Hello I’m not a person who is affected by this community moderator but I’m posting on behalf of people who are, since they don’t seem to know of this community yet. I attempted to reach some via DM but I’m not sure they’ll respond. So I’m making this post since I feel this needs to be addressed.

Recently I was made aware of a community that appeared randomly on Lemmy.world. It seems to be a troll community given the type of content, but the reason I’m posting about it here specifically is that this mod seems to be banning anyone who points this out or goes against his narrative. Furthermore he is only using the autoremove on ban function, not removing any content the users have posted, which I believe is deliberate in attempt to prevent the content from showing up under the modlog and revealing the hypocrisy.


Some samples of comments:

Comment from: @[email protected]

Everything else you posted has been pretty cringe but what he fuck is up with this one, dude lol

comment from: @[email protected]

free software is SLOWING DOWN tech advancement??? WHAT???

comment from: @[email protected]

i genuinely do not understand your point

comment from: @[email protected]

First off, nice new community. I look forward to days of quality posts such as this./s

Second, how many Linux distros have this level of data collection, and what is their estimated market share?

Original comment link


All of these were retrieved from the API, even though they aren’t included in the modlogs, I could’ve included more but it’s kind of a time consuming process to look for them and retrieve them. Viewing removed comments is easier on Lemmy than it is on Reddit but it still isn’t easy.

What do you guys think, does this seem like power-tripping? Also does this person’s content seem like blatant troll content?

CC: @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected]

People who’s comments I mentioned, I CCed them so they know I did this on their behalf

  • @[email protected]
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    20 hours ago

    This is an example of a community I don’t subscribe to, because I’m not the target demographic.

    I think a Linux sucks community should exist, it can exist, and if the moderator wants to remove anything about Linux not sucking that’s fine too. The way this moderator is doing it, they should just turn on mod only posting.

    I looked at the community sidebar, and one of the community rules is no promoting Linux, no defending Linux, so at least it’s consistent

    Lemmy needs a diverse set of voices.

    Counterexample: if I go into fuck cars and talk about vehicles in any positive fashion, I’m going to get dog piled and probably banned

    • @Serinus
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      38 hours ago

      I’ve suggested a rule in the past, but we don’t have this rule now.

      Community Manipulation

      Communities should not be overly moderated in order to enforce a specific narrative. Respectful disagreement should be allowed in a smaller proportion to the established narrative.

      i.e. A user should be able to (respectfully, infrequently) post/comment about a study showing marijuana is a gateway drug to !marijuana without moderation tools being used to censor that content.

      There are times people wouldn’t like it, but it’d fully solve this !linuxsucks issue.

      • Socialist Mormon Satanist
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        -86 hours ago

        Communities should not be overly moderated in order to enforce a specific narrative.

        Agreed. That’s exactly what is killing Reddit. They ban/permaban so many people just for disagreeing with them.

        • Unruffled [he/him]
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          24 hours ago

          Can you imagine ml or hexbear adopting this rule though? I think it depends on the type of community. If it’s a “safe space” type community then I think it’s fine to keep out the dissenters. Eg I often remove right wing comments in lefty memes because it’s supposed to be a space for memes, not people shouting at each other. Likewise, if someone starts ranting about the evils of piracy in c/piracy then they are getting a community ban. But a US politics community has to be tolerant of alternate viewpoints, because of the nature of the community. That’s why it took a while to ban linkerbaan. He wasn’t banned for his politics though, more because of the way he treated other users in such a hostile way all the time, even people who mostly agreed with him.

          • @Serinus
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            12 hours ago

            Can you imagine ml or hexbear adopting this rule though?

            Wouldn’t it be great? But yes, it’s antithetical to those instances, which are fully intended as propaganda.

            My hope is that the best ideas can handle a little dissent, while the ideas that fully rely on memes and echo chambers get deflated.

            I’ve seen what happens when moderation enforces an echo chamber. It’s so much easier to believe a narrative when it’s the only one we hear. It’s the entire premise of reading fiction. We’re primed to believe the story goes as the author says, whether it’s fiction or non-fiction. Timed correctly, it doesn’t take a huge opposing narrative to trigger us to think about it more.

          • Socialist Mormon Satanist
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            4 hours ago

            Yeah, I didn’t know who he was until recently. I was falsely accused of being an alt of him a few times. They would just reply with “linkerbaan.” But I thought it was some Swedish word for “ban” and they were saying I should be banned. lmao

            After looking him up today, I see that he would go way overboard on the attacks. So I don’t even see how anyone would compare him to me.

