Moderation conflict involving c/vegan
Moderation conflict involving c/vegan
Intro
We would like to address some of the points that have been raised by some of our users (and by one of our communities here on Lemmy.World) on /c/vegan regarding a recent post concerning vegan diets for cats. We understand that the vegan community here on Lemmy.World is rightfully upset with what has happened. In the following paragraphs we will do our best to respond to the major points that we've gleaned from the threads linked here.
Links
Actions in question
Admin removing comments discussing vegan cat food in a community they did not moderate.
The comments have been restored.
The comments were removed for violating our instance rule against animal abuse (https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/#11-attacks-on-users). Rooki is a cat owner himself and he was convinced that it was scientific consensus that cats cannot survive on a vegan diet. This originally justified the removal.
Even if one of our admins does not agree with what is posted, unless the content violates instance rules it should not be removed. This was the original justification for action.
Removing some moderators of the vegan community
Removed moderators have been reinstated.
This was in the first place a failure of communication. It should have been clearly communicated towards the moderators why a certain action was taken (instance rules) and that the reversal of that action would not be considered (during the original incident).
The correct way forward in this case would have been an appeal to the admin team, which would have been handled by someone other than the admin initially acting on this.
We generally discuss high impact actions among team before acting on them. This should especially be the case when there is no strong urgency on the act performed. Since this was only a moderator removal and not a ban, this should have been discussed among the team prior to action.
Going forward we have agreed, as a team, to discuss such actions first, to help prevent future conflict
Posting their own opposing comment and elevating its visibility
Moderators' and admins' comments are flagged with flare, which is okay and by design on Lemmy. But their comments are not forced above the comments of other users for the purpose of arguing a point.
These comments were not elevated to appear before any other users comments.
In addition, Rooki has since revised his comments to be more subjective and less reactive.
Community Responses
The removed comments presented balanced views on vegan cat food, citing scientific research supporting its feasibility if done properly.
Presenting scientifically backed peer reviewed studies is 100% allowed, and encouraged. While we understand anyone can cherry pick studies, if a individual can find a large amount of evidence for their case, then by all accounts they are (in theory) technically correct.
That being said, using facts to bully others is not in good faith either. For example flooding threads with JSTOR links.
The topic is controversial but not clearly prohibited by site rules.
That is correct, at the time there was no violation of site wide rules.
Rooki's actions appear to prioritize his personal disagreement over following established moderation guidelines.
Please see the above regarding addressing moderator policy.
Conclusions
Regarding moderator actions
We will not be removing Rooki from his position as moderator, as we believe that this is a disproportionate response for a heat-of-the-moment response.
Everybody makes mistakes, and while we do try and hold the site admin staff to a higher standard, calling for folks resignation from volunteer positions over it would not fair to them. Rooki has given up 100's of hours of his free time to help both Lemmy.World, FHF and the Fediverse as a whole grown in far reaching ways. You don't immediately fire your staff when they make a bad judgment call.
While we understand that this may not be good enough for some users, we hope that they can be understanding that everyone, no matter the position, can make mistakes.
We've also added a new by-laws section detailing the course of action users should ideally take, when conflict arises. In the event that a user needs to go above the admin team, we've provided a secure link to the operations team (who the admin's report to, ultimately). See https://legal.lemmy.world/bylaws/#12-site-admin-issues-for-community-moderators for details.
TL;DR In the event of an admin action that is deemed unfair or overstepping, moderators can raise this with our operations team for an appeal/review.
Regarding censorship claims
Regarding the alleged censorship, comments were removed without a proper reason. This was out of line, and we will do our best to make sure that this does not happen again. We have updated our legal policy to reflect the new rules in place that bind both our user AND our moderation staff regarding removing comments and content. We WANT users to hold us accountable to the rules we've ALL agreed to follow, going forward. If members of the community find any of the rules we've set forth unreasonable, we promise to listen and adjust these rules where we can. Our terms of service is very much a living document, as any proper binding governing document should be.
Controversial topics can and should be discussed, as long as they are not causing risk of imminent physical harm. We are firm believers in the hippocratic oath of "do no harm".
We encourage users to also list pros and cons regarding controversial viewpoints to foster better discussion. Listing the cons of your viewpoint does not mean you are wrong or at fault, just that you are able to look at the issue from another perspective and aware of potential points of criticism.
While we want to allow our users to express themselves on our platform, we also do not want users to spread mis-information that risks causing direct physical harm to another individual, origination or property owned by the before mentioned. To echo the previous statement "do no harm".
To this end, we have updated our legal page to make this more clear. We already have provisions for attacking groups, threatening individuals and animal harm, this is a logical extension of this to both protect our users and to protect our staff from legal recourse and make it more clear to everyone. We feel this is a very reasonable compromise, and take these additional very seriously.
Sincerely,
FHF / LemmyWorld Operations Team
EDIT: Added org operations contact info
IDK it seems like pretty clear animal abuse to me
Cats are obligate carnivores. It is 100% animal abuse.
Yep. The doublespeak here is wild. "Controversial topics can and should be discussed, as long as they are not causing risk of imminent physical harm. Therefore, we are leaving up comments that cause imminent risk of physical harm."
Forget the particular details of this issue. It feels way, way more strongly like they're trying to duck out of having to take action.
https://www.benevo.com/vegan-cat-food-from-benevo/
Benevo Cat foods contain all the nutrients an adult cat needs, including a wide range of vitamins (including A, B, D, E, K), essential fatty acids and taurine, without the need for slaughterhouse meat. Although obligate carnivores in the wild, domestic cats still need nutrients they would normally source from prey. Thankfully Benevo Cat contains all those nutrients in a bioavailable kibble.
