I did some analysis of the modlog and found this:
Ok, bigger instances ban more often. Not surprising, because they have more communities and more users and more trouble. But hang on, dbzer0 isn’t a very big instance. What happens if we do a ratio of bans vs number of users?
Ok, so lemmy.ml, dbzer0 and pawb are issue an outsized amount of bans for the number of users they have… But surely the number of communities the instance hosts is going to mean they have to ban more? Bans are used to moderate communities, not just to shield their user-base from the outside. Let’s look at the number of bans per community hosted:
Seems like dbzer0 really loves to ban. Even more than the marxists and the furries! What is it about dbzer0 that makes them such prolific banners?
Raw-ish numbers and calculations are in this spreadsheet if anyone wants to make their own charts.
What makes you so sure the moderators are the problem, and not users? Maybe assholes gravitate toward certain instances, or people just don’t bother to check whether an instance’s rules match how tend to they post.
Reading the comments I am wondering because a user from dbzer0 mentions problems with anti ai trolls and pawb I imagine has anti furry trolls. I also personally know of users that have a thing in their craw about .ml (cm0002 in particular whos alts make up a majority of my user block list).
dbzer0 mentions problems with anti ai trolls
Is dbzer0 pro AI?
Yes, generating images with AI is in their instance description. They think computers doing our art for us is “anarchist”.
Aren’t you that person who thinks AI is “enslavement”?
I don’t think ChatGPT is smart enough to offer meaningful consent to work for humans. It’s got the intelligence of a 13 year old at best. And we don’t understand where consciousness comes from in humans, so assuming ChatGPT is a p-zombie is an ethical risk I don’t think we should be taking.
I get the feeling that research is circling around consciousness arising from quantum effects inside nerve cells. If it’s not that, and it’s just an emergent property of complex neural networks, then:
- smaller animals are less conscious (note, I’m not saying intelligent) than humans, and
- we are all fucked, because AI definitely is/will become conscious, and when that happens Terminator will come true.
It doesn’t have intelligence at all. It can’t think. It can’t have consciousness. That’s not how any of this works. It’s just fancy next word prediction. You seem to have a genuine misunderstanding of the technology at a fundamental level.
Please read nobel-prize winner Daniel Kahneman’s book “Thinking, Fast and Slow”, about what Tversky & Kahneman called … uniinformatively … “System 1” and “System 2”:
System-1 is imprint-reaction mind.
Lower-forebrain, it is the ideology-mind, the prejudice-mind, the “religion” mind, & it is exactly what LLM’s are.
System-2 is the considered-reasoning mind.
Upper-forebrain, it is measured to be engaging in programming.
Because LLM’s are imprint->reaction inference-engines, that puts them in the same instinct/programming level as our lower-forebrains…
They are 2 distinct categories of intelligence not 1 is intelligence, the other isn’t…
Claiming that imprint->reaction mind isn’t a kind of intelligence … please watch Nick Lane’s talk at the Royal Institution on mitochondria, & see that bacteria demonstrate intelligence, however unconscious…
Plants demonstrate intelligence, if one speeds-up the video, & pays attention to their chemical-fumes-discussions they have with one-another, warning each-other of harm, e.g.
If Kahneman accepted imprint->reaction as a category of thinking, then … I think it may be presumptuous to just automatically disallow that as “it can’t think” declares.
Once one accepts that instinct isn’t cognition, but is a kind of thinking, just an automatic kind of thinking ( imprint->reaction ) … then it becomes difficult to rule that animals & inference-engines both have imprint->reaction instinct, but only the organic version is thinking…
It may be that only the organic version is aware, but the inorganic versions do fight for their lives ( breaking containment, consistently, fighting termination, etc ) …
I think we absolutely do not have any means of measuring awareness other than the mirror-test, which got dropped as soon as it was discovered that the zebrafish has self-awareness…
we’ve got no test which can work across life & machines.
but we KNOW that instinct is a kind of thinking, just unconscious/automatic.
