Moderation.
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One last note, then I’ll STFU about this…
Feedback is appreciated. IF it’s kind and helpful.
It hurts me that a nazi slipped through today. Like, it crushes my soul and makes me sad. And I want for us to prevent that.
So we’re going to use this as a learning moment to see what else we can do moving forward.
🧵 4/4
@markwyner
It fills my soul with goodness to see there is an active defense force springing into action when the nazis attack. Thank you! -
Moderation. It’s a roller coaster.
Today, a (literal) nazi opened an account and began harassing people. We received ~80 reports within minutes. That may be a record.
We suspended the account, of course. But not before a lot of people yelled at us. For the record, this is not preventable when registration is open. We can only react. So be nice.
My gratitude and love for the person behind this report. It made me chuckle. 🫶
🧵 1/3
In my experience y'all do a fantastic job with moderation. When I report a bad actor, it's gone quickly. I don't even see huge swaths of the harmful things I see others talk about, which means y'all are getting to it well, at least for the times when I'm active here. Thank you.
I've occasionally pondered sending a thank you note when I've heard about some bad actor, but not seen it at all. I'll try to actually do that, so y'all get an occasional random thank you.
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@luciledt it’s a tough call to be sure.
99% of the time everything works as intended. And because of the size of our server, we get massive numbers of registrations. Checking every single one of them would take more time than we have.
Our admin is an exceptional human being. He’s kind, ethical, and encouraging. He makes calls like this, but he respects the mod team’s input. And I respect his decision on this. Usually it’s not a problem.
@markwyner @luciledt You pulled off a heroic effort to rectify a horrible situation that was completely preventable by closing registrations.
Of course, 99% of the time there is no problem. But open registrations allows that 1% to do damage before you get to it -- even if you get to them fast. The damage is already done.
My instance has closed registrations, because I do not prioritize instance growth over the safety of the wider fediverse.
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@markwyner I'm not a language expert, but isn't the right term "neo-nazi"? As far I know the term nazi only used to describe those who were Nazis back then, while "todays Nazis" are referred to as Neo-Nazis, correct me if I'm wrong.
I see there being three kind of nazis.
Capital N Nazis are members of the 30-40s German party as well as members of the American Nazi Party. Self described, Hugo Boss wearing, actual, factual Nazis.
Lowercase n nazis are general fascists of any stripe. Vernacular nazis, if you will. If someone calls themselves a “race realist” and cares a strange amount about legal immigration while only discussing how much violence is required to deal with illegal immigration.
Neo-nazis are kind of a transitionary fossil between Nazis and nazis. Before you could be a random racist wearing a suit and appearing on CNN to discuss white genocide, the neo-nazis of the 70s-90s had to blaze a trail of bank robbery, zine publication, murder, early internet adoption, and that time they blew up the Federal Building in OKC. They cared less about aesthetics and more about outcomes.
@kathleenbelew’s book Bring The War Home and Robert Evan’s audio treatise The War On Everyone are both useful resources.
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One last note, then I’ll STFU about this…
Feedback is appreciated. IF it’s kind and helpful.
It hurts me that a nazi slipped through today. Like, it crushes my soul and makes me sad. And I want for us to prevent that.
So we’re going to use this as a learning moment to see what else we can do moving forward.
🧵 4/4
@markwyner moderating, in any size community is hard work, we salute the mods in this household!!
As for feedback, I don’t know much about this particular event, or your instance, but you’ve just given a big list of ‘reasons why open registration is bad and creates a lot of extra work’ with no reasons to why it has to stay open.
Is there a reason it -has- to stay open? Genuine question, like would making it manual approval create more work for the mod team overall?
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We’re a huge server. One of the biggest. So we get targeted. A lot.
For every nazi account you may see for a brief moment, you don’t see hundreds of others that we managed to catch before you saw it. We block some email domains and IPs when we can. We do tons of pre-emptive work behind the scenes.
We’re also volunteers. We have a team that spans many time zones. But that doesn’t mean we have someone on guard 24/7/365. Shit happens. It’s no reflection of the integrity of our team/server.
🧵 3/4
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Moderation. It’s a roller coaster.
Today, a (literal) nazi opened an account and began harassing people. We received ~80 reports within minutes. That may be a record.
We suspended the account, of course. But not before a lot of people yelled at us. For the record, this is not preventable when registration is open. We can only react. So be nice.
My gratitude and love for the person behind this report. It made me chuckle. 🫶
🧵 1/3
@markwyner Moderation and management of open services is a thankless, soul-crushing task sometimes. I hope you know that more people appreciate your work than find fault with it. And the people getting angry with you are mostly angry that Nazis exist, and misdirecting it at y'all.
Anyway, please keep up the good work and banning the baddies.
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Is hybrid possible?
Like if somebody has "88" in their name it gets set on a watchlist or set to need approval on a usually open server.
Or x reports dropping from long term accounts to result in an account lock that can be reviewed.
I get that no automated solution will solve this problem and people misdirect their anger, so thanks a lot for your effort!