Benevo Cat is a professional cat food, created by Benevo in 2005, formulated and checked by independent animal nutritionists to meet the AAFCO(USA) and FEDIAF(Europe) guidelines for animal nutrition.
We've had safe and healthy variants of vegan cat food for 20 years. Trying to elevate the question to animal abuse speaks entirely to personal ignorance.
Cut and paste blurb from a marketing website from a manufacturer. That you cut and pasted from your top level comment which currently is at -30 due to it's lack of actual sources or anything of value.
This is not helpful to anyone and you may be out of your depth if you think it is.
I am not taking a position on feeding cats vegan food. I am just pointing out you are arguing so weakly you're actually doing your position a disservice.
Your argument is very weak, you are just citing a company that sells vegan food for animals, a very clear conflict of interest.
For instance, I can also cite some Google PR page on how much they care about privacy.
Farm feedstock.contain all the nutrients an adult cow needs, including a wide range of vitamins (including A, B, D, E, K), essential fatty acids and taurine, without the need for grass. Although obligate herbivores in the wild, domestic cows still need nutrients they would normally source from vegetation. Thankfully farm feedstock contains all those nutrients in a bioavailable grain.
grain is a professional cow food, created by grain manufacturers in 50,000BC, formulated and checked by independent animal nutritionists to meet the AAFCO(USA) and FEDIAF(Europe) guidelines for animal nutrition.
We've had safe and healthy variants of cow food for 52,000 years. Trying to elevate the question to animal abuse speaks entirely to personal ignorance.
Eta - modifying the diet of a domesticated animal for your convenience seems to run contrary to the premise of minimising animal cruelty.
And humans weren't made to eat tablets and get injected with mixtures from syringes.
IDK it seems like pretty clear human abuse to me
If medical drugs can be made to be safe and compatible with humans there's nothing stopping it for the same happening for vegan food for cats
I am not a vegan, but I do try to make food choices that are as ethical and healthy as I can... or at least as far as I can afford.
Cats are carnivores. Fact. This is not debatable. But I think you could also meet or exceed a cats nutritional needs from other sources. Whether those sources are readily available and whether a person is sufficiently meeting those needs... that's another can of worms.
Generally, I'd argue that if you are hell-bent on a vegan diet, then you should not own carnivorous pets. No matter how well meaning you are, there is a significant chance that you will inflict harm on your pet, and that is unacceptable.
You might be surprised at how much corn, grains, and other non-meat stuff there is in cat food. Particularly in cheap dry kibble that nobody typically bats an eye at someone feeding to their cat.
This conversation just seems so weird to me. The number of people who feed their cats anything similar to what they’d be eating in the wild is minuscule.
Meat isn’t some magic substance, biological chemical reactions turns grass into cows. That you think you can’t take those nutrients and make them bioavailable to an obligate carnivore is absurd. Ever seen an impossible burger?
And if you think the cruelty stems from the idea that cats wouldn’t like it, I gotta say. I have my cat on an expensive grain free meat heavy diet. And I know for a fact that he goes crazy for the cheap shitty corn based purina kibble. He has busted into other people’s homes to steal kibble from their cats.
So is it cruel for me to feed him a more nature based diet when it’s clear he prefers corn based trash?
I don’t see any reason why a functional vegan cat food couldn’t exist.
You're forgetting some people are idiots, especially those "better than others" who do crap like this.
I think what people generally want is not reddit. The mods in reddit have almost no accountability from admin.
Oftentimes comments are removed just because a mod doesn't agree or like the content.
I was banned from r/Ukraine simply for saying we shouldn't demonize the entire population of Russia for the actions of their government. I later argued with the mod through their "arbitration process" and he would not unban me. (What really hurt is that I'm Ukrainian. It was an improvement sub for me)
No one wants that! Please don't let that happen here!
I was banned from /r/grindr for suggesting it's ok for trans people to use it. It's legitimately one of the most blatantly, unapologetically terrible mods I've ever seen, and it's just him.
I'm personally of the opinion that if a community is poorly moderated, you should just make a new community that is better aligned to the level of moderation users actually want and not to rely on a centralized admin team. They should really just be preventing serious abuse, like grooming, and provide support and advice to mods.
Ultimately its not sustainable and gives Admins too much centralized power to determine to that level what is and isn't appropriate mod behavior. I get that what you experienced is generally dickish behavior, but that can easily spin out of control when it relies on admin judgement calls like that.
In reality, even admins don't hold the ultimate power. This is a federated platform and there are lots of other instances. It's an extension of the sentiment you express - if people don't like how things are done on one instance, they can move the community, or even start a new instance.
All I'm getting from this entire saga is that vegans on here are lunatics. From forcing this nonsense on pets, to all of the follow-up, this is a very bad look for the community, from somone looking in from the outside.
This is some cultish behavior...
You get that from anywhere with a chamber that echos well enough. There's the folks who don't have kids or want them, and then there's the anti-natalists who call the people who have children breeders and their kids crotchspawn. There's the Christians and the Religious Right. Jews and Zionists. List goes on.
I think this is showing that about 70% of the people on here are incapable of reconsidering their positions on something.
To me thats upsetting, but then again lemmy.world is the low hanging fruit of the fediverse. Other servers would never have picked this fight to begin with.
It's almost like Lemmy is just another social media site with the same types of people as every other social media site. Regardless of how seemingly a lot of Lemmy users view themselves and Lemmy as a whole.