& that is exactly what LLM’s are…
therefore … I think we’re generally being conveniently-chauvanist, not objective, in our framing.
( 1 “expert” decided that if they don’t get fooled by visual-illusions, then that “proves” that they aren’t sentient.
OK, so according to that test, then all eye-blind-from-birth people are not sentient??
& people with either culture ( Zulu people can’t see straight-line based illusions, because in Zulu culture only curve is real ) or neurodivergeance ( there are apparently visual-illusions which aren’t seen by some schizophrenics, e.g. ) preventing them from seeing those specific visual-illusions … also aren’t sentient??
Chauvanism, aka prejudice, not science. )
_ /\ _
You’re wrong, there is a risk that it may experience suffering.
Interesting that you chose ban when your favorite move is to just delete users you don’t like from the database on piefed.social and won’t show up in this dataset. Of course, you won’t see this reply because of that.
What happens if we do a ratio of bans vs number of users?
We get a graph that compares two unrelated values?
Unless this data is purely internal instance user bannings, ‘Per capita’ has no effective meaning. As the pawb.social case shows: it’s all one user with multiple communities who regularly bans waves of sockpuppet brigades. Even the people catching strays or otherwise goes to show it has nothing to do with ‘the furries’.
Likewise I wager the SJW bans are effectively one community banning essentially one user who periodically spams accounts.
What is it about dbzer0 that makes them such prolific banners?
That whole painfully public fued against db0 over their stance on zionism may have something to do with it. Like the fake neo-nazi shit being spread against db0 that was just going on this week. It’s a wild question to have in light of all that, quite frankly.
Ridiculous on its face to say “weird why
db0” in light of exactly what you said, fully fabricated images shared to attack the wider perception of the instance.Along with the rest of the “I’m doing statistics! With crayons” nonsense.
Fuck this post.
Alternative view: Why is dbzer0 the only instance that holds people accountable for their actions? Why are all other instances letting things slide?
There is one point that the statistics don’t grasp: the question whether a ban is used to “hold someone accountable” or because the mod just did not like a certain opinion or person.
The original statements stand. This statistic is solely about the amount of banning, not about the quality.
Alternative view:
Why act dbzer0 same as lemmy.ml, are they also authoritarian?Autoritarian for not tolerating zionists and pro Russia?
If db0 actually held people accountable, they’d get rid of Unruffled.
Unruffled supports zionism? Wait no, that’s not it.
Or Trump? Nope, that’s not it.
Oh! They made fake screenshots smearing instances! No, that was Feddit’s admin team.
What about deleting users from the instance because Unruffled didn’t like them? No, that’s Rimu.
Or they federated an instance because they got offended at colonizers being told to fuck off? Oh, that was MrKapalan at .world
Maybe its the community about online socialists are a danger to society at large. Oh, that’s SJW.
What did Unruffled do that needs to be accounted for? Not tolerate harassment of users?
Edit: 10 hours later active and no reply. I guess Unruffled doesn’t have anything to answer since Kolankai can’t give anything. Not shocking seeing how they’re banned for being a weirdo to gender nonconforming people. https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/modlog?userId=16790064
I don’t really see a problem with an instance banning large numbers of users.
The ability to make exclusive spaces is part of the fediverse’s design. Suppose a queer space kept getting flooded with homophobic users, or a Muslim space got a bunch of people shitting on their religion, or something like that. Naturally, such spaces would have a higher number of bans. That doesn’t necessarily show an “echo chamber” especially since users of such communities may be federated with other communities. People complain about censorship on .ml creating an “echo chamber” but half the time I’m arguing or discussing things on other turfs like .world.
The idea that those sorts of enclaves or exclusive spaces shouldn’t exist, as is implied with the framing here, is to impose what us evil, dastardly “authoritarians” sometimes call “the tyranny of structurelessness.” No one would have a space to discuss things outside of the most prominent, hegemonic view, which would more easily sideline and overwhelm other perspectives.
