Was recently banned from a whole bunch of DB0 communities for, as best as I can gather, downvoting once when I viewed by All (potentially accidentally while scrolling).
Important notes:
- I don’t use scripts.
- I don’t mass-downvote Communities. If I see a post I generally don’t like when browsing All, I may downvote one post, block the Community and move on.
- Some of the communities I was banned from don’t have any posts in them so I wouldn’t have been able to downvote anything.
- Of all of these Communities, in my history I downvoted one post in one of them. Voting in this manner is not vote manipulation. It’s quite literally a feature of the platform and as a mod of another Community, I would consider it pretty good etiquette.
- One of my bans reads “Appeal Granted, not a brigading member” but I’m still banned.
- I don’t troll.
WTF is going on here?
EDIT - Updated Info from the conversation below: In the initial image, you can see two “ban waves.”
The 10 bans three months ago stem from a single downvote in one Community. It was @[email protected] See here: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/34853477
I was called out by name for a single downvote and culled from a score of Communities I did not participate in by them.
The other bans from two months ago are from four total downvotes over a 10-month timeframe in one Community.
I have also stated in this thread that I don’t have issues with AI-gen images, but there are shoddy ones and well-done ones.
EDIT 2: Now unbanned from the ten Communities listed as “3 months ago” in my initial image, but have been banned from three more because of this thread with the reason given being “self-proclaimed anti-AI brigader” which are two things I didn’t claim to be. God dammit Lemmy…
the whole “if you don’t like the content, don’t downvote, but just ignore / block it” is really cringe
If I get banned for a downvote I dont want to have anything to do with that community anyway.
That mods/admins can even see who is downvoting is, by far, my least favorite thing about Lemmy.
Honestly. Doing this when someone makes dozens of downvotes is ridiculous and stupid. Doing this with a single downvote is… I can’t even begin to fathom how unimaginably stupid and ridiculous that is.
I also got banned from some communities for “systematic downvoting”. I’d estimate I’ve downvoted maybe 5 or so posts by a moderator promoting a harmful diet, which was apparently enough for being “systematic”. The mod also banned me from other random communities I had never interacted with in the first place. But oh well, nothing of value was lost for me. Just kinda sucks that mods can use this to make it seem like their statements are less controversial than they are.
Haha, just noticed I got banned from 2 communities, presumably for commenting in here (they are both dead communities I’ve never been to). Someone is a very petty and now blocked mod.
My first interaction with [email protected] was him threatening to ban me over downvoting his comments.
One of the first things which made me look into what this power tripping bastard is and yeah, a Russian pretending to be an American who’s since been avoiding any communities they’re not a mod on.
Dude says things like “reality has a well known Russian propaganda bias” while pretending to be American while supporting Putin.
Lemmy is infested with Russians
Lol same. It was my first and last interaction and the most pathetically sad threat that’s ever been directed at me.
Tbf, they’re pretty easy to spot and they’re much less over here than the bad place. They’re on a schedule too, so you can kind of be ready for them.
Can this admin see these votes without diving through the database because he’s an insecure douchebag? Like Mastodon only shows some things even to admins without being gross and unethical by digging into the database directly.
They are not so much punishing you as cultivating a vote farm. You are just a weed here.
I don’t have an issue with this instance being pro-AI, but I find it weird as fuck how harshly skeptics are treated
To clarify, we [admins] didn’t do this. It was a mod of the community that moderated lots of other communities that decided to ban them from everything
PTB, banning people from unrelated communities is very much overstepping
It’s been a common thing for awhile now, unfortunately. My .ee account was randomly banned from a bunch of comms because of being pro-ai or somesuch ridiculous thing.
It’s also common practice on .blahaj
It’s not a “common practice on blahaj”. It’s just how lemmy does instance bans.
I generally don’t community ban people, I tend to instance ban them, because if they’re breaking community rules, but not instance rules, it’s up the community mods to deal with, and if they’re breaking instance rules, they get an instance ban.
And when you instance ban someone, and choose to remove their content, that’s what it looks like in a modlog. It’s not because I’ve gone and selected a whole bunch of community bans. It’s just how lemmy works
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Blahaj is specifically a safe environment for LGBTQ+ folks who usually face harassment elsewhere, pre-existing homophobia or transphobia is a totally valid reason to be banned pre-emptively in my opinion. The safe environment doesn’t exist if you just let anyone in and then ban them after they cause trouble.
(Using “you” in general here, not to mean you specifically, OP) if you’re hanging around outside a gay bar talking about how cool your schutzstaffel tattoo is, they aren’t going to let you inside the doors. Same idea here.