Yeah...and entirely unsurprising.
Im no vegan, and was originally convinced that giving cats vegan food was animal abuse, and am still sure its best for cats to eat meat But really, seeing so much people just saying 'vegans are hysteric/lunatic/cultist' without any more reflection gave me a weird vibe, like it's the exact same rethoric used against any progressist idea It got me thinking, like I think I disagree with vegans on the vegan cat food thing but people are being so mean to vegans and tolerant to power abuse, i'd rather be on the vegan side
Its likely because most of the arguments against vegan cat food are "of course its bad", which is a horrible reason to think anything.
I hope some people also noticed this and allowed them the opportunity to learn more about what is possible for a cats diet.
my only argument for the vegan food is this: if the cat enjoys the food and it provides all the nutrients then what is the issue?
No one is suggesting we force feed cats wall paper paste.
The comments in here are unbelievable. This post was about the systemic moderation issues that lead to the incident, the team's response to it, and how to deal with such a problems in the future.
Half the comments: CATS CAN'T EAT VEGAN
The other half: CATS CAN TOO EAT VEGAN
There are people here who need to go back to fucking reddit.
in defense of those people the previous thread showed up on basically every lemmy instance under the sun, there are memes about it now.
I'm not sure what else you were expecting with a site wide drama such as this tbh.
go back to fucking reddit
Yeah, fuck reddit, and fuck u/spez.
Er, am I doing this right?
The question is at the root of which moderator's actions are correct. There's a reactionary bias from tons of Reddit-fugees that came out of vegan bashing and anti-vegan hysteria which we see crop up repeatedly.
It can be difficult to distinguish between people sincere, abet misguided, beliefs and outright trolls. And moderation takes a significant temporal and emotional toll. "Vegans are killing their pets/kids!!!" is a popular panic phrase intended to gin up hostility. Consequentaly, the mods in these communities are playing endless wack-a-mole with trolls who just want to conflate veganism with an esoteric form of cruelty.
Establishing a bright line of appropriate content is important for good moderation. But to know where that line is, you need some degree of objection information.
Which brings us back to the fundamental question of whether safe, reliable vegan cat food exists (spoilers: it's been around for decades). But if you don't accept that premise, you're going to see any mod censorship as some diabolical cat killing agenda.
Cats are obligate carnivores. It's trivial to stroll into any store and get food that will make your cat healthy but its not clear how easy it is to get vegan food that will do the same. Seems like if you don't believe in eating meat you should just not have a little carnivore in your home. For instance rabbits can be trained to live inside, cuddle with you, and poop in a box.
Difficulty level of Reddit is too high, since people would actually need to, you know, read stuff, in order to have "read it."
It's not just a diet thing, it's a matter of animal abuse.
I don't doubt that there are options out there for people that want to feed their pets a vegan-friendly diet, but given that cats primarily eat meat the idea of promoting a vegan diet that isn't heavily monitored and noted by their vet is an awful look for the vegan community and Lemmy. You absolutely cannot expect people to just treat this as a moderation issue, because at its most fundamental level it's about whether lemmy.world supports content that is harmful to animals.
I said it elsewhere here, and since people don't like it being raised I'll say it again: shit like this wouldn't fly on Reddit. Lemmy has a poor reputation on the Fediverse for housing extreme opinions, and this debacle really won't help its reputation as a fed-friendly alternative to Reddit. Saying "go back to Reddit" just highlights the problem more, and is probably why there are plenty of posts on the Fediverse asking why Lemmy is so hostile, or why it's nowhere near as friendly as many communities on Mastodon.
Here's an idea, why don't you save your argument for one of the myriad posts that have popped up discussing this very subject of whether or not cats can eat vegan or not and whether or not that is abuse.
But here and now within this post is a discussion over whether or not mods acted recklessly and whether or not there is a need for better guidelines on what is and isn't allowed. Which were discussed in the post that you apparently didn't read.
At no point did the author of this post open up the floor to discuss whether or not veganism is good, bad, or ugly for cats.
Vegans win this time.
In the end, vegans are always going to win, because a vegan way of life is one (but not the only) precondition for ways of life that are actually sustainable.
The integrity in this post is off the charts.
Love to see it.
Thanks, we're always trying to do better and learn from our mistakes.
As I got older, I realised that there were no real winners and there were no real losers...but there were victims and there were students
- Ren Gill
Absolutely agree. This is an issue where it could have easily been covered up, but the leadership opted for total transparency.
They admitted the mistake, showed how it happened, and worked out an agreement with the community to avoid the problem in the future.
Forget comparison to corporate media (it's not even close), I've seen issues in the Fediverse handled 100x worse than this.
The only person with integrity I see here is the admin that initially removed the comments promoting animal abuse. Those that backed down and restored the comments caved to the pressure of an extreme, insular community and sided against *defenseless animals. I see no integrity in their actions no matter how they try to spin it.
I happen to agree with the position on diet. But that's not really the point here.
Any community interested in truth and safety must have a consistent measure for truth. Human civilization relies on scientific consensus. That concensus can change, and it can be flawed, but it's really the best system we have. Admins/ have stated that they are relying on that for their decisions.
In this case, there is not a strong enough consensus to make a determination. I haven't reviewed the research personally, but I'm confident that the admins have. They made the right call based on the information presented.
Not that I think Rooki was wrong with what they did. But it doesn’t take a genius to figure out how fast such stuff can get out of control.
Thing happened. Admins reflected on thing. Came up with solution. Communicated solution with community in an understandable and transparent manner. Perfect.
