Quadruple moderation is killing Lemmy. It’s a gift to Reddit

There’s a rule about online communities I want people here to understand: the 90-9-1 rule.

Roughly 90% lurk, 9% comment, and 1% create.

Additionally - lemmy monthly active users is stangant at about 35k monthly active and not improving:
https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/stats

When I first got to Lemmy, I had trouble finding enough content I was interested in even commenting on. So I figured: why complain about the lack of content when one can start posting it myself?

That's why I post so much.

If people don't post, most Lemmy communities simply don't have enough creators to sustain themselves. You need posts before lurkers can lurk, commenters can comment, and some of those people eventually become creators themselves.

I'm not posting just to flood Lemmy. I'm trying to help solve one of Lemmy's biggest problems: not enough content creators.

And frankly, doing that has been a nightmare.

Lemmy has a quadruple-moderation problem

Every active content creator has to survive four layers:

1. Community moderators can remove your posts or ban you from the community.
2. Your home-instance admins can ban your entire account.
3. Receiving-instance admins can block/ban you for everyone on their instance, even though you don't belong to it.
4. Public moderation history means those decisions follow you. One moderator's decision can influence another and snowball into more moderation.

For prolific content creators, that's brutal.

I've had multiple accounts banned over one or two posts that somebody didn't like. Months of posting, comments, engagement and contributions can effectively disappear from a community because of a couple of moderation decisions.

And the more you contribute, the worse the odds become. If you make hundreds or thousands of posts, eventually you're going to post something that one moderator somewhere doesn't like.

You don't need one moderation team to tolerate you. You need multiple independent moderators and admins, across multiple servers, to remain aligned indefinitely.

There's almost no cost to deleting a creator

This is another major difference from Reddit.

There is generally no financial investment in a Lemmy community's content. A volunteer moderator can ban someone who contributed months of posts and comments and lose all of that person's past and future contributions without losing revenue, salary or investment. Did you know all creator posts are wiped out from lemmy after account banned?

The creator paid the cost in time.

The community loses the content.

The users lose something to read and discuss.

And the moderator who pushed the button may personally lose essentially nothing.

So who benefits from making prolific content creation this difficult?

Because it certainly isn't Lemmy.

And this creates an enormous attack surface

I genuinely have trouble believing that everyone complaining about prolific posters simply doesn't understand this dynamic. At some point I have to question whether some of it is deliberate.

If I were Reddit and wanted to undermine a federated competitor, this is exactly where I'd attack it: its content creators.

You don't need to hack Lemmy. You don't need to DDoS instances. You don't need to take anything offline.

Lemmy already provides the mechanism.

Report prolific contributors. Call their posting "spam." accuse them of being bots. Point moderators toward their public moderation histories. Get one account banned somewhere, then let that decision influence moderators elsewhere.

Eventually the creator gets tired of fighting and leaves.

I'm not claiming I have proof Reddit is doing this. I'm saying Lemmy's architecture makes this kind of subversion ridiculously easy, and Reddit would be an obvious beneficiary.

Reddit doesn't have this same federated quadruple-jeopardy problem. You're primarily dealing with the moderation of the subreddit you're contributing to.

Lemmy desperately needs more people creating content, yet its moderation structure makes life progressively harder for the people who create the most of it.

At some point we should be asking:

Who actually benefits from that?

A plea to admins: protect your creators ban reddit agents instead

Before banning someone, look at who is contributing and who is reporting.

If an account with zero posts in years reports someone who has contributed hundreds of posts, don't treat those two users as equally valuable to the health of the community.

That doesn't put creators above the rules. Remove bad posts. Warn people. Moderate proportionally.

But stop throwing away months of content and future contributions over one or two posts someone disliked.

Creating content takes time. Reporting takes seconds.

Protect the people actually building your communities.

edit: I am reposting from reddit - there is no rules against that. its actually great thing for majority of lemmy users!

This reposting tool is open source - i've never been hiding the fact im reposting from reddit.
people get only high quality pre-dozed, pre-moderated content.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/lemmy-deep-lighthouse/

I think more people should be using similar tools and populate lemmy with content. - htis is the only way to move that 35k mau number and creat conditions for more OC on lemmy

edit 2 " but we dont want content" argument.

The fuck you dont. who the fuck is we?

And this is why I don't buy the argument that the people still here represent what users want.

Look at the numbers.

• Fediverse: ~14 million registered, ~1.17 million MAU.
• Lemmy: ~756,000 registered, ~35,000 MAU.

Lemmy has had three quarters of a million accounts created and only about 4.6% of that number is active monthly.

Obviously that doesn't mean 95% were all regular users who quit. But it does tell us something important: the people currently active are a tiny, self-selected fraction of everyone who has tried this platform.