.blahaj admins/mods will ban you from every space they control for any reason they don’t like you. They will then just say that person was a bigot to try to avoid drama.
They do not have consistent moderation policies, and use their small amount of power maliciously.
They try to curate a group of people who will not question them and will tribalisticly defend the space no matter what.
Finally someone that speaks out
the amount of gaslighting they do is enormous
And that group of people seem quite pleased with Ada’s strategy, she’s one of the most well loved moderators I’ve ever seen in any community.
If you don’t like it, that’s fine. The space isn’t for you.
I wouldn’t expect a community of handpicked loyalists to be unhappy with their idol.
If you don’t like it, that’s fine. The space isn’t for you.
This is the exact type of passive agressive tribalism she curates. Thanks for being the example i guess.
I agree I don’t feel safe there, it’s better for me to not contribute to that space and let it go the way of the lgbtq subs on reddit with their idol mods who could do no wrong.
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Literally never said that.
I’m also trans.
Also I’m a progressive lmao.
.blahaj admins/mods will ban you from every space they control
I don’t moderate any communities outside of blahaj.
I find it weird as fuck how harshly skeptics are treated
It’s reactionary, they’ll get trolled to hell otherwise.
I moderate a community on Reddit which allowed AI posts. Until recently, the community got less than one AI post per month. Regardless, every post would get an onslaught of hateful comments and false reports full of curses.
Recently, the subreddit got a few more AI images than usual. Less than a third of the posts over the last month before I personally removed multiple of them for quality reasons. The accepted consensus between commenters, however, was the opposite of this reality.
Not to say the actions of this mod were correct, in fact it seems ridiculous. This is just to answer why they would be harsh.
I find it weird how harsh AI haters treat people who use it.
People are assholes to people who disagree with them, no matter the topic.
You can find examples of people on each ‘side’ being assholes. Social media teaches people to be outraged, not to have any empathy.
As a Mac guy since the 90s, I can tell the hate and bile against AI is on another level, though. Relatively speaking.
I also recognize that the environmental and societal impacts of AI are why it’s so different from your typical fanboy/platform/lifestyle argument.
Like, that guy commenting about AI here does not really deserve the -4 votes his comment had when I started writing this.
I also think r/singularity types are off the deep end too. The way they are frothing at the mouth for societal collapse/UBI/etc is wild.
You can find examples of people on each ‘side’ being assholes
Very true!
Depends on the usage:
- Generating images of witches - Not very harsh.
- Perpetrating genocide - Very harsh.
Could the same not be said of computers in general?
Yes, and how well do people treat Mark Zuckerbot?
He’s an android. Android is a phones not computers duh.
well how are you supposed to treat people who roll coal?
Like you’re doing right now?
Did you not know that data centres use a huge amount of electricity, or did you think your posting was environmentally free?
Have you ever gone on a vacation? Because if so you’ve polluted more from one trip than all my years of AI art.
On an individual level generating an image is barely more any more resource intensive than a Google search. So don’t try to pull that shit when you’re just as guilty as using computers, the internet, and electricity for your personal enjoyment.
A lot of peope consider it immoral.
Those same people probably find intellectual property moral, so immoral people themselves.
Oh, so you don’t really have a proper grasp on the issue, huh?
You see, creators create things because they need money to provide food, shelter, etc
AI directly steals from creators so that it can attempt to reproduce something to replace them.
So you can be over here like “blahblah you don’t have a right to defend your intellectual property blahblah”, but no reasonable adult will ever take you seriously. Because you are advocating for the dissolution of jobs and attacking livelihoods.
So shut up! :)
Thats a capitalism problem, not an AI problem. AI is just the most recent example.
They shouldn’t have to rely on maybe getting paid so they can have food, shelter, and other basic things for living.
Right… but they do… so…
Irrelevant until we fix that problem. And guess what? Advocating for AI in the meantime is only going to give more power to corporations :) so great job, bud!
I dont advocate for corporate AI.
I’d also mention most users on db0 are far more likely to be using fully open models and models they’ve trained themselves (which is what I do, mostly log/error eval stuff).
That said, “fixing” AI will solve nothing, because capitalism is going to find yet another way to screw them over. Banning AI tomorrow isn’t going to provide job security or a stable income, it wasn’t before and it isn’t now.
I work with a lot of creatives, and so many are contract based and struggle between them. Several of them have been finding work cleaning up (as in, creating new) materials that were AI generated and look terrible.
So again, the issue is capitalism, and AI is just the most recent conversation piece. AI isn’t the root of the problem, nor is the problem “solved” without it.
Congratulations you’ve discovered capitalism is the enemy.
