Honestly, I’m just sick of having the exact same conversation an indefinite number of times every time I come to lemmy.world.

I’ll keep it short: No one from the DNC is on Lemmy. When you post on Lemmy, you’re not successfully talking any sense into the Democrats. You’re speaking to people who are deciding how to vote, whether to vote, how to get involved with activist organizations, and also just in a truth telling sense helping all of us make sense of what’s going on. The problems in American politics go way deeper than one candidate or one party. You are not saving the Democrats by making these recommendations, although they’re not really wrong, but you are attempting to take 100% of the oxygen away from other problems (which are also very real) which we are all similarly mostly-powerless to fix but which are also significant problems.

You’re also arguing against a bunch of stuff that I, at least, never said, which I understand is fun to do but it’s not real productive for us making sense to one another. I’m happy to talk with you, if you do some homework first: Find 5-10 different examples of me talking about Gaza, what a problem it was, and how Biden was complicit in it. Once you’ve done that (it should take literally one text search, use the @PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat account since this one is new), we can chat.

Sorry, did something I said sound like “I’d like to have an extended debate about this with you?” I think I’ve laid out pretty clearly how I feel about it and why at this point.

The mods used their power to create the impression of a specific narrative, and you bought it.

Everyone knows I always obey what the mods want to shape, as the narrative. Especially Jordan.

Ozma was “right” in the sense that when history was finally written, they’re on the right side of it, and Jordan is on the wrong side. Jordan won the narrative battle, but lost the narrative war. Jordan’s ability to control and manage that narrative is perfectly on display in those top comments, but now, the narrative has shifted towards the narrative that Ozma was trying to construct and deliver.

If you accept a whole bunch of reframings of things into other things, then yes, this makes perfect sense. For example, you might say that because ozma can’t say his viewpoint 15 times a day, but only as many times a day as other people who are posting a variety of viewpoints including criticism of the Democrats, that means his viewpoint was suppressed, on purpose because Jordan bans any constructive criticism of the Democrats, and so on.

I can’t really add anything to what I’ve said already. You’re welcome to have the interpretation you like of what happened. It sounds like you’re pretty attached to your current one.

return2ozma has only the power of their rhetoric, their prominence, and the support of the community

The fuck are you smoking?

https://lemmy.world/post/16224102

Top replies:

• “Good move, they were a clown and pointing out that they were arguing entirely in bad faith is correct.”
• “Dude thank God”
• “My take is the dude just filled the board with unrelenting misery.”
• “I think I agree more with the spam angle than the “only bad news” angle.”
• “I blocked him quite a while ago. Poll after poll after poll were filling up my feed at one point. Fuck that shit. You sir, may fuck off.”

I can’t rightly tell if you are legitimately this bad at remembering / perceiving what is happening on Lemmy, is why you’re giving me this whole alternate history where with the power of his rhetoric, he was trying to bring light to the darkness, and the mods just wouldn’t allow it so they could shape the narrative, but it’s seeming less and less likely that this is innocent mistakenness on your part the longer I talk to you about it.

• "

the Ozma one is low hanging fruit because the mod who did the ban said in precise language that it was being done in an effort to control the narrative

That’s not at all what he said. He said, more or less, that Ozma had indicated that he was deliberately trying to control the narrative. Specifically, he said he was seeking out anti-Biden stories and posting them as a sort of semi-automated process, just as many as he could find, to bring “balance” or something along those lines to the narrative. He wasn’t all that concerned with whether the stories were true – just “which side” of the narrative they supported.

Like I said, I actually don’t agree with that being a good reason for banning him, although I do agree he should have been banned. To be honest I think the design of a lot of Lemmy’s systems, moderation included, is just fundamentally broken. If someone wants to come in and manipulate the narrative (which again was what ozma specifically said he was trying to do), there’s not any good way to prevent them, which is a problem.

Also like I said I think if you study this objectively you will see that mod abuse works the opposite of the way you’re thinking that it does. I think the vast majority of mods that are trying to manipulate the narrative are ones most people haven’t heard of, that are quietly finding reasons to ban anyone who argues too loudly with return2ozma or whatever. But I’m happy to see the data. Personally, after having looked at the way the systems fit together and how people try to abuse them on both sides of the user/moderator divide, and done a certain amount of your same type of numerical analysis, I think the right thing to do is more or less to just throw a lot of the core concepts away (or, maybe better, layer some better core concepts on top of them and bring moderation back to its role as just keeping the porn / spam away and try to depend on higher-level constructs to keep debates on track.)

But it would be important to getting a complete picture to also look at someones posts and maybe try and look at how that impacts narratives.

IDK if you really need to do this. You’re welcome to, but I feel like instead of spending any significant time trying to prove any particular way that the existing systems are broken, just accepting that they (in particular the “mods are gods” model) are broken, and trying to make something better, might be a better way.