            Even seeing that, I don’t think he should have got banned from whole instance, seems to me community bans would be enough, but I’m sure he’ll just alt up and come back on anyway. He seems, um, determined. lol

    • @rtxn
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      19 hours ago

      I’ve had run-ins with Linuxsucks’ owner and basically only poster over on linuxmemes. They’re a troll, a contrarian, uninterested in any kind of honest or good-faith discussion, and an overall dickhead. The community is a one-man circlejerk.

      You’re right about needing counterpoints, but Linuxsucks ain’t it.

      • Draconic NEOOP
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        914 hours ago

        I think he basically only made it because he somehow thought that if he had his own community his memes wouldn’t get as heavily downvoted, as they do on [email protected] though they’re pretty wrong about that. Pretty much all but one of their posts there on linuxsucks are getting downvoted heavily.

    • @Delphia
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      916 hours ago

      Oh, Hello voice of common sense. Been a while!

      Going into subs about a specific topic to troll should get your shit removed.

    • @[email protected]
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      1319 hours ago

      I’ve actually been fairly fine in fuck cars, both Reddit and Lemmy editions. I actually like cars, well, some of them anyway.

      • Draconic NEOOP
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        1719 hours ago

        The difference between [email protected] and linuxsucks is that the first one is largely a fact and logic based community about the problems with car dependency in urban areas, and car-dependent infrastructure.

        linuxsucks is a single troll who’s talking shit about linux for seemingly no real reason, some of his posts are insanely illogical, and make very little sense. So yeah I definitely think these communities are anything like each other.

        • @[email protected]
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          17 hours ago

          I don’t think you want to create an expectation that communities have to be logical and open to reasoned debate. That’s a lot of work to enforce

          • Draconic NEOOP
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            14 hours ago

            I don’t expect that for all communities. That would be unreasonable. Though generally, it’s preferable to not have communities with no other purpose than trolling. Which is basically all of the content in the community I mentioned in the post. These types of communities don’t really benefit anyone and can be breeding grounds for toxicity and possibly even dangerous misinformation.

          • @TrickDacy
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            314 hours ago

            I like how far backwards you’re bending over to ignore the point. You must really love windows

            • @[email protected]
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              -313 hours ago

              The point is the discussion is more valuable than being right. It doesn’t matter if I’d like Linux or not.

              • @TrickDacy
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                512 hours ago

                A point was being made, your only concern seems to be ignoring it

        • @IsThisAnAI
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          -416 hours ago

          That’s some horse blinders my friend. Most of the folks in that sub just scream at cars and God forbid a truck.

          • Draconic NEOOP
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            15 hours ago

            Reading comprehension ain’t your strong suit eh.

            I guess that's not surprising

            Hello I’m not a person who is affected by this community moderator but I’m posting on behalf of people who are, since they don’t seem to know of this community yet. I attempted to reach some via DM but I’m not sure they’ll respond. So I’m making this post since I feel this needs to be addressed.

    • @[email protected]
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      111 hours ago

      Will you though? Dogpiled? Yes, that’s just the nature of Lemmy. Banned? I have not heard of this happening but maybe I’m just ignorant.

    • Lvxferre
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      619 hours ago

      I think that there are key differences between

      • A community criticising something, backed up by reason and evidence. Even if it’s something popular, doubly true if there’s a circlejerk around that thing. This can and should exist.
      • A community created to circlejerk against something, through insane troll “logic” and silencing any dissidence. This is fertile grounds for idiocy and misinformation, thus harmful for the society [I can go further on that if desired] and the Fediverse [ditto], and should not exist.

      Sometimes the boundary between both is not clear - but this community, unless it’s a troll comm, falls cleanly into the second case. Specially given how opaque the moderator is trying to be (check how none of the removals appear in the modlog).

      • Draconic NEOOP
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        719 hours ago

        I think it’s very clearly a troll community since really the only person posting there is the mod, most of which are very transparently troll content, like this one hating on the idea of OpenSource and Free licenses for some really weird reason, that hasn’t actually been clarified. Someone said to me when I showed that to them that they could be an alt-right corporate shill, but I don’t have enough information to come to that conclusion. Only thing I can clearly tell is that they are very obviously a troll.

        And yeah I definitely agree that these types of communities are very harmful, and definitely something we should nip in the bud before they get out of hand and start spreading disinformation, as well as fostering toxic or even dangerous sentiment.