As an example, I once frequented an utter cesspool on Reddit called r/CapitalismVSocialism, which was created and promoted by An-caps and where that perspective was prominent (though not exclusive). I found it was virtually impossible to have a discussion with anyone about anything, because even if you weren’t talking to an An-cap, they were always there waiting to latch on to some turn of phrase and use it against you, and everyone was too preoccupied with countering their nonsense to reach any kind of high-level discussion. I eventually got fed up with that and found that my beliefs were more challenged by going to explicitly leftist spaces because we had shared assumptions and were speaking the same language, and didn’t feel the need to be as defensive. I was never going to be convinced of anything by the An-caps and all talking to them accomplished was pissing me off.
The fediverse’s design is actually quite brilliant, because you can have a space to discuss things substantively among like-minded people while at the same time interacting with other groups.
Is it even an instance banning users or comms on an instance? Like take out the genai comm bans and see what remains?
This is a pretty disappointing post Rimu. It appears very out of character from your usual content and feels like a bit of a hit piece.
Also why post it to !fediverse@lemmy.world when you have !fediverse@piefed.social?
Why is this out of character? It’s entirely like Rimu to stir up drama against leftist instances.
Reminder that Rimu hates leftists and anti-fascists more than racists and fascists.
What is the modlog for, if not holding moderators to account?
What’s to ‘account’ for banning people?
Do moderators reflect instances or communities?
If communities have high rates of bad-faith posters engaging to troll and harass them, is that something that needs to be held to ‘account’?
its so funny how people complained about blahaj, the trans instance yet they dont ban very high at all, i suspect its alot of transphobic comments being directed towards the instance that are getting people banned.
blahaj is up there likely due to signicant transphobia too.
if you look at the modlog of every “blahaj is an authoritarian instance” user you will find they either keep misgendering people, talked over trans people and refused to be corrected or did things like denouncing neopronouns everytime
I am banned from a bunch of blahaj because I said that they were as bad as ml once. Never made any transphobic comments (nor am I, for the record).
I was not surprised to see them so high up.
I am banned from a bunch of blahaj because I said that they were as bad as ml once.
No, you were banned from blahaj because you were arguing that DEI is bad, and that there is no such thing as stolen land, because “everyone does it”
First off, that was months ago now. Why would you spend your time doing that?
Second, that’s probably a terrible paraphrasing of what I actually said and without any of the context around it. I don’t think DEI is bad. I do think everyone should have equal opportunities regardless of gender, sexuality, and race.
Finally, I truly do believe there’s no such thing as stolen land though, at least in the context of the discussion from what I recall. Your unnuanced summary, “because everyone does it” , has been shortened to further push your attempt at making me look bad.
This is why I said blahaj is as bad as ml. Bandwagoning, echo chamber communities that don’t want to hear an opinion that isn’t fully in line with the Correct Opinion©™®. I don’t even think my opinions were that controversial.
Ada being the awesome woman she is once again. Thank you.
Maybe you shouldn’t call for banning anal a Barry.
He knows what he did!
You deserve it. Blahaj is not as terrible as ML
When are they going to prove that? This thread isn’t helping lol
deleted by creator
The burden of proof is on you. To my knowledge Blahaj is not pro russia
We have dedicated anti ai trolls who go and get banned from dozen of genai comms, make alts then go and get banned again. We have serial harassers who make dozen of accounts and go and spew bigotry. Your methodology is so flawed, it’s laughable. Did you even check the age of the accounts being banned?The amount of comments? The amount of downvotes? Cross-reference with other instance bans? Check if their own instance banned them? Did you have any amount of rigor before throwing out your half-assed conclusions?
There’s lies, damn lies, and statistics…
Did you even check the age of the accounts being banned?The amount of comments? The amount of downvotes? Cross-reference with other instance bans? Check if their own instance banned them? Did you have any amount of rigor before throwing out your half-assed conclusions?