If that lazy fucks over at Reddit would have been half as good as you with theirs jobs, we probably wouldn’t be here to begin with.
Mods aside, the Reddit app is still garbage
😂👍
You’re beating a dead horse here. The most common association with that app is “barfing a little bit before deleting it”.
This is all PR, lemmy.world didnt make good with their vegan community, they just want everyone else to think they are fair and level headed. Reddit has the exact same PR, except they were trying to make money openly, while most assume lemmy.world admins are losing or breaking even (whether thats true or not).
Put simply, reddit was trying to collect more profit from their users one way, and lemmy.world is trying to collect its donations in another, but PR servers both cases.
Doesnt really matter theres plenty of space elsewhere for the vegan community, which is the beauty of the fediverse.
Wow. I have no involvement in the original issue and I'm definitely not as familiar with the circumstances and details as others. There may be a lot missing here.
But this feels like a very mature, logical, empathetic, well-intentioned response and the kind of thing I like to see.
We're just trying to do the best we can to consider everyone involved and what we can do better going forward. We're all just volunteers trying to keep things positive and stable. 🙏 ❤️
Thanks!
Feeding a carnivore a vegan diet indeed is animal abuse. Cats can survive, but survival and healthy are not the same. Cats on a vegan diet get sick much faster and die younger, statistically according to vets. I'm a vegan, I have cats, I feed them meat. If you don't like feeding your pets meat, get a herbivore pet instead.
The way things were handled may have been wrong, but animal abuse should be banned from Lemmy imo.
There could be a technical fix for this. Lemmy could use a system that requires certain moderator and/or admin actions to require a 2-person authorization, and temporarily put the action in an “under review” state for a set amount of time.
For instance, an admin removing content would replace it with a placeholder for up to 2 days. If another admin accepts the change then the comment is removed. If no other admin responds then the content is put back.
This is pretty much Change Management.
Would be fine as an option that could be enabled, especially for larger communities, but an instance run by a single person wouldn't be able to host communities if it was a built in requirement for all communities.
Of course.
You can't fix people problems with technical solutions. I know tech folk like to think they can, but it really doesn't work. Sometimes you simple needs some rules, guides, and a good book to slap someone with.
Maybe not fix, but some things can certainly help.
In theory a good idea, but there is lots of content that needs to be gone serverside asap - either because it's CP, otherwise illegal, spam that clogs down the Fediverse/can even be used to DoS a server,etc.
A slight modification, it could be implemented as a suggested action where the admins (or mods) can ask for a second opinion when they feel it's appropriate.
That way urgent actions can happen right away, and potentially controversial actions can be discussed. It should solve the problem without forcing a specific workflow
I was just thinking about this: peer review admin actions. A first admin could initiate the action, then the peer review could be assigned randomly to another admin - randomly so that admins can't create specific cartels to team up on specific topics.
More backstage work for admins who are NOT paid. No.
Personally, I like this idea. But it can be equally abused if two admins colluded to agree with each other. But, I think it’s at least better than nothing.
I would imagine this would need to be done at the software level to be most effective. You should request this sort of feature from the Lemmy team to integrate into both the backend and the UI.
If you do create issues for this request, you should post back here (or whatever related community) so people can upvote the issues to show the devs we really want the feature.
Upvoting and commenting for visibility, this is a great idea. Though concur with snooggums below that it would need to be an opt-in option.
I think a 3 person team is better. 1 mod/admit marks something for moderation. 2 other mods need to agree to mod. If 1 of the mods disagrees, it stays.
This is inspired by true events in September 1983, where a russian command post in charge of their nuclear weapons caught on radar 4 incoming missles, supposedly fired from America. The captain in charge turned his key to fire every nuke they had at America. The second in command turned his key as well. The third in command refused. His logic was if America was going to fire nukes, why fire exactly 4 nukes and only 4 nukes, all targeting the same location? Would it not make sense to deplay thousands if you're trying for a surprise ambush?
Those nukes that America fired? Clouds. The Earth was at just the right rotation for 30 minutes to confuse the russian radar into interpreting 4 missle shaped clouds as solid objects.
America was almost turned to dust for no reason, 2 weeks before I was born. Because of some happy fluffy white clouds, that even Bob Ross will admit almost DID cause an accident!
So yeah. Maybe we do a 3 mod system.
Well, on the Internet, damage to reputation might be irreversible, but damage to content won’t.
We’re not dealing with nukes.
But any standard change management process can do that. I don’t think 3 people need to be involved in most matters.
I appreciate you guys owning up to this, especially since a lot of people here seemed determined to ignore the actual issue and just start a redditesque circle jerk about vegans.
Thanks! When we fall down, we get back up and try to learn from our mistakes to do better next time ✌️
Animal abuse isn't an opinion. It's evil. And malice by ignorance that could be corrected is malice.
Stop apologizing for doing your jobs. We all have opinions and raise them loudly in the Fediverse so I understand your natural reaction and want to communicate well. But IMHO this is troll feeding. If they posted in favor of human genocide, you'd close a ticket, and move on, not write an apology for taking it down.
https://www.benevo.com/vegan-cat-food-from-benevo/
Benevo Cat foods contain all the nutrients an adult cat needs, including a wide range of vitamins (including A, B, D, E, K), essential fatty acids and taurine, without the need for slaughterhouse meat. Although obligate carnivores in the wild, domestic cats still need nutrients they would normally source from prey. Thankfully Benevo Cat contains all those nutrients in a bioavailable kibble.