No reasonable leftist will ever take you seriously if you want to fight for the status quo.
So go fuck yourself :)
Yes, capitalism IS bad. Labor is stolen and exploited for profit by people who added nothing or next to nothing. Sound familiar?
No, you absolute child, it is LAUGHABLE for you to consider yourself a “leftist”.
Real leftists advocate for harm reduction, meaning that defending individual creator’s IP rights are a MUST, at least until capitalism is abolished.
In other words… got anything intelligent to say, or just going to keep saying stupid shit?
Liberals advocate for harm reduction. Leftists advocate for revolution.
This just in: Technology makes some jobs obsolete. More at 11.
Right, did you miss the part where the AIs are usually trained using stolen data and also consume huge amounts of energy? Why are you defending AI rn? 🥱
Did I miss the part where you made a terrible argument and are now pivoting to something else?
Nope sure didn’t.
My first lemmy account was banned from the fed. Because I spoke ill of Israel. I figured this place isn’t much better than Reddit.
Then you check some of those communities and there’s like less than 10 posts in them.
There’s more banned people than content.
If they are such tiny communities then the question is why do so many trolls go out of their way to find them, downvote everything, and harass/bully the mods? Not saying that was the case in this instance, but it’s been an ongoing problem, which is why the mods are a bit twitchy I guess.
The same user quietly banned me from all their communities for being a “Zionazi apologist” (which couldn’t be further from the truth) and it took me over 3 months to even notice.
They are just a special kind of idiot and I hope they don’t ever get to mod communities that are actually relevant.
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How do you know who banned you
Because there’s only one account modding in those communities. Some Lemmy UIs also let you see which mod took action in the modlog.
I mean it’s 2025 on the internet. If you don’t like someone says you either ban them, or tell them they are mentally ill/bigot/nazi.
You can no longer just let other people have different opinions. Everyone who disagrees with you is now an evil demonic force that needs purging from your community/life.
Was recently banned from a whole bunch of DB0 communities for, as best as I can gather, downvoting once when I viewed by All (potentially accidentally while scrolling).
PTB
I’ve had very inconsistent moderation experiences on dbzer0
I’m sure some were because of this guy.
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Db0ero is explicitely pro AI
I would guess the Mod has gone full shizo and banned you from the whole instance and everywhere he could because you downvoted an AI generated image.
I don’t make it a habit of downvoting images simply because they’re AI-gen, but there are well-done ones and horrible ones just like any images. Do they really ban for simply downvoting ANY AI image? That’s… kind of a lot.
I’m still trying to get my head around people giving votes that much attention. Maybe Lemmy has started getting refugees from other places that live and die by the arrows.
Someone go in there and do the same thing and see what happens. I would but you’ve probably picked up on my apathy by this point.
The mods that banned me for ‘systemic down voting’ and ‘anti-ai harassment’ because I down voted a few AI posts and didn’t feel bad also lectured me about how horrible down voting is and how much it hurts the fediverse.
My upvote to down vote ratio is far better than either of those two mods.
I’ve seen quite a few people banned for downvotes in comms. It always makes me wonder what they think lurkers do.
They assume anyone who down votes without commenting is brigading.
Oh i know that. I’m saying it’s crazy because it just bans more lurkers than anyone. We’re probably on the same page.
I just said to another here in this thread: Downvotes hurt visibility. Downvote trolls can be a problem for small communities trying to build up. I managed to discover the serial downvoters on my old lemm.ee comm and when I banned them (about 4 of them?) it had a huge impact. They didn’t all downvote /everything/ but they downvoted a lot of things, and no contribution. And if they got in early, they could sink new threads. Now, I wouldn’t just downvote randoms for occasional downvotes - but if I kept seeing the same names on threads (and they never actually engaged with the community) with no discernable patterns - I might.
Made a huge difference.
Yeah, the mods who are doing this appear to believe lurkers don’t exist and anyone who doesn’t make a comment but down votes is part of a brigade.
that happens on reddit to, but with reporting. if you report when someone dint respond or you dint respond to them, the mods get mad enough to ban you, or if they feel like even if the report was report-worthy, the mods might not think so.
Not related to the OP here, but downvote trolls can be a problem for small communities trying to build up. I managed to discover the serial downvoters on my old lemm.ee comm and when I banned them (about 4 of them?) it had a huge impact. They didn’t all downvote /everything/ but they downvoted a lot of things, and no contribution. And if they got in early, they could sink new threads. Now, I wouldn’t just ban randoms for occasional downvotes - but if I kept seeing the same names on threads (and they never actually engaged with the community) with no discernable patterns - I might.
Made a huge difference.
