The last few posts made here, they’ve shown up, made the most inane, idiotic, and pointless comments, upvoted each other in a frenzy of circle jerking, and generally made a pest of themselves.
They’re a nuisance, and add nothing of value to the Lemmy experience.
So the last few days we have had explosions of comments on some posts, and some of my experience is from posts and communities on other instances, but having come to this post not long after it was posted, and seeing comments like “sounds like the crackers should go back to europe if they dont like it. “too long” fuck off street names over 15-letters are the norm where i live”.
They popped into a post about a name in NZ on an NZ instance to call people racist names.
You and I may have different ideas about what is ok, or possibly the comment has been drowned out by the attention the post got so it’s not so obvious anymore, but to me that is not a thoughtful comment in a friendly community.
Yeah, had to scroll way down to see the comments, but although I think they are a bit dumb, there were other hexbear comments in that thread I agreed with. I’m generally in favour of keeping the community open, supposing you have the ability to ban the trolls if you think it needs it (no idea if you can do that in Lemmy). Defederating just seems like a big step, and your right I find those comments mildly offensive at best but of course it’s your server so up to you the standard you want to keep.
On the votes front, I believe as the admin you can see the vote counts? Are the really outweighing the local voices? Or is the proportion of lemmy.nz vs other instances consistent over time? I previously used my lemmy.world account to access lemmy.nz, and I imagine there are loads of people with accounts on different instances.
Given the low numbers currently I think finding ways to be more open is good, but I can also appreciate not wanting to deal with shitty behaviour.
This is one thing I struggle with. Some posts by hexbear users are so thoughtful, while others are so flippant.
What I want for a community isn’t “not offensive”, but actively friendly.
I can see the votes in the database. I’ve only checked specifically this post (and not any comments under it), but last I checked there were 23 voters subscribed to !newzealand out of 169 votes. That’s regardless of which server their account is on.
I haven’t checked this for previous posts. That could be an interesting thing to check, to see if it’s unusual (the volume of votes is certainly unusual).
I posted a reply here, that’s a little different than my attitude up to now, but I think it’s still a reasonable path forward - though again anything is only a proposal at this point.
That’s a really interesting read. Also blown away by how low user numbers are still. I haven’t been back on Reddit since the 3rd party app shutdown, and I know plenty of others have left. Makes it seem more important to me to build community but it’s a tricky balance to strike.
Thanks for your thoughtful responses. I am enjoying having the kiwi community to interact with so your obviously doing something right.