Benevo Cat is a professional cat food, created by Benevo in 2005, formulated and checked by independent animal nutritionists to meet the AAFCO(USA) and FEDIAF(Europe) guidelines for animal nutrition.
We've had safe and healthy variants of vegan cat food for 20 years. Trying to elevate the question to animal abuse speaks entirely to personal ignorance.
It’s still forcing YOUR diet on a helpless animal. They eat meat.
End of story.
Good news, thanks for the open communication.
You're welcome!✌️❤️ We try and be easy to get a hold of as well.
I'm reminded of an article talking about an outage at Yahoo! back when they were huge. It turned out the whole outage came down to one person messing up. The manager was asked how they let the person go and they said "Whatever the cost of that outage we just spent it on training, that person will never make that mistake again, nor will they allow someone else to make it".
If you have mods trying to manage things and they make a mistake you don't axe them, you discuss the situation and work in good policy for going forward. This one case is costly to the community, but nowhere near as costly as losing someone with this experience.
As for the vegan diet for cats issue, in general people who do vegan diets for kids and animals run a high risk of causing harm. Is it possible to do correctly? Maybe. Is it likely that an individual who is not trained in that field will manage it? No. But should it be investigated? Sure, but o my with experiments that actually do teach us something, no wasted studies of 3 weeks on a diet and checking blood tests, or comparing vegan kibble to omnivore kibble. Still, the same issues plague human dietetics and we don't have the answers there either, so yeah, maybe we should all chill a little and work together rather than identifying with one side of the argument and vilifying the other.
Never fire someone for an accident unless the accident was a symptom of willful negligence. Fire them for being unqualified or incompetent, sure, but not for an honest mistake. Training someone to avoid that mistake in the future will be far less expensive than replacing them, and they're going to be far less likely to make mistakes like it ever again.
Mistakes create opportunities for growth ❤️
The idea that it's dangerous to raise children on a vegan diet is unequivocally false, and misinformation. Every major health authority has made statements affirming that a properly implemented plant-based diet is entirely nutritionally adequate for all stages of life. Literally the only supplement that's strictly necessary in the majority of cases is b12 - which is something that everyone should be supplementing with anyway. Aside from that it's easier to get adequate nutrition from plant-based diets than it is on the Standard American Diet.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27886704/
https://bitesizevegan.org/the-crime-of-raising-vegan-kids-when-diet-is-deadly/
The question is not about what is possible, it is about what is common. Also, I am not saying the SAD is good or even better than vegan. Anyone trying to eat well is likely to make some of the same good choices, such as reducing refined sugars, dropping a portion of their ultra processed foods, and monitoring and meeting their protein needs. Being unable to hit your protein needs on a vegan diet is something an incautious person may experience, but supplementing protein or increasing protein components in your meals is manageable.
That all said, it takes extra work. Most people don't have the spare effort to cook at home for every meal, people are time and money poor and stressed beyond all reasonable limits, so we need to try to make some sort of plan that can actually be followed, not just some ideal. Is vegan possible? With effort and education it seems that some people can manage it, so at least some portion of people could do that. On the flip side if someone eats fish and chicken as their meat rather than beef have they not made progress from a bunch of ways? Definitely fewer carbon emissions. I don't claim to know the answer for what we should do but saying "do this perfect thing" seems counterproductive.
A sensible, compassionate, gracious and humble response? I thought this was the internet?
Yeah, I was as taken by surprise as you. I guess thats one of the reasons I keep using Lemmy after ditching reddit
Thanks! Yeah, a lot of the team (and users) came from Reddit, so feel ya on that.
Try to be as transparent as we can and keep things as healthy as we can for the community.
Thank you for your measured, reasonable, and frankly reassuring response. I appreciate that moderation is a very difficult task and I want to thank all of you, both for your work and for how you've acted when faced with a difficult situation. This is exactly how I would've hoped this response would be. I do hope that your resolution to discuss these things beforehand can help avoid similar issues in the future.
Thanks for understanding. It took the whole team a lot of work to get to this point 🙏
To be clear, while the idea that discussion is welcome is good the moderators of c/vegan do not tolerate discussion. Any opinion that goes against the orthodoxy of the echo bunker leads to a permanent ban. If you express any opinion other that, "It's fully acceptable to force your extremist philosophy on an obligate carnivore by feeding it an unnatural vegan diet" you will be banned. It's an incredibly closed minded and intolerant community.
Forgive me for being suspicious of your comment. There is a huge anti-vegan bias in society, and many argue against veganism, not in good faith. Can you provide any examples of the mods doing this?
This is not exclusive to c/vegan; other communities have similar issues you have brought up; they have also been called out by a few, but c/vegan is getting the most traction.
It goes back to user, mod, and admin control over their communities.
This post seems to address the overpolicing conflict.
There probably just sick of every thread, every damn thread, having people coming in and trying to debate. It's not a community for that and asking people to not do that is well within their rights. If somebody went into an anime community and kept saying live action is better, they should get banned. Doesn't mean that community is an echo chamber.
Someone linked the mod log. I read it and totally looks like echo chamber to me. You tow the line or you get removed. Did that admin open a can of worms step in doodoo and track it through the
houseinstance making a mess? Yup. But the pot is calling the kettle black when it cries about the censorship aspect. These seem like folks that belong on reddit or their own instance because its the personal kingdom of the mods being encroached on that is their real problem.The rest of lemmy.world admins are now trying to navigate this mess and no matter what they chose to do a large chunk of thier userbase is going to be unhappy. As far as I can see this was the least damaging way they could move on. There simply is no good ending to this, just a least bad one.
