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:
- Community moderators can remove your posts or ban you from the community.
- Your home-instance admins can ban your entire account.
- Receiving-instance admins can block/ban you for everyone on their instance, even though you don’t belong to it.
- 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.
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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.
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.
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.many people want to switch from reddit, but cant - no content.
also noeone everyone shares your definition of lemmy. to me - I would love it to be decentralized reddit. im fine with reddit content as long as I dont have to use reddit.
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 welcomein 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.
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.
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
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 [email protected] 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
not a bot. another thing that pushes active creators away from lemmy - relitigating everything over and over and over again.
its genuinely exoustingHow 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.
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.
I’m talking about social media and the Internet as a whole.
Nothing you’ve posted is original. It’s all reddit posts that you’ve…get ready for it…reposted.
yeah call me lemmy poster. its semantics who cares . only reddit agents taht want to waste time
I don’t think it’s semantics when you’re lumping in “reposting” with “content creators”. Your post seems to imply lemmy’s moderation stifles content creators, when the posts that moderation actions are being applied to are mass reposts of reddit content, not actual organic content created by lemmy users.
edit: I am reposting from reddit - there is no rules against that. its actually great thing for majority of lemmy users!
As a member of the admin channels, this seems to be the most loathed part about your account. Reddit is a hatred echo chamber for the fediverse, second only to AI. While you view it as a positive element, nearly everyone else here left reddit and take offense to it’s posts following them. They view your participation to be bot-like behavior and that’s why you’re seeing so much pushback to your accounts in particular. I can promise you that a normal user that isn’t aggregating reddit content for the fediverse is not sharing your moderation and banning experience.
For a normal user, the gauntlet is much different. At least on the .zip domains, our policy is to not interfere with reports that don’t have a user or community that belongs to our instance unless it’s something requiring fast action like csam or doxxing, etc. We leave the rest to the mods and admins that the community belongs to.
Your account doesn’t offend me and I appreciate your participation but I will say that I’ve blocked you on my browsing account since I browse New/All and I don’t enjoy seeing what amounts to an overwhelming feed of reddit posts.
TL;DR: You’re using the fediverse in way that the majority of the platform feels it wasn’t designed for so you’re going to continue seeing the same retaliatory behaviors for as long as you continue to participate in that manner.
- 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?
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 [email protected], 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.
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
Flooding “Lemmy” with reposts from Reddit will make “Lemmy” look like a “tardy clone of Reddit with less discussion”. Why stick with a repost platform if you can get the same content but more and earlier with Reddit? New Reddit frontend still remains browsable without login (maybe with some irritation, but anyway).
One has to act differently. To get to the sources first (or, at least before Reddit, at least sometimes). RSS feeds of publications (already worked on in PieFed), microblogging support: compatibility with Mastodon (available on MBin and now on PieFed), already existing bot comms reposting from Hacker News and Lobste.rs (both these sites have no subs and crossposting to a comm may have sense…), reposting e.g. art from Mastodon, Bluesky, cara.app…
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. 🙄
Given their profile avatar is AI-generated, well…
This post was written by AI
And now they’ve switched to posting comments generated by AI.
They are even using AI just to repost …
[…] 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.
You very obviously used Gen AI to write this. People are here to interact with people, not bots. Otherwise we’d be on Reddit.
TL;DR: Spammer is mad anti-spam measures are working.
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.
Hey hey hey hey hey there. This person’s post is LLM, and self-admitted LLM at that, but don’t you insult my headers and bullet points.
I’ve been both dedicated, and angry enough to properly format them, and I’ll do it again!
Ah the tired old thing we need the fediverese like x.
Mastodon tried to do it. now you with lemmy.
people on fediverse doesn’t want cross posted stuff. They want stuff from actual people and those poster interacting with the post.
This moderation you are upset about isn’t as much of a problem.
You are trying to speed run reddit here and it isn’t going to work. Just work with what lemmy offers and eventually people will come but it is going to take time.
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/
No thanks! I’d rather Lemmy/Piefed to grow organically than allowing non-credited ‘oc’ posts directly from Reddit or get it spammed with useless content.
I’m sorry to break it to you, but you’re NOT doing Lemmy any favor. We (and I say ‘we’ because I firmly believe that’s the opinion of most regular Lemmy/Piefed users) do NOT want it to become another Reddit. We want it to be better than Reddit.
And being a ‘more active’ community is not necessarily a good thing.
Also, the ‘quadruple’ moderation you described is literally an intended characteristic of the federation. You might not see it as a good thing, because your account is basically an (unflagged) spamming bot account, and that’s exactly what Lemmy wants to avoid.