I thought today partly because of this conversation about making a politics community which was something along the lines of:

This community works differently to how most politics communities work. It has strict rules designed to facilitate productive discussion. You can be rude, to a point, but you can’t participate in bad faith:

• If you claim someone said something they didn’t say, that’s a temp ban.
• If you make a factual claim but then aren’t interested in backing it up, that’s a temp ban.
• If you’re asked one or two reasonable questions about what you said, and you’re still talking but you’re pretending the questions didn’t happen, that’s a temp ban.

The idea is to make the discussion productive. Let’s see how it works. Maybe this is a fool’s errand but IDK how any set of moderation could be worse than lemmy.world.

Other misc rules:

• Reliable sources only.
• No image / video posts.
• Self posts for discussion are fine.
• No personal insults.
• No racism / transphobia / related bigotry.

In that world, you’d be able to ban return2ozma the first time he posted an article about how Biden did some horrifying thing that he objectively didn’t do, and someone asked about it in the comments, and ozma said “IDK I’m just trying to bring balance” and posted 5 more articles. For me, I would vastly prefer that over the current moderation structure where it is sort of arbitrary rules and the comments are mostly a bad faith free-for-all where the mods’ actions don’t really do all that much beyond keeping obvious death threats and things away.

Can you sense the salt in my overall feelings lol

Well, I wasn’t the one who said it was easy (and IDK that digging through the modlog is the easiest way even for someone who is sure that it happened to find out when it did), but sure. Here are all the posts from Dec 2023 and Jan 2024 that were removed that had “poll” in the title:

7554770 | 2023-12-29T13:56:49.802793Z | Sarah Huckabee Sanders lowest approval rating for governor in last 20 years, Arkansas Poll says | https://www.thv11.com/article/news/politics/sarah-huckabee-sanders-lowest-approval-rating-governor-20-years/91-c76da35b-4704-46de-abc0-0a42ee19ea95
2806047 | 2023-12-29T13:18:36.770457Z | Trump Fan Who Threatened Poll Workers And Officials Sent To Prison | https://crooksandliars.com/2023/08/trump-fan-who-threatened-poll-workers-and
2461059 | 2023-12-29T13:18:19.629020Z | Donald Trump Has an Absurd Amount of Support From Republicans Who Believe He Committed “Serious Federal Crimes”: Poll | https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/07/donald-trump-ron-desantis-2024-poll
3653177 | 2023-12-29T13:16:15.792290Z | Democrat Adam Frisch leads against Rep. Lauren Boebert in poll for 2024 race | https://www.denverpost.com/2023/08/22/adam-frisch-lauren-boebert-poll-2024-race/
10024810 | 2023-12-29T13:08:37.582079Z | Trump Shares Poll Result Predicting 'Revenge' And 'Dictatorship' As Top Priorities | https://www.huffpost.com/entry/donald-trump-poll-dictatorship-revenge_n_658beb48e4b0cd3cf0e41a98

I was assured there would be some that showed Biden behind in the polls, that the mods were trying to cover up…

It’s a silly thing to get hung up on, but it helps to demonstrate that the person I’m talking with is talking about some situation that didn’t happen in reality.

I think it’s a pretty normal thing for one person to say “Anyone who tried to criticize Democrats gets banned” and one person to say “When did that happen?” It’s not like I am hounding you to do my math homework. It was only in your mind that it blew up into a “task” for you to come up with an example.

Like I say, this is why I don’t really go to lemmy.world. The rules are different. People make proclamations about how it is, and then get all bent out of shape if someone expresses skepticism, like it’s a horrible unreasonable thing.

Feel free to take as much time as you need. I understand that finding examples of what you’re talking about might be challenging. I support you in the mission.

(Edit: Oh, also, we’re not on a phone call. Stepping away from Lemmy instead of replying to me, if you don’t have a reply yet, is sort of implied in the asynchronous nature of the thing.)

return2ozma was banned because he was posting a nonstop flood of articles, and admitted to the mods that he basically just searched out bad stories about Biden and posted them whatever they were (even some ones he didn’t try to defend any kind of factual accuracy of), to bring “balance.”

I actually don’t agree with making that the criterion. I think it’s of a piece with lots of types of lazy and unproductive moderation that happpens on lemmy.world. But, I definitely agreed with banning him, for the same reason that I would expect to be banned if I went to your favorite community and posted 15 stories a day about “Five things you won’t believe about what Biden accomplished during his term in office!” It’s not about the viewpoint being prohibited from anyone expressing it (and, of course, the fact that we’re having this conversation and you haven’t been banned for expressing criticism of the Democrats is an obvious counterexample to you trying to say that’s banned on LW). It’s about one person spamming to try to promote it.