Thank you for limiting your bans to people who were actual serial down voters and not just someone who happened to down vote a single post.
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Fair enough. I tend to block before down voting and that’s rare. Haven’t thought of how much votes actually matter, but obviously it does on the smaller scale.
I should also add that 2 or the accounts I banned literally had no post or comment history despite being active for years. Their only purpose was to downvote.
Because votes = views.
If you make something and it instantly gets to -2 within seconds because of bot/trolls it means no one will ever see it.
Well luckily it was just AI slop and they didn’t actually make anything.
Well luckily it was just AI slop and they didn’t actually make anything.
Meh, I actually have a very successful side business selling things with AI slop all over them. So there is something I make with AI: money. I make more money from that than my retirement check. I steal from the lying capitalist megacorps. lol
every time i learn something new about you it’s so on-brand
Right?! Thanks, friend! :)
That’s very capitalist of you
I’m using their own methods against them. No regrets.
That’s embarrassing. I’m surprised you would admit that even in pseudonymity.
Embarrassing for you, maybe. Obviously, not embarrassing for me.
I’m just riding the wave while it lasts. I don’t treat it like a real job. More like skimming cream off the top while the corrupt capitalist system lumbers along. I know the window for making money this way is probably short, but that just makes it sweeter.
The megacorps are raking in billions, and I get to sneak in, steal the product that they’ve already stolen, and laugh all the way to my tiny bank. They build the machines, pump out the slop, and flood the world with it. I just show up with a spoon.
Picture a giant bull in a field, stuffing its face. Flies swarm around it, laying eggs in the shit. And I’m a little scruffy bird perched on its back, snacking on the flies and soaking up the ride. The bull does all the work. I just feast on the ecosystem it creates.
I grow fat off the slop that megacorp capitalists overproduce. I use them, instead of them using me. That’s the game, friend. Delicious.
You’re fighting a fight you can’t win. AI isn’t going anywhere. I’m just adapting to the situation. And laughing.
Creativity is in the idea.
Drawing is dexterity not creativity.
What is important is that what they made reflected what they wanted to, not that they used a pencil or a stylus.
Disagree. Creativity is in the idea, the composition, and the execution.
A prompter hardly even has the idea in the first place.On top of that: “drawing” is labor.
Tell that to Andy Warhol.
Preach, brother!
reddit monitors upvotes/downvotes heavily, maybe they are coming from reddit, in addition reddit are using other nebelous reasons to ban people in a sub.
No, they don’t, at least not the site wide admins.
This community is part of dbzer0, so if you were banned from the instance you wouldn’t be able to post here either.
It looks like you pissed off on moderator of a bunch of comms and they banned you from all of theirs. Based off another commentor’s link, this seems to have happened when those comms were being hit by waves of drive by downvoting so you may have been caught in the cross fire.
What is ‘drive by down voting’?
People (or bots) who go through a thread or comm and just downvote everything without otherwise engaging with the thread or comm.
It personally doesn’t bother me, but I can see why some find it distasteful.
Yes, a few of the mods will ban anyone who downvotes AI or misinformation without making a comment or because you downvoted ‘too many times’ or some other bullshit. My ‘systemic downvoting’ and ‘anti-ai harassment’ community bans are for downvoting a few posts and not being sorry about it.
i discovered i have several community bans for being an anti-ai troll. i find that so odd because like… i’m not trolling, i genuinely have concerns about a litany of issues surrounding ai such as the environmental cost, the double standard of corporate theft being okay and piracy being a serious crime, the ways the ai corporation ceos want to use ai vs how any technology should benefit the populace. i have a viewpoint, not an agenda. i also think and post about a wide variety of other topics. that said, if an ai community wants to block me, that’s fine, i was probably going to block them too. not because i think they’re wrong to have their community, but because i have zero interest in engaging there. it’s like how i block all communities in languages i don’t speak. it’s not an act of me censoring or hating them. it’s just me cleaning up my feed because it doesn’t make sense to be there
I work in IT and think AI is the second biggest threat to the planet in the next 10 years.
samesies. it’s grifters leading the blind in that field and it’s already had devastating effects in certain areas
100% guarantee that LLMs have already been instantiated on murderbot hardware
You don’t need to speculate or go “I guarantee”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI-assisted_targeting_in_the_Gaza_Strip
i have a viewpoint, not an agenda.
But on Lemmy, that’s a rare thing. Most have an agenda.
that should teach ya
They shouldn’t be. I’ve messaged the two mods and asked them to respond, because I don’t know the details.
We found the answer (kinda)! It was @[email protected] See here: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/34853477
I was called out by name for a single downvote and culled from a score of Communities I did not participate in by them.