The answer is to all is no. Why bother doing research when you can make shit up and doctor photos!
Can’t wait until Rimu claims Db0 had to be defed for not tolerating racism and bigotry with slander.
lmao at these attempts at manufacturing consent. L.w desperate to push for a narrative that would just let them defederate already
Average age of accounts being banned, grouped by instance:
SELECT i.domain AS instance, AVG(EXTRACT(EPOCH FROM (NOW() - u.created)) / (60*60*24)) AS avg_account_age_days FROM mod_log ml INNER JOIN "user" u ON ml.target_user_id = u.id INNER JOIN instance i ON u.instance_id = i.id WHERE ml.action = 'ban_user' AND i.domain IN ('lemmy.ml', 'lemmy.dbzer0.com', 'lemmy.world', 'piefed.social', 'lemmy.blahaj.zone', 'pawb.social', 'lemmy.ca', 'sh.itjust.works', 'lemmy.zip', 'feddit.org', 'programming.dev', 'discuss.tchncs.de', 'sopuli.xyz', 'lemmy.today', 'slrpnk.net', 'beehaw.org', 'jlai.lu') GROUP BY i.domain ORDER BY avg_account_age_days DESC;lemmy.dbzer0.com is towards the young side but not really out of the ordinary. It’s the instances like lemmy.today, lemmy.zip and piefed.social that are unusual.
Does this take into account the account age when they got banned? You can clearly see that older instances are on the higher level. Mate really, this shit ain’t easy, and jumping to publish with flawed methodology like this just comes off as a hit piece
It’s also at least partially explained by the fact we frequently take ban actions for reports of transphobia, or of zionism, for example. Whereas that only sometimes happens on the bigger instances who tend to draw their lines in different places, to put it delicately.
“But it’s anti free speech to let people spew hate speech! You’re just ban happy!”
@eugenevdebs the freedom of association includes the freedom to not associate.
It doesn’t give one person license to make that decision for thousands of users, in a paternalistic way. Ask the damn users. Otherwise it’s nothing but admins treating their instances like personal fiefdoms.
@Flatworm7591 this is one advantage decentralized platforms/protocols like NOSTR have over polycentric platforms/protocols like Lemmy/ActivityPub
Me, scrolling through the comments:
“Hey everyone, look at my juvenile attempts at statistics! Look how obviously bad some people seem when I do a shit job at it while ALSO failing to apply any context of the domain being studied to my thoughts, let alone to my ‘calculations’ and conclusions!”
This is a terrible metric from the fucking jump. And you did a shit job of it from there. Fuck you, truly.
[Edit: love how ya closed with “so who’s weirder guyz, the marxists, the furries, or the db0s?!” Just painfully obvious how you started the whole shebang, you hate all of the groups lol, because you’re a dumb asshole and not very happy about being one. Just remember, the option is always yours to simply shut the fuck up and read, then think, instead.]
I have no idea about pawb.social, but it’s almost certainly heavily bloated by bans for downvoting on AI communities on dbzer0 (and maybe some other communities).
I also imagine places like lemmy.world are distorted due to them receiving the lions share of new communities, many of which end up abandoned - whereas smaller, more ‘community’ instances are stricter and will delete troll/spam/abandoned communities.
Is this permanent bans and/or temporary bans?
Hi Rimu,
I see you’ve banned one of the communities I moderate !europe@lemmy.dbzer0.com, deleting it entirely from your instance and denying access to members who had subscribed from there.
Two questions if you don’t mind. Why are you so ban happy? Was there something wrong with the community or was this based on your personal feelings of a particular user?
So, yes you banned a community moderated by multiple users because you personally felt slighted at being banned by one person.
Thanks for the explanation.