But I’m not trying to do additional work on your behalf right now. I just had a long day and I’m done working for now.

You said anyone could do it, you said it was super easy, just from memory. We’d be having a different conversation if you’d said “Anyone who felt like taking a bunch of time away from their job could probably put together a script to comb through the whole database to find the single example you’re looking for, because I’m sure at least one exists, although I can’t do that whole endeavor right now I’m confident that it would work if someone did do it. I’m very tired and such a thing would be horrifying and unfair if someone asked me to do it. I just know some other person who had a lot of energy to spare could.”

I mean any one could go find some examples from memory that they experienced.

Could you find some examples from memory that you experienced, for me?

I feel like we keep having the same conversation here.

Are you genuinely, seriously, trying to pretend that Joe “We beat Medicare” Biden was the better candidate to beat Trump? Bruh.

What? No, not even slightly. I’m saying that the people who are extensively hand-wringing about how these specific Democratic candidates fucked everything up, should be sparing at least one or two words for thirty years of Democratic fuckery laying the groundwork, the media pretending that Trump was a controversial but ultimately capable businessman who would fix the economy that was hurting them so badly, and any particular thing the Democrats did wrong was justification for having a multi-week freakout, and also the fact that most Americans get their political news from TikTok and Facebook if they get it at all.

Biden was old as fuck and it was a massive problem, even before the debate. I’m saying that none of the most serious problems got solved when he was replaced. And look… they didn’t.

I think this might be a massive gift to people who want the internet to remain free and unrestricted.

The more people you drive into the underground, the less well you’ll be able to regulate. Usually, it’s a cautionary tale about carelessly over-strict regulation. But, I guess it can also be an uplifting tale about carelessly over-strict regulation, depending on what you’re trying to regulate. Lord knows, we need to be teaching people how to dodge around local internet restrictions and monitoring right now.

Jimmy Kimmel, apparently, had Stormy Daniels come on and point to the most accurate one of a selection of dildos, if you want to get the information without needing gory details.

I specifically am building it to document the relationship between how moderation operates as a power structure and structures narratives of the community. Its a work in progress but I’ve shared components of it with others (SatansMaggotyCumFart, for one, who wanted me to use it to do an investigation of UniversalMonk).

I think this is 100% an excellent idea. I am firmly convinced that you’ll find it works the opposite of the way you’re saying it does here (you’ll find that there are certain types of topics where flamewars develop, and some mods whose names aren’t really commonly spoken tend to sanction participants on one and only one side of the flamewar, more or less, the “pro-Democrat” side.) But I’d be happy to wait and see what the data on it is. Who knows, maybe anyone who spoke poorly of Biden was getting banned and it happened all the time but you really do need to build a whole analysis tool to give me even a single example.

I would appreciate if you repost this to maybe one of the debate subs that I think someone started. Its probably better to house the discussion there then to create an endless series of responses.

Agreed. Like I said, aside from all the backbiting about who said what before the election and whose fault it all is, there is actually a useful conversation to be had about what can even happen in American politics that’s good right now.

So anyone can look it up, but in order to look it up, you’d have to build some tools and it’s a whole project?

Because instead of addressing anything at all about what I said, they said more or less “but you’re the person that said (totally unrelated thing) which I don’t agree with therefore you’re unhinged.”

There is no point in bothering with conjecture regarding the bans. They happened, its documented, any one can look it up.

Can you look them up, and show them to me? I came close to digging through the modlog myself, to prove that the number of times in Dec 2023 / Jan 2024 that someone was banned for posting a poll showing Biden behind was 0.

We argued that without replacing Biden, we’d lose the election.

I said that with replacing Biden, we’d lose the election, because the exact same arguments that applied to Biden would get applied to Harris, plus some new ones, and all the forces that marshaled a variety of bad-faith bullshit against Biden would start to do the same against Harris, and people in this country literally can’t tell up from down when it comes to the election. And, in the election, that’s what happened.

A lot of what you’re saying happened also, yes. I’m genuinely confused about how you’re accusing me of being cynical about it or telling the Democrats to be more right wing. What statements did I make that led you to think that?

Your core point here is actually something that deserves a little more of a response than I feel like typing up here. I’ll make a post in some “political discussion” community and maybe send you a note about it, because how we make forward progress and deal with the brokenness of the Democratic party is obviously a pretty important topic that is highly relevant to this story.

I just want to deal with this stuff a little, since you did try to tag me:

The core of their argument was that their cynicism was required to win elections. That we had to sacrifice our values, for whatever reason, to be able to “win” the election. To reiterate what our criticisms. Originally, it was with Biden. That without a serious pivot on Gaza and to right wing “enlightened centrism” that had guided his path to that point, he would lose the election. The later criticism was with Harris, and basically identical: That without pivoting and focusing on the issues the base was concerned with, that she would lose the election.