“Create more slop” is, in fact, a message I disagree with rather strongly and did downvote that (and only that) post. I PM’d the the mod in response to that post:
Brigading is organized. I, a single person, downvoted one post I saw in /All because it is actively content with a message I do not care for or agree with. Bad form would be going through everything in the community and downvoting. I didn’t do that either. What I had done is called “using the platform as intended.” And you overreacted with a ban.
So we’ve effectively solved the first part, but not the three Stable Diffusion parts… Those also seem to line up with another single downvote a month later. Again, hardly brigading or vote manipulation.
EDIT: Huh. Looks like we had someone in this thread downvoting nearly every post in here.
EDIT: Huh. Looks like we had someone in this thread downvoting nearly every post in here.
if it is draconic who’s downvoting that would be a hilarious lack of self reflection. Is there any way to check?
Mods or Admin can. I can’t.
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@[email protected] - keep going mask-off.
Ban me too, cripplebrain. I am Spartacus.
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My pleasure
yeah, it was. do you wanna cop a ban too? cause if you use that sort of language here, I bet you’ll get one as well.
if you’re the sort of person who thinks using that sort of language is fine, then we won’t be losing anything worthwhile.
I don’t use it, but I also believe context obviously tells you that it was meant as a bad choice for “crazy” / “obsessive” and not a discrimination against those people
No need to minimod and taunt
Ah, the good old “ignorance is an excuse”. Too bad it’s bullshit, huh?
Why would you always assume the worse? That’s a great way to get offended at anything and to easily censor people while only giving your narrative
It’s dbzer0, and that’s the instance this comm is hosted on. So no, none of the Admins of the instance “went schizo”.
Looks like a mod of multiple comms maybe.
I never said admin.
You said “banned you from the whole instance”, which isn’t something a moderator can do. Only admins can do instance wide bans, moderators are limited to bans from their own comms.
It wasn’t unreasonable to think you were mixing up moderator and admin. Plenty of people did during the first reddit exodus, and still do.
When you see a wall of bans from a dozen communities it looks nearly identical to site wide bans.
Don’t use ableist language in a community where both of the mods are neurodiverse.
It’s annoying that the amount the general public cares about schizophrenic people is often less than they care about changing the words they speak.
sidenotes - CW: R-slur, used non-casually
This is common with a lot of disability-related terms, I expect this usage to decrease over time similar to how usage of ‘retard’ has.
I am unsure whether [‘schizophrenic people’ or ‘people with schizophrenia’] is correct here, I am going based off of what I have heard about [‘autistic people’ vs ‘people with autism’] as I could not find relevant information online.
well most people with schizophrenia dont really consider themselves schizophrenic. it takes a lot of work to even get to that point of recognition. so you’re really looking for ways to destigmatize the experience of psychosis in general to encourage people to be open to acknowledging it and not worrying about all the social repercussions of being “crazy” and just be willing to find another explanation for the bizarre experiences theyve been having . unfortunately the very definition of delusion is that it persists in the face of evidence to the contrary! and to think that one’s beliefs have no ground in reality. it’s a lot to swallow!
honestly the best way to phrase it would probably be something like “had a break from reality” or similar
The “person-first” formation is debated. Some people like it, some don’t. I think most people don’t care. I would assume, like most similar things, it was started by someone with only a tangential connection to the subject.
Yeah, the other way is identity-first and autistic people tend to prefer identity first. It does and should differ from minority to minority.
Have you considered perhaps not just saying the r-slur.
EDIT: see below comment
I don’t say that either.
You… Literally said it in your post. Big fucking shock to my system.
original comment, see edit first
are you kidding me
EDIT: I was confused by her saying ‘post’: I think she’s referring to my usage in the sidenote, which was intended as an example of [slurs towards disabled people that are no longer used], whereas I thought she was saying that I used them casually.
I don’t think discussing slurs is harmful to society in the same way that using them directly (as an epithet) is.
Despite this, I understand some people have strongly-negative reactions to seeing them, so I have added a content warning to the section.
Your edit is correct
I dont think its harmful to society, no, but as you say, some people have strong negative reactions to hearing or seeing them. Appreciate you changing it.
Ew what, I didn’t know this. I always just saw them as the anarchist friendly instance and I blocked all the ai communities so I guess I didn’t notice the correlation. Thats actually dissapointing
Oh no the transphobic genocide deniers are disappointed!
Lol.
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I just block the comms I don’t care about, can recommend.
Including that AI generated low effort crap. I don’t get the point of sharing that stuff, when you can generate your own if you want. But nowadays I don’t get many things anymore.