Ed: I've seen your voting patterns kids, your dissaproval of this post means nothing to me. I have no respect for people who purity test thier own social group.
What you're describing is an echo bunker. The anime example isn't a good fit, though. In the case of c/vegan they are taking about animal abuse, feeding an animal that evolved to eat meat and that needs to eat meat to be healthy a vegan diet. Whether anime or live action is better doesn't harm anything. Feeding a cat a vegan diet has a real possibility of causing health problems or death.
No one gives a shit what they want to eat. I look at the pictures of the brown slop that they post claiming its the best recipe ever and laugh. I don't care. When they talk about doing that to a cat or dog I care. Those are the posts that get a lot of reaction from people who love animals.
The hate that vegans get on Lemmy is when they push themselves into discussions of farming, hunting, fishing, etc. to push their ideological purity on other and to shame people who are just going about their lives or when the talk about abusing their pets.
I don't agree with the outcome of THIS situation, but I DO agree with the idea that mods and admins are not gods on the fediverse. I like the concept of checks and balances, even if I disagree with the ruling. The fact that it's not a god complex one person rule is better than what reddit has.
That being said, you can be vegan, but give your cat some chicken! Cats LOVE chicken! Why would you want to deprive your cat of what they love? If they were neighborhood cats, they would instinctually be killing birds ALL THE TIME!!! So it's not YOU killing the chicken. It's your cat. Don't like it? Don't get a cat.
I don't get a dog. Why? Because I'm never home. That would be unfair for a dog to just NEVER get to go for a walk, just because I'm home like 10 hours a day. And even that is mostly sleeping. Wouldn't be fair to the dog. Just like it's not fair to the cat to never have chicken.
Can we not relaunch the argument that turned into a black hole, pulling everyone on Lemmy into a hellish void? Let's keep the cat diet discussion in c/vegan, c/cats or some other devoted sublemmy.
I don’t agree with the outcome of THIS situation, but I DO agree with the idea that mods and admins are not gods on the fediverse. I like the concept of checks and balances, even if I disagree with the ruling. The fact that it’s not a god complex one person rule is better than what reddit has.
Can you elaborate? I want to understand.
I am not involved in the action above but it seems fair.Cats love their beef food. It's not normal for cats to eat cows.
Cats are not vegan lol
To be totally honest you have nothing to apologize for. Dogs and cats are metabolically different to humans and cannot survive on a vegan diet unlike us. Forcing obligate carnivore pets on vegan diets is certainly animal abuse.
I remember when there was a growing campaign to ban r/nonewnormal on Reddit due to it being a hub of medical disinformation and conspiracy theories surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic, and that this led to a blackout much like the later API protests.
Rather than read the room and introduce a new rule banning medical disinformation, Reddit's Tintin-looking moron of a CEO instead threw out tonnes of BS statistics on brigading likely plucked out of his own sphincter, and banned the subreddit because their activity exceeded this arbitrary percentage he made up.
And before you tell me this guy's figures were legit, aren't we forgetting that he pathologically lied about his interactions with the Sync developer? Spez is a snake.
@lwadmin For full disclosure I agree with rooki on this topic.
I may have missed it in the write up but I think the vegan mods needlessly escalated the situation by trying to ban and remove comments from an admin.
I am not saying I always agree with rooki but I respect his job as an admin.
The mods of vegan treated him disrespectfully in his capacity as an admin by deleting and banning him.
You should cover this in your terms of service.
good look
Lunatic vegans on lemmy? No way dude
Seems like a reasonable conclusion to me. Thank you for communicating as well as for your time and effort spent handling this in a careful and mature way.
Thanks, when thing gets out of hand, we try and take a step back as a team and evaluate how to do our best to fix things for both our site and the community as a whole.
Appreciate how you handled this, but denying a carnivore an appropriate diet is definitely animal abuse.
I think discussing the emerging field of plant based and synthetic replication of a carnivores diet using real research is pretty clear cut not animal abuse just because it can be animal abuse if not done carefully and because you say so. (Also, I'm not a vegan and I have never fed my cat vegan food, you guys are just obnoxious though)
I love the compassionate intervention that allows @[email protected] the opportunity to learn and correct his behaviors and models that level of compassion. Thank you very much! 😊
Me too.
Can you people trying to restart the original argument take that shit elsewhere? This is a discussion about how to approach moderation.
They are heavily linked. If moderation is lax enough to allow what many perceive to be animal cruelty then it endangers one of the largest mediums in the fediverse. Lemmy already has a poor reputation on Mastodon, and the debate on this really doesn't help shine a good light on lemmy.world.
I've heard evidence that it was a fairly toxic community there anyway.
We should be careful to avoid creating communities that are echo chambers. Ie, it should be a community discussing veganism, not a vegan safe space where people abuse you if you disagree
Otherwise, in 5 years time you end to with scenarios similar to reddit or on beehaw
I left beehaw because I half agreed with the community, someone in a "safe space" abused me, and a beehaw admin overlooked that abuse and instead insisted I was starting a flight (simply because I didn't 100% agree with the community it seemed)
We also risk scenarios where vaping or drug communities could grow and become toxic in the same way. We also should be as scientific as possible and avoid becoming Facebook.
I'm not sure about the cat thing, but to me, it seems like it could at least be used as animal abuse
We should be careful to avoid creating communities that are echo chambers.
I'm afraid that ship is already sailed, foundered, and is well on the way to the bottom in a lot of communities.
When it comes to spicy topics, many communities on Lemmy feel incredibly close-minded and hostile to opposing views.
