For a while I didn’t block them b/c I wanted to see what and how much they were posting. The shtick was indeed getting old and after seeing the glut of posts today, I blocked them. Enough is enough and I know what they are about.

Trolling. Trolling and disinformation.

Ha! Yeah - in fact it evolved and expanded to the extent of almost all of his interactions being simply copying and pasting his responses ad nauseum. Very rarely saw him say anything he hadn’t already parroted back dozens and dozens of times. I kinda get why some people accused him of being a bot, because it’s hard to imagine a human deriving anything out of those sorts of interactions.

There are multiiple Stein Stans in the community who report anything remotely anti-Stein, even (especially?) when it’s true.

Mod tools are pretty limited.

We have a queue of reported posts and reported comments, from there it’s a manual lookup of user history in their profile and on the public modlog.

For actions, we can remove comments and posts, lock posts, ban users temporarily or permanently, feature posts in the community, and promote users to mods.

That would be awesome of you.

The response here is not about whether their behavior was socially acceptable, but whether it was an indication of a fake account being run by multiple people or a script or something.

I’m personally suspicious due to all those cut and pasted replies, but I suppose it’s possible that’s just an indication of obsession as well. I’ve saved text for a comment reply before, but it was because the text had a lot of citations and I was tired of refinding them each time. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of reason to save and repeat “I don’t have to explain anything to you. Thanks!”

“please stop replying because I feel compelled to say something in response.”

Modding at that point kind of becomes:

I’d rather be on Snoopy’s side than Lucy’s. ;)

As long as it’s not a non-sensical response and seems to fit the comment chain, I don’t see an inherent problem there.

Example:

“Well, we agree to disagree.” full stop. Discussion ended. No, I don’t have an issue with that.

They constantly troll anyone who responds to them. It’s sheer flame bait with every comment.

All of the posts and comments that user makes are universally Down voted, and pretty much everyone here hates this user. Why on earth you won’t ban them permanently is beyond any of us.

I appreciate that you want to give them the benefit of the doubt, but it’s obvious that they’re main goal is to provoke Arguments. Pretty much everyone in the affected communities, like news and politics, can’t stand the person. Nobody wants them there.

Please permanently ban them, at least from those communities.

I think this is balanced and fair. I don’t think they demonstrated any supremely shitty opinions, i.e. racism, bigotry, but their presence was incredibly annoying and they didn’t really participate in useful conversations and moreso used the reply box as a soapbox to say a lot of nonsense.

Moreover, I think banning until the election shows an understanding and restraint by the administration team that is commendable.

having shitty opinions is not a TOS violation

Good cause I’d be gone already

Yeah, they are literally bragging about being a troll in their profile when they boast about their downvotes.

That’s a much more recent turn. Not that long ago they were asking why they were getting such negative engagement. I think they decided to cling to ideology and take the negativity as an affirmation of their position. Make no mistake, I’m not asking for them not to be banned or anything. I have 100% left community that they’ve been apart of. And will not lament their absence. I don’t think it’s clear trolling.

It’s amazing how many people forgot about the classical “get a rise out of everyone with shitty arguments” troll, or forgot that the way to deal with them was to ignore and ban on sight. Fuck, I was practically in diapers when Usenet and BBSes were a thing and I still remember “don’t feed the troll.”

If “not genuine good faith engagement”, “dismissive”, “need for engagement”, “too much free time”, “unwillingness to understand or acknowledge other arguments”, and “toxicity” aren’t signs that someone is trolling, then can you please share the definition of trolling you’re using? In my eyes all of those things are classic troll behaviors.

I mean maybe, but I think it would be pretty obvious given the nature of how and what they post.

For local, lemmy.world users, yeah. I think the confounding factor is federation, but like I say, I raised the issue and we have people way smarter than me!

I asked in our Discord. I think the limiting factor is federation. I’m not sure how it’s possible to rate limit things in a federated environment.

Fortunatley we have smarter people than me around!

Clearly we just turn over moderating to ChatGPT, what could possibly go wrong? ;)

Oh very much so, which is why I, and other mods, were paying very close attention to what they were doing.

Reports fall into two categories:

“Oh, this guy again, can we ban them yet?”

and:

“Oh, god, it’s the person who reports everything…”

The weird part is in the latter case, you can’t just ignore ALL their reports, no matter how much you want to, because there is that 1 in 10 chance they’re right. LOL.

In cases like that the default position is to allow the downvotes and individual user blocks to do the job.

They’re just misunderstood

I think @[email protected] is right. The Monk has many beliefs that I either agree with or at least understand where they’re coming from. If there had been full duration Democratic primary, or any of the 3rd parties been even remotely competent/had a chance, or the voting system been a universal Ranked-Choice Voting system or better I’d probably support them. But he refused to see reality to the point I think it is fair to argue a dishonest agenda at best.

Regardless of the cognitive dissonance saying that gives me, I think it was a good thing for the community, and perhaps Monk too, that a break was mandated.