So when 30 existing users say "WE don't want more content," you're hearing from the people the current system successfully retained. You're not hearing from the enormous number of people who tried Lemmy and aren't here anymore.

Maybe instead of assuming the remaining users have figured out what Lemmy should be, we should be asking why so many people tried it and didn't stick around.

let's post moar \o/

TL;DR: Spammer is mad anti-spam measures are working.

Seems you post a lot of duplicates. No wonder your posts get deleted if you keep spamming exactly the same post multiple times??!!? And then you violate community rules... After that you seem to be doing ban-evasion... I mean... Seems to me like Lemmy is working exactly as intended?! This isn't a place to dump random spam posts? You gotta learn what this place is about.

You can't just throw some dogfood at people and demand they like it. You're not the center of the universe. Maybe start your own community if that's your thing. You'd be able to make up your own rules there. There's a button in the top menu bar.

Nobody. Unless you had the capability/knowledge/will to maintain your own instance, which makes your content and yourself unbreakable.

1. Public moderation history means those decisions follow you. One moderator's decision can influence another and snowball into more moderation.

This has got to be the first time I’ve seen the modlog listed as a negative aspect of lemmy?

im considering that.
but I think it would be the fifth jeopardy. they can complain to get your instance defederated

Did you know all creator posts are wiped out from lemmy after account banned?

I'm dubious of that, because I've often seen posts with a red [banned from community] tag right beside the user, which often made me scratch my head - how/why is that post there if the user is banned?

Another thing to keep in mind, we don't need to be reddit in terms of content volume. Yeah, a lot of us expect that, but it's better for us, as humans in the long term, to be slower here

Strictly speaking, it's not the first time. We've had issues with the specific way the modlog works, before. But usually that's edge-cases. Not someone questioning transparency and accountability be part of the platform in itself...

community ban dont remove conent.
instance ban in addition - removes all content. I've had thousnds of posts wiped out that way.

The modlog itself isn't the problem. A public modlog combined with effectively no simple straightforward appeals process is the problem.

A moderator can ban you, put a reason in the public record, and there is no built-in independent process to challenge it, present evidence, or have the decision reviewed. That entry can then be seen by the next moderator, who may treat the previous ban as evidence that you're a problem.

So the reality is pretty brutal:

Ban → public record → no meaningful appeal → next moderator sees the ban → increased chance of another ban.

Transparency is good. An irreversible public accusation with no real mechanism to dispute it is not.

I think modlogs should not be accessible to public unless there is a simple dispute process and accountability for abusive moderators also baked in. some jury, something

If you're going to repost someone's picture from Reddit that they tagged as "OC" (Original Content), at least don't copy the title verbatim and mislead people into thinking your repost is OC...

https://ani.social/post/35620231

https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1vn59fb/shark_fin_eclipse_sunset_mallorca_es_oc/

So what? It still exists on the web. People can visit you, enjoy your content. Make a stand.

if there is no independent dispute process, and no accountability and removal process for abusive moderators - modlog should not be public in my opinion. Just too easy to exploit and influence

in my opinion - lemmy is just trying to be defederated reddit. I think it would be mistake to think of it any other way.
from that perspective - I see no problem with reposting highly upvoted reddit content, absolutely every major social network recycles content from other network. Only lemmy seems to be pointing that out as a problem for some reason.

Hi it's me, the person you're talking about.

Let's get one thing out of the way first: you've admitted that your posts are automated, as if it wasn't obvious. You're a bot. You're not tagged as one, but sanitation@lemmy.today is a bot that a human sometimes uses.

Now as for the content you bot, I don't have an issue with a lot of it. Go ahead and post your links and memes. Meme culture is built on theft, anyway. I don't dislike you any more than any other mass poster who is rarely present in the comments of their posts

It's the content you steal from OC communities that drives me crazy. You justify it as "encouraging content" but that sure hasn't planned out - you're the dominant poster in every com you repost to.

You take every joke from shittymoviedetails and, by not linking the source, basically claim it as your own. But don't think the solution is to include a link. Just don't repost it at all.

You copy and paste other people's complaints to a community for venting about minor gripes. And since they're not YOUR complaints, you aren't getting the catharsis of the original poster. You're literally just spreading negativity. This one especially pisses me off because THAT COMMUNITY WAS DOING FINE before you flooded it.

If you're gonna be a spambot, at least show us the respect of fixing your shitty repost machine to deal with long titles.

TL;DR: You're an untagged bot making the Internet a worse place by reposting the dumbest shit from reddit

I agree with your diagnosis, but I disagree with your treatment. You are doing the same mistake I did when I implemented content mirroring on alien.top: you are putting out so much automated "content" that outsiders will look at this and think the community is just a place for you to dump links.

Also, please drop the main character syndrome and the "Reddit agent" paranoia. You have multiple people here telling you that your approach is harmful to the groups that are already here. It's not a conspiracy. Reddit doesn't care about you.