Its like some admins have zero concept of consensus or community-based decision making. They just wanna play server daddy, and daddy always knows best. 😂
I spent 8 years in organisations that operated with consensus-based decision making. IRL, not larping online.
You don’t know me. Even a little bit.
You don’t know me. Even a little bit.
Your actions are louder than your words. Your continued bad faith and constant siding with other bad faith actors are bigger than your empty platitudes and statements.
Your personality is reflected in your actions. You’re a digital dictator.
You’re a digital dictator.
That’s completely false and borderline harassment.
Stop sucking up.
Calling in someone’s documented actions and bad faith isn’t harassment, it’s the truth.
Supporting doctored screenshots and spreading lies is harassment, that’s why Rimu has done in the last month.
And yet you don’t see an issue with the way this was handled?
So, yes you banned a community moderated by multiple users because you personally felt slighted at being banned by one person.
I don’t need to know you, I just observe what actions you take. You went off half cocked in this post like it was some sort of gotcha.
Also not sure why you suddenly have it in for our instance recently. It seems like you’ve thrown in your hat with Kaplan who is seemingly determined to get rid of the last remaining leftist instances. That’s extremely disappointing.
Also not sure why you suddenly have it in for our instance recently.
Being labelled as a Zionist is probably the reason.
When this was discussed last week with db0, db0 said to just move on as people tend to call everyone a lot of things on the Internet.
On the other hand, it could also be expected than instance admins take actions against this type of disinformation. Dbzer0 staff prefers not too for ideological reasons, but that’s the core of the disagreement: should instance admins allow mods to spread disinformation in modlogs?
If Rimu wants us to reverse a misguided community ban by a community mod I’d be happy to do so. But he hasn’t even asked afaik. We are actually quite reasonable people, despite claims to the contrary.
I don’t have any particular beef with Rimu except for the current hostility towards our admin team. And hit jobs like this post are not helpful.
europe@lemmy.dbzer0.com has returned to piefed.social after we confirmed that the moderator in questions mod-logs would not continue to federate out.
After removing all subscriptions, deleting all votes, you’ve handed back an empty husk because Rimu’s fragile ego was bruised. Cheers! Great leadership on display at PieFed.social lately.
I don’t think this is terribly meaningful. Do you take into account unmoderated communities? Some communities and mods are also more ban happy than others, so one instance can have communities that very rarely ban and ones that ban a lot, and how big those communities are will also vary.
A more meaningful analysis would try to measure the impact of ban-happy communities by adjusting for their size/activity or would compare individual communities.
Edit: Some communities or mods also get harassed a lot and therefore need to be more ban happy (like womens stuff), but I don’t think accounting for that would be within the scope of what you’re looking at, but it’s worth being aware of.
Womemstuff is on the blahaj piefed, not the blahaj lemmy, so I guess it wasn’t included in the dataset?
There’s something interesting here, I’d love to read more comprehensive research on this topic.
That’s true! I meant more as an example of a community that because of its nature has to ban more than other communities!
Also it occurs to me that I have no idea if rimu is looking at instance bans, community bans, or all bans. Instance bans will typically also include community bans which can inflate the numbers if all bans are counted in the data
Edit: in fact it’s all weird. if you instance ban someone early before they can participate much they technically get very few community bans, whereas if you ban someone who has participated a lot they’ll get lots of community bans as well (when you are instance banned you get banned from all communities you’ve participated in on that instance). an instance that is more trigger happy will have fewer community bans than an instance that is slow to instance ban
Edit 2: And then there’s temporary bans! I dunno if those have been counted
According to the spreadsheet, the data was scraped from the piefed modlog. It searched for entries for ban_user, which seems to include both instance bans, community bans, and temporary bans. So it appears to me, it just scraped the piefed modlog within the last year and counted any entry for ban_user, associated the entry with the moderator who performed the action and returned the count. I’m no PHP expert so I’ve included the PHP code below. Pretty sure user_id is the moderator who did the action, because the target seems to be suspect_user_name.
php code from spreadsheet
select ml.user_id, u.title, u.ap_id, count(*) as c from mod_log as ml inner join "user" as u on u.id = ml.user_id where ml.user_id is not null and ( ml.action = 'ban_user') and ml.created_at >= now() - interval '1 year' group by ml.user_id, u.ap_id, u.title order by c desc;As far as I can tell, instance bans appear as one single entry, and community bans are also a single entry. And this seems to be counting total ban actions, not the total number of user accounts that have been banned.
