image/55506686-1e21-48b3-96f5-c761c605fdd9.webp

I mean, there u go…

fartington,

Can’t wait for all the reddit powermods to come here

Alice,
@Alice@hilariouschaos.com avatar

It’s honestly already bad. Lemmy is worse then reddit is now bc a lot of those ppl came here when the api thing happened

Vespair,

This is my concern. Or rather, my concern is that we will simply be replicating the reddit powermod problem with Lemmy powermods. I think we have the chance to learn from problems of the past, and I am worried we are not taking that opportunity

sunaurus,

Purging is something that can’t really be used to hide mod actions, as any federated instances will still retain their copy of any purged content. Purging is a feature which is only really useful for completely removing illegal content from our servers, it’s used quite rarely and in fact leaves a trace in the mod log as well.

Alice,
@Alice@hilariouschaos.com avatar

Join their matrix chat. You’ll learn even more…

Vespair,

I’m not savvy enough to even know what that means. Is matrix a discord alternative or something?

Alice,
@Alice@hilariouschaos.com avatar

play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=im.vector.a…

Pretty much.

If you make an account just type lemm.ee and lemmy in the search bar. This is where the admins talk. Don’t interact though use the account to see what they are up to.

catloaf,

A lot of those are one guy posting a lot of trollish comments on one post. And there are a bunch of entries because, if you read them, the mod removed, accidentally restored, then removed them again. It doesn’t really seem like a big deal to me.

Vespair,

Valid. I’ll admit I didn’t really read what was being removed, just the times and reasons listed after being kind of dumbfounded by the unprecedented rapid increase in modlog entries.

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