I mostly agree with your post, but come on. If it’s OC, it should be credited appropriately.

I pull some stuff from Reddit to repost, but I always pull from the source and not Reddit itself. Lemmy doesn’t need to be an exact clone of Reddit to succeed. We should be crediting creators where possible.

Also, please drop the main character syndrome and the "Reddit agent" paranoia.

not just me. many people tried lemmy and back on reddit at this point. just too little content, too much moderation

Can I point out - lemmy MAU is stangant 35k a month, this is a problem.
if its still stagnant by now - it will never improve organically going forward:

https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/stats

what is your solution for attracting users?

all im hearing is some whishy washy - "they will come" organically - but they are not coming organically. why is that? there is no content thats why.

Also, please drop the main character syndrome and the "Reddit agent" paranoia.

I post to communities that Im interested in. thats why I came here from reddit.
PCMR and gaming had no contribution at all when I started posting. Im building up those communities, ya welcome

in fact I intentionally dont want to post to games community as it had more contributors, I intentionally picked community with less active contributions. and im sorry - many mods actually reached out and thanked me for contributing.

That's a known issue. There might be some improvements for you with the upcoming version 1.0. I'm not sure if that's gradual improvement or more fundamental changes... But many parts of the moderation system aren't perfect and everyone is aware of its limitations. I think you're invited to help out if you can contribute code, come up with a specification that works smoothly in real-life (including edge-cases), become a mod and do a better job at it than the current ones, or anything like that.

I guess complaining is fine as well. But you really don't want to be part of the problem at the same time. Nobody is going to listen to you this way. You want to be part of the solution to give some weight to your words/opinion.

And good luck with your opinion how Reddit is better than this place... As far as I know they have way better systems to track you, prevent ban-evasion, they have some fully automatic systems to silence you... You can't even look at what kind of information they keep about you... That's kinda caprice as we do times a thousand if you ask me. But you're also invited to use that platform if you like it better?!

lemmy userbase is stuck ar 35k a month. thats it.
people that propose - "lets do more of the same" and expecting different results are delusional.

and since its so small - there is no content, and since lemmy bans creators that are trying to change this - it will never change.

so if this continues - there is a reason for active creators to also think - wth am I wasting my time for?

You literally just repost from reddit. You arent the first person to do it, you won't be the last, but it doesn't actually make the fediverse look more active, it makes it look like a bot-filled ghost town.

Yeah I'm testing new reposting tool. Why

• sanitation@lemmy.radio

Its optional, you can ban and remove, or just ban. Up to the admin.

If it’s OC, it should be credited appropriately.

see Velma- problem is people complain if I put links back to reddit. (I used to do that)
many communities dont want to credit reddit thats why I stopped doing that.

lemmy has double identity issue - nobody can agree on one pattern.

This reposting tool is open source - im not hiding the fact im reposting from reddit, never did as you discovered.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/lemmy-deep-lighthouse/

I encourage more people to use it and populate lemmy communities with content.

using automation is not against lemmy.world rules. There is a real person clicking the button and reading all ofthe responses. I just can post posts Im interested in much much quicker - that should not be a problem, thats a good thing.

OMG - the modlog functionality is severely lacking.

But it’s infinitely better than reddit’s modlog.

Ignore people complaining is the best advice I can give on Lemmy after being here for a while.

Instead of trying to post in communities with shit-ass mods (looking at you JonsJava), find communities that have more reasonable mods and build up there. You have to find the people that appreciate your posts which is frustrating sometimes, but so much better than trying to deal with mods that love the smell of their own farts.

Lemmy doesn't ban creators. You are just not a creator. Your post slop and repost shit from reddit. If people would want that in their communities they could replace you with a few dozen lines of code. By all means, stop wasting your time doing the job of a bot.

Ok but... You're not creating. You're flooding Lemmy with garbage from reddit. None of what you post is your creation. And it's all low quality reddit crap. In !workreform@lemmy.world, for example, it was a fairly slow community, which is fine. Then you started flooding it with low-effort memes, drowning out the useful posts. This will kill a community. "Then post the content you want to see", you'll say. But there's no point when for every one useful post there are thirty trash memes pushing it down.

Your actions are actively harmful to Lemmy.

not a bot. another thing that pushes active creators away from lemmy - relitigating everything over and over and over again.
its genuinely exousting

and repost shit from reddit.

that makes me a creator yes. for lemmy.
thats what most posters do - only tiny tiny minority create OC

How about reposting everything over and over?

Why are you so insistent on multiplying and spreading what already exists?

Why is MORE content better for you than GOOD content?

I would rather Lemmy be 100% OC with a handful of posts per day than for it to be yet another bucket where you can dump ancient memes. We've got enough sites like that.