We should be careful to avoid creating communities that are echo chambers
From what I see we are already echo chambers on the most pressing topics.
Interesting, first time I hear this about Beehaw
It's not a common scenario probably.
But I felt at least one admin was so focused on protecting at least 1 minority, that they were willing to overlook bad behavior by some of them. Or maybe they knew that if they told them to act better that the community would see them as a threat
In fact, the person who exclaimed that I "wanted to kill the entire minority" simply because I didn't 100% agree with one thing also I realized colored my opinion early of the rest of Lemmy on another thread by calling it a cesspool
It's actually the opposite. People are free to discuss on other servers, and I realize that lots of the thing that person was saying, was actually bad for discussions except in a way that benefits them directly (even disregarding other people in their minority).
The crazy part is I have plenty of friends who are part of that minority lol
They were a mod too, so over time, some of these communities will only develop stronger and stronger opinions which are self reinforcing and rise to the top in these safe spaces and basically become another femaledatingstrategy like environment
I have a question: what is the FHF? Searching that acronym without context leads to what appears to be unrelated organizations.
FediHosting Foundation, it's our parent non profit.
What's crazy is all the admins had to do was look at that subs modlog prior to the controversy to see this was all most likely a troll:
https://lemmy.world/modlog/1309?page=3&actionType=ModRemoveComment
That mod team doesn't give two shits about "free speech".
Let them migrate to their own instance, changing all of lemmy.world's rules and making all those sticky threads is about as much as you could feed a troll.
Wow that modlog is pretty eye opening, big echo chamber vibes.
I’m asking this purely out of naivety, not trying to make a point: are you saying that because there are removed comments there that seem balanced and pretty thoughtful but have been removed regardless?
This is honestly my very first time looking at a modlog so I’m trying to got understand how to read it.
Yeah. I know why I blocked them a long time ago. There is nothing of value in that community.
I’m not involved with the original drama - nor do I want to entertain it to begin with - but good on you guys for being transparent
Thanks. TBH most of us are here because we want to see more transparency with the internet.
We're not perfect, but we try to do the best we can, even if we make mistakes.
It's hard as heck to consider all the different angles on big issues, which is why it can take us a few days to a week when big issues pop off.
I'm glad you're sticking to your guns on this. At the end of the day, it should NOT be up to the admin team who are not subject matter experts to determine what is and is not considered "truth" especially in cases where there is still active research on the topic.
I also can totally see how this topic can elicit a knee jerk reaction, because people have been known to put animals on vegan diets irresponsibly, but we don't block people from posting "chonkers" or obese cats which is literally the same thing where people will often intentionally overfeed their cats for this aesthetic which is also clearly abuse in the exact same vein.
I also think its a good thing you reinstated the admin after some reflection and a well thought out response and statement. It doesn't seem like they are on some crazy power trip either.
I was reading through the Section 8 Misinformation, there seems to be a typo:
We always recomend that users
Thanks! We fixed it in the next update we push.
Fixed!
The mods at the lemmy world vegan community don't see things the same way. From this post:
"Today the lemmy.world admins made a follow up post about the incident where the admin Rooki interfered with moderation of this community in a way which was determined to be against lemmy.world TOS and factually incorrect. Throughout this incident there has been no communication with me, nor to my knowledge any of of the other moderators of this community. Rooki quitely undid his actions and edited his post to admit fault however there was no public acknowledgement of this from him. In fact I wasn’t even told I was reinstated as a mod which is quite funny."
"The lemmy.world admins’ response appears more focused on managing their own reputations and justifying similar actions in the future than providing a good environment for vegans, and other similarly maligned groups. Their statements about wanting to handle misinformation and overreach better in the future ring a bit hollow when they won’t take actions to address the anti-vegan circlejerks under their update posts which abound with misinformation and disinformation."
"The legalese written basically allows for the same thing to happen, and that if it does the admin decision is to stand while moderators have to quietly resolve the conflict at the admins’ leisure. Presumably with a similarly weak public apology and barely visible record correction after the fact."
Codified anti-vegan bias based on reactionary views? That's unfortunate. Glad I'm not on that instance.
this is a welcome post, i was a little worried what this was going to be like, but you didn't manage to cannibalize yourselves over it so thats good.
Regardless the internet wouldn't be the internet with stupid squabbles like this one.
I suppose it's good to take any opportunity to clarify moderation policies but... all this over cat food? Jesus Christ people, have some perspective. Not every topic needs to devolve into a debate about free speech and censorship.
If you prefer, there is still the debate over the medias bias fact checker bot
Bias Rating: 10,000 out of 10*
*you made mistakes twice over six-hundred & fifty comments and you are now Breitbart
Proof: my personal blog [link]
Media Bias/Fact Check - News Source Context (Click to view Full Report) Information for Media Bias/Fact Check:
MBFC: Least Biased - Credibility: High - Factual Reporting: Very High - United States of America Wikipedia about this source
[email protected] - News Source Context (Click to view Full Report) Information for [email protected]:
MBFC: Left-Center - Credibility: High - Factual Reporting: High Wikipedia about this source
Search topics on Spammy Spam Paywalled News
I’d rather it happen over animal cruelty now than being unprepared for discussions over underage nuclear eugenics later!
Thanks for the continued work in maintaining a community!
❤️✌️
🍿
😅
Good call.
You mention censorship like it's something that never happens here. Mods delete comments they don't agree with all the time.
It would be better if you linked to some receipts from the get go
Who cares?
Censorship is a problem when it is a political state with armed military force to back it up and disappear individuals for unsanctioned speech.