That wasn’t the core of my argument. The core of my argument was that, with the exception of Gaza, Biden already embodied every one of the values you’re claiming you weren’t willing to sacrifice: On income inequality, on climate change, on corporate corruption, on policing, on basically everything, he was the best leader we’d had in decades, someone who actually made some small amount of forward progress after, which is especially impressive given that he had to deal with a mostly-dogshit Democratic congress to try to get it all done with, and letting Trump win the next election just to spite the Democrats for not being “left enough” (which, yes, they are not) because of a mostly fantastical conception of what Biden even did in the first place, was going to lead to (1) a total cessation of any forward progress, in or out of politics (2) horrors that would have been hard to conceive of, some small number of which are coming true even now (before he turned the deportation machine into the third largest military in the world).

It was based on grabbing quotes and pretending they corresponded to policy, assembling misleading little talking-points, and outright lying. And, of course, pointing to Gaza. That was one thing that the anti-Biden crew had 100% in the bag without needing to misconstrue a damn thing. It was a horror, a stain on the world, and he was arming the whole thing the whole time through. So what could anyone say to defend it? Fair enough. And then, Kamala Harris came along, who hadn’t done any of that, and y’all blamed her for it anyway, and went back into this wild fantasy-land where the only answer to save Palestine was to let Trump win.

Anyway, now we’re in the timeline we’re in. I really hope that it is the catalyst for something better, the kind of popular revolution and massive upset to our politics that’s always been what we need, and not too many people have to die in the meantime to make that happen. I honestly don’t even really know what the answer is, in terms of finally making the American government a decent operation that can provide for its people some kind of decent life and future. I hope it happens before the whole world explodes.

I also know that you’re lying about what “we” said before the election, what Biden’s record was before the election, what the mods did before the election (I guarantee you you cannot find stuff in the modlog where someone was banned for posting a poll that showed Biden behind or something), what “our” (my at least) goals are in all of this, and all the rest of it. You’re trying to reframe it all in this innocent way by retconning that something totally different happened than what happened. So, that makes me suspicious of your motives, and of the honesty of all the constructive criticism you’re now trying to offer, yes.

Let’s hope Cuomo fucks things up for the establishment, let’s hope Mamdani gets somewhere and his message keeps spreading, with or without the help of the current people in power. Hopefully we can agree on that, at least.

You attacked me on some totally unrelated topic, instead of addressing anything I said about this topic.

If you disagreed with me about whether or not it’s totally cool and normal for Lemmy to send people’s admin passwords back to the mothership, you could weigh in over on that topic back when we were talking about that (and I’m pretty sure you did). It’s all good, the issue is fixed now whether or not it was an honest mistake in the code, and we all had our say on it.

Now all of a sudden we’re talking about some totally different issue, and whether or not anyone in power on Lemmy was “suppressing” or “banning” criticism of the Democrats during the run-up to the election (they were not) is left on the table, forgotten.

Here’s more explanation if you need it, with some examples of how attacking past unrelated arguments or issues can be a good example of using ad hominem to deflect from anything about the issue currently under discussion:

https://practicalpie.com/ad-hominem-fallacy/

When someone uses an ad hominem fallacy, what’s going on inside their head? Often, this tactic is a defense mechanism. People tend to resort to ad hominem when they feel backed into a corner or threatened in some way.

Instead of tackling the issue or the argument being discussed, it’s easier—and emotionally safer—to attack the person making the argument. This is often an unconscious response fueled by cognitive biases like the “confirmation bias,” which makes us more likely to believe things that align with our existing opinions.

Launching an ad hominem attack, on the other hand, is quick and easy. It’s a low-effort way to feel like you’re winning an argument, even if you’re not actually engaging with the issue at hand. It’s a psychological shortcut that undermines rational discussion.

This is why I always regret it when I go to lemmy.world lol.

My ass. I wish the mods had banned obviously disingenuous “let’s let Trump win to make a point, what’s the difference anyway” made-up critique that blamed Kamala Harris for Gaza and inflation, under a tissue-thin pretense of “I just care about the country sooooooooooooooooooooo much that I’m giving well informed constructive criticism.” Instead we had to just yell at y’all about it in the comments, which since there were hundreds of posts and comments every single day with that viewpoint was always a losing battle. Even trolling of crayon-quality transparency of the UniversalMonk variety was explicitly allowed by the mods, and people who objected to it too strongly got banned for it.

The whining about how you’re not allowed to get your message out, which is constantly broadcasted on every channel where you’re claiming you’re being silenced, is just part and parcel of the alternate reality you’re having a good bit of success in constructing. MAGA does it too, it’s part of the package.