Also, definitely a bot. Your clipboard isn't truncating post titles when you manually copy and paste shit from reddit.

Also also, you're not a creator. Why would an actual creator be incentivized to use a site where 99% of it is shit stolen from reddit? Wouldn't they prefer a site with fellow creators?

I'm ok with you getting pushed out.

Someone can create their own instance?

Also: not all moderators follow the same moderation style. When the Tesseract block list leaked, most Lemmings took it as a badge of honour. I was on it as well :3

I think it should be done per community. if community wants to credit reddit with a link - I will absolutely comply.

you are putting out so much automated "content" that outsiders will look at this and think the community is just a place for you to dump links.

my posts are strictly rate limited several a day top, posts have to have 100+ upvotes on reddit - guaranteed high quality, have to be be recent (no more than 2 days), not have duplicates on lemmy, there are AI rules I typically add to enforce adherance with community rules etc. its only a high quailty highly rationed content.

1. It's the fediverse, not Lemmy.
2. It's decentralised. What you describe as "quadruple" is just the way this works
3. I don't like posts starting with "I want people here to understand"
4. 90%, 9% and 1% are very very rough estimates that vary greatly across platforms and communities
5. Not every post is a "creation". I don't like to be spammed with tons of links to news articles that OP probably didn't even read.
   And now I look at your username I think I see the problem.
   FWIW, I don't mind you doing that but I do mind you seeing yourself as a knight in shining armor for "helping" the fediverse lift off. And complaining about mods/admins who might see things more my way.
6. Comments are just as valid as posts
7. Idgaf about reddit, and I don't care about you creating a fedarated copy of it

edit: thanks for showing me that FF addon. That explains so much.

You are not an active creator. You are just trying to hack your way into community building. You are frustrated because most people are completely apathetic when it comes to actual action against Big Tech, and you think that by bringing a flamethrower to the beach you will be able to boil the oceans. Trust me, I have done the same mistake.

I post into workreform - because I support that community and its message an find those memes very very relevant.
its not crap. all that stuff then reaching frontpage on lemmy is quite telling. those posts reach 1k upvotes as well. This is a proof those posts are well received.

@frontg - you have 4 Posts in a year. you are the reason that people like me have to create more content the way I do it. if you would to contribute more I wouldnt have to.

Any post formatted like that comes straight out of an LLM. No user, no matter how dedicated or how mad, would take the time to format headers and bullet points.

Reposting stuff from reddit and posting whatever the LLM spat out. As far as I'm concerned, you are a contributing factor to a stagnant user base here.

most people and mods actually love my posts and that content is highly upvoted,

look at my post history - noone of it has negative karma. im only post content people like.

When I started using federated social media I had to block a lot of people* who just mindlessly churned out posts with links to often dubious news articles etc. It became much better after that.

And often they see themselves as knights in shining armor that "help the fediverse lift off".

It's just another version of the terminally online forum regular.

* judging by the usernames, often the same person using accounts on different instances

yeah - but if every active postere then is forced to create their own lemmy instance because the are forced out - I think thats a problem.

How about reposting everything over and over?

im not. I check for links and attempt to not repost existing links. I have 4400 posts and only small minority are accidental reposts. Thats why im urging moderators to pay attention - if one posts 20 posts and 10 of them are reposts - thats a problem.

if someone posts 4k posts and 3 of them are reposts - thats just statistics. Major difference in intent.

my posts

There are not "your posts", that's what I am saying. You are just parroting things you are find elsewhere, and you are doing it in a scale that is not compatible with the current demand here. You see people saying "I am thirsty" and you respond by pointing a firehose directly at their faces.

is not compatible with the current demand here

there is a demand. that demand just goes back to reddit.

"I am thirsty" and you respond by pointing a firehose directly at their faces

thats what reddit agents want you to belive. just limit posting bro, we dont need so much content bro. And then people just go back to reddit.

Bruh, calling yourself a creator for reposting shit other people also found and reposted to a different site is the equivalent of calling yourself an artist while using genAI. 🙄

what is your solution for attracting users?

"attracting new users" is not a sentiment that is shared by all of us, not at any cost anyhow.
The cost being the fediverse becoming a sad impersonal place (like reddit) before it even lifts off.
Your "solution" might attract a few people - those who think bigger numbers are better, always.

Upvotes are not a measure of value. That thought process is how you get reddit and Facebook.

Again, you aren't creating. You're slopping reddit's garbage over to Lemmy and suffocating its communities.

Edit: if you want to consider upvotes as a measure of value, look at the votes here. Everyone is disagreeing with you.

Yeah I really don't like people mass-posting news articles calling themselves creators.

they re my posts - because im the one posting them onto lemmy. this is valid name.
another thing reddit agents would do is argue pointless semantics and waste everyone time.