@coalburner3000 @markwyner @kenjen additional dimension on that one, tho: many folks have multiple 8s in a username, esp on financial stuff, because it's a good luck things in some cultures (the 8 looks like "happiness" in Chinese, is my understanding)
my family used to do a lot of banking in Monterey Park, which is mostly Chinese, their banker liked them and saved some "good" account numbers, long story short, thirty years later I look like a total white supremacist in my financial life
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@coalburner3000 @markwyner @kenjen additional dimension on that one, tho: many folks have multiple 8s in a username, esp on financial stuff, because it's a good luck things in some cultures (the 8 looks like "happiness" in Chinese, is my understanding)
my family used to do a lot of banking in Monterey Park, which is mostly Chinese, their banker liked them and saved some "good" account numbers, long story short, thirty years later I look like a total white supremacist in my financial life
people born in 1988 feel you -_-
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One last note, then I’ll STFU about this…
Feedback is appreciated. IF it’s kind and helpful.
It hurts me that a nazi slipped through today. Like, it crushes my soul and makes me sad. And I want for us to prevent that.
So we’re going to use this as a learning moment to see what else we can do moving forward.
🧵 4/4
@markwyner Appreciate your promptness and response time.
Is there a way to leave registrations open, but keep accounts at a lower allowed activity level, slowly ramping up with their ongoing activity and lack of warnings/triggered phrases?
Feels like if there was an automatic impediment to lots of spam, but little to any meaningful poster, it might curb the former a lot. (Rand would also permit less abuse while providing mods more warning when they start.)
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people born in 1988 feel you -_-
@coalburner3000 @markwyner @kenjen my credit union won't allow user name changes
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One last note, then I’ll STFU about this…
Feedback is appreciated. IF it’s kind and helpful.
It hurts me that a nazi slipped through today. Like, it crushes my soul and makes me sad. And I want for us to prevent that.
So we’re going to use this as a learning moment to see what else we can do moving forward.
🧵 4/4
@markwyner Thank you for everything you do to keep the rest of us safe
I used to do it myself, it's not easy, it takes a toll & it's not always appreciated because ordinary users don't see the details
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Moderation. It’s a roller coaster.
Today, a (literal) nazi opened an account and began harassing people. We received ~80 reports within minutes. That may be a record.
We suspended the account, of course. But not before a lot of people yelled at us. For the record, this is not preventable when registration is open. We can only react. So be nice.
My gratitude and love for the person behind this report. It made me chuckle. 🫶
🧵 1/3
@markwyner so why are you still not closing your registrations
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@legendary_creeper @markwyner you're right, the Nazi party doesn't exist anymore, ergo there are no literal Nazis.
But do readers understand what type of person is being referred to when they are tagged incorrectly as "Nazi"? Yep. So it probably doesn't matter one jot.
Or perhaps you'd prefer to think of it as Nazi-the-actual-noun vs nazi-the-personality-disorder?
> Or perhaps you'd prefer to think of it as Nazi-the-actual-noun vs nazi-the-personality-disorder?
I do not since it would oppose the truth based of my current knowledge about neurology and psychology.
But I do have an unhealthy tendency for accuracy and perfectionism. That's why it bug me.
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Moderation. It’s a roller coaster.
Today, a (literal) nazi opened an account and began harassing people. We received ~80 reports within minutes. That may be a record.
We suspended the account, of course. But not before a lot of people yelled at us. For the record, this is not preventable when registration is open. We can only react. So be nice.
My gratitude and love for the person behind this report. It made me chuckle. 🫶
🧵 1/3
"not preventable when registration is open"
so it's preventable.
i suggest you start preventing it, dispshit.
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Yeah, I have been waiting for that with great anticipation. Our mod team, which includes our admin, has been discussing it. In fact, our admin opened a ticket on the Mastodon repo about this, which is one of the catalysts for moving the idea forward.
@markwyner @gunchleoc @kenjen It is always my immediate reaction to think if there are more technical approaches to make this better. I wonder if rate-limiting any new account for the first few hours (or even days) would reduce the impact as well? Something like "no more than 1 reply/post per hour" would probably not be felt by many new sign-ups, but could reduce the reach of malicious actors.
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@markwyner I think I do appreciate this. As a moderator, it takes a lot of work and if you are all volunteers it is difficult. A lot of the good work a mod does does get unnoticed because it just happens in private like you say.
@OliviaVespera thank you.
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@markwyner so from what I am told. There are stock options to at the very least prevent the username from being registered.
https://pizza.enby.city/users/domo/statuses/115328690748595820
I get it won’t stop the content, but has that been implemented since?
@OliviaVespera not yet. People keep mentioning this. But it’s coming in a future version.
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@markwyner I'm at a different instance, but anyways I'd like to say THANK YOU for your time & know-how in moderating in the "neighbourhood" and THANK YOU for nicely explaining it for non-techy people!
wishing you a lovely day!@buchstabensport thank you so much. And you’re welcome. If you want to learn more, I wrote about it:
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@markwyner Seven posts before this on my home feed was someone calling out mas.to (and others) as a badly moderated. I just don't see how that sort of thing is in any way helpful.
Thanks for all you do, and please keep up the good fight.
@GlasWolf thank you. There are always gonna be people who think they’re all-knowing. People who talk trash about moderators. It gets to me, sure. But there are way more who are kind about it. I appreciate you.