This is a free-to-use, volunteer-run website —if you are posting shit and it’s consistently
censored(read: deleted) then you might be the problem.People these days are deranged in their notion of what free speech and censorship means—you do not have a legal right to post the most egregious shit to a privately run website and not face consequences from that private entity. Also, no one’s cutting out your tongue. Feel free to go out on the street and spout whatever shit you want.
good response. love knowing there are adults in the room turning pissing contests in to practical policy.
Drama time 👏 and vegan drama no less. Always feels really nourishing
I find myself needing supplements in addition to my vegan drama.
All of that was over people fighting about feeding a carnivore pet plant based pet food? You're f*cking kidding me right?
This is complicated. 🤔
Speaking of mod power abuse, some days ago one of your mods deleted my (very mildly) snarky comment for "mod harassment", which I didnt even know they were until that point. I suggested they should be a little less petty and argumentative in random comment chains.
I did not report that bs at the time because I honestly dont give two fucks about the guy and have since blocked him, but I'm sure you can find it in the mod logs.
Mods or admins? Because this is a thread about admin powers and responsibilities, not mods.
he was convinced that it was scientific consensus that cats cannot survive on a vegan diet
10/10 vets understand the science behind the consensus.
But anyway, let's hear what the accountant and physicist think, since that's going to be relevant.
And yet do I see correctly, that nothing at all was done about the mods that removed posts stating with proof, that the AKC agrees that cats are oblate carnivores and should not eat vegan cat food.
This whole thing reads like an apology to those who were wrong to begin with.
There's a sad, ironic element of humor that vegans are inadvertently advocating for animal abuse. ):)
vegan cat food
wtf???
With modern science everything can be substituted in a healthy way. It's not like nature conjures magic to make animal meat nutritious. It's all just chemistry. That said, escalating a discussion about fucking cat food into something that gets pinned on the announcements page TWICE is insane.
It feels like Lemmy is growing up. Love to see it.
Yeah, it's been a wild ride 😀
I'm guessing someone on /c/vegan took umbrage with the fact that cats are obligate carnivores and didn't want to hear anything else.
Edit: I find my upvote/downvote ratio unbelievable for this comment. Astounding how controversial facts are.
Please. Don't stoke the fires of Mordor. They're cooling off. Please. Give it 10000 years.
Indeed.
I really don’t understand their position.
Cats cannot make a moral choice so what are these folks going to do when they see their “vegan” cat take down a bird or a mouse?
The fact that domesticated cats are notorious hunters really does make this whole thing pretty fucking funny tbh.
Im guessing you want to kill all cats
Im basing my guess on the same as you do - imagination
Ps Im not a vegan
You are just being terrible.
It's good to have these issues. I still look at Lemmy as v1 of something that will eventually be quite different and the moderation and admin questions are not easily solved.
It seems like there are some good ideas in the comments, but another might be community voting for mods. Its interesting to me how undemocratic these democratic platforms are. Might be something to consider in future versions of Lemmy.
It seems like there are some good ideas in the comments, but another might be community voting for mods.
I have seen instances organize votes for their admins. Could be an option indeed.
Can someone link to the post on [email protected]? I wanna see this shit show 😅
Ty 🍿
I have cats, and I never would have responded to somebody the way rookie did in that thread. Also sounds like it's less "heat of the moment" When people are coming forward with other stories where he's been very emotionally charged during conversations.
But, all that aside, why is a backend programmer for lemmy an admin/mod at all?
Is there an issue with a backend programmer also being an admin/mod?
Yeah - they probably don't know javascript.
Just get a tortoise ffs.
Good Job!
The comments were removed for violating our instance rule against animal abuse (https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/#11-attacks-on-users).
That's not true at all. The reason given by Rooki for the actions at the time was "missinformation" [sic]. The ToS had no rules on misinformation at the time.
But their comments are not forced above the comments of other users for the purpose of arguing a point.
These comments were not elevated to appear before any other users comments.
That's also untrue. Rooki specifically distinguished that comment (the shield icon) in addition to having the [A] (admin) icon next to their name.
We will not be removing Rooki from his position as moderator
In your post, you accept that the vegan comments were valid, thus Rooki was in the wrong. Why does an instance moderator get to interfere (and impact what the readers see for days) with absolute impunity and new rules created to back their talking points? Rooki was not even asked to pause their activity while you looked into the conduct. There was no punishment to discourage those acts at all. Where in the world does one side admit to being at fault but the remedy still favors that side only?
Edit: post->comment
There was no punishment to discourage those acts at all.
It's weird to me that you are indicating the only way to address someone making a mistake or not doing the best thing is "punishment".
I think they addressed what they're changing and the thoughts behind what you're talking about very specifically and clearly.
That's also untrue. Rooki specifically distinguished that comment
Unless i'm mistaken, the comment you're saying is "untrue" is specifically about ordering it over others; as one would see based on up/downvotes. You seem to be talking about something else.
It’s weird to me that you are indicating the only way to address someone making a mistake or not doing the best thing is “punishment”.
For one, I'd question that being a mistake (or using the "cat owner" excuse to justify it), as Rooki has repeatedly expressed the same kind of views even outside the context of cats and after the incident. That and the extent of Rooki's actions on !vegan, as well as Rooki's response to my "asking for removal" post shows it's a strongly held belief influencing the mod behavior rather than an emotional one-time response in the heat of the moment.
There has been no indication on Rooki's part that the actions were wrong and contrary to the rules, and that their behavior will be different going forward. The quiet comment edit from ten days ago that followed my post is a "sorry not sorry", as it continues to