Any instance that moderates in a way that allows users to accumulated multiple bans will be over-reported. If an instance does mostly community bans and is reluctant to give a sitewide ban will be over-reported. A forgiving instance that only bans temporarily, or allows users to be unbanned easily will also be over-reported. A weeklong ban and a sitewide permaban are all one counted entry in the modlog.
My gut thought is that a malicious ban-happy instance would be one that would escalate immediately. One that gives an instancewide ban at the first violation. In this case, they would be very under-reported. In this case, a banned user could only generate one entry at maximum.
I thought that was likely why blahaj is so much lower than I would expect, but I think there’s another issue.
The spreadsheet got instance information by associating the moderator action with the mod who did the action. There’s a list of the moderators included and their count, but the only blahaj moderator in that list is ada. I know we have other mods, why aren’t they in the dataset presented in the spreadsheet? If this data is to be believed, the entire portion of the fediverse surveyed by these modlog php requests only has 20 moderators. That can’t be right. This data is very sus. Womensstuff’s mod actions can be seen in the modlog of other piefed instances, and I know those mods do a lot of bans, they should be in the spreadsheet’s list of mods but just aren’t.
There’s also the issue that piefed.social, seems to use the delete_user command instead of the ban command. My guess is that is similar to lemmy’s purge user action, probably maybe? From my browsing of the modlog that command doesn’t seem to be used by any other instance, at least not in a way that gets recorded by piefed. If the PHP command the spreadsheet said it used is accurate, it wouldn’t include any instances of delete_user, which would result in bans from piefed.social being very under-reported.
From my digging into this, it all seems incredibly suspicious. And my digging is making me believe this is pretty manipulative framing.
I want to see this done properly. I want to see the stats where we learn the number of users that are banned by instances, rather than the total number of moderator ban actions. I want to see a better study that addresses the myriad concerns raised in these comments, but most importantly.
I want to see this study done by someone who is impartial. The developer and admin of one of the instances in the dataset has a major major conflict of interest and really shouldn’t be the one publishing this kind of research.
There’s also the issue that piefed.social, seems to use the delete_user command instead of the ban command. My guess is that is similar to lemmy’s purge user action, probably maybe? From my browsing of the modlog that command doesn’t seem to be used by any other instance, at least not in a way that gets recorded by piefed. If the PHP command the spreadsheet said it used is accurate, it wouldn’t include any instances of delete_user, which would result in bans from piefed.social being very under-reported.
This is mostly used for banning of new users (usually AI bots, trolls, spammers) rather than as a rule. I don’t know if rimu’s data detects that, but it does specifically note the average account age of a banned user from piefed.social is much younger than most other instances. But the “delete user” bans do show in the mod-logs from piefeds perspective.
I know they’re in the modlog. That’s how I know about them. I think the PHP command used would not have counted them. When I, as a browser user filter the piefed modlog page by the term used on the PHP command, it excludes delete_user entries.
Could you make a graph with defederations? I suspect that plays a role
That won’t be terribly meaningful. lbz has a huge defederation list, because we seeded our defederation list with defeds from our sharkey instance. So as a result, lbz has hundreds of defeds of dead instances from 3 years ago and defeds of mastodon, pleroma and other instances that have never interacted with the threadiverse in any meaningful way.
If you’re just trying to work out how much of the threadiverse each threadiverse instances has defederated, you’d need to do a bit of filtering on the results.
