I got banned earlier today with the message “rule 1”, no other information about why, or which comment broke the rule. As far as I can tell it was this one, which just says “We want the bot gone. That’s it. It’s really that simple.”

So I checked the modlog for other bans, and @aniki@lemmings.world was banned today as well, also just for “rule 1”, probably either for the comment saying “a stupid bot writing useless bullshit” or “This is what you call “Not listening to criticism.””, neither of which are an attack on any person.

(Also earlier today @MindTraveller@lemmy.ca was banned with the message “fuck off”, which I’m pretty sure is not a reason to ban someone from a major community, but doesn’t appear to be related to the MBFC bot.)

One more today, @stormesp@lemm.ee was banned, again just “rule 1”, last comment being this one, again not an attack on any person.

So what’s the deal here? I couldn’t find any rules for mods on lemmy.world with a brief poke around, but are we letting mods run major communities like little fiefdoms, banning people for criticism?

  • ericjmorey@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4·
    17 days ago

    Quote: [the quote is really long, pls dont make me type it and just look at the link lol]

    Result: 15 day ban

    Note: the comment precedes the ban by 26 days, but catloaf’s recent comment history contains opinions critical of the LW News mod team

    I copied it for you:

    Link to the study, because the fuckers never do: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2405334121 Here’s what I was looking for:

    In all studies, we made certain that the participants and the people in the images were from the same nationality, since cultural familiarity is critical for the face–name matching effect to occur.

    Additionally, this survey was conducted by Israelis, and since it says it was translated into English in the paper, I assume it was conducted in Hebrew. They say “socioeconomic cues such as age and ethnicity are experimentally controlled”, but I don’t see that they explain how. My suspicion is that the results are affected by non-facial cues like clothing, hairstyle, facial hair, and indeed age. For example, if I showed you a picture of an old woman and asked if her name was Doris, Helen, Megan, or Kayley, which do you think it is? If I showed you a picture of a guy with short dark hair, possibly graying, beard stubble, and a collared denim shirt, is his name Edgar, Clarence, Emil, or James? Further, since they did some kind of control over the prompts, I have to assume they presented faces and names the respondents would be familiar with, meaning this does not necessarily hold outside of Israel and Israelis (and I assume mostly people ethnically Israeli Jewish). This reinforces my belief that their methodology is flawed, and while people might look like their names, their faces themselves do not change to fit, rather there’s a correlation with other factors like age (i.e. name popularity over time), grooming style, and so on.

    • catloafOPEnglish
      4·
      17 days ago

      I can’t imagine that comment was why I was banned. If it was, then it seems to me like they went digging to find an excuse to ban me.

      I wasn’t given any reason that comment was removed, either. As I replied to myself there, my only rule I can guess at violating was calling news article authors who don’t link or name the study “fuckers”, but as I said, I’m happy to remove that if it’s unacceptable.

      • ericjmorey@lemmy.worldEnglish
        21·
        16 days ago

        I’m not sure why you were banned, I was just annoyed about reading a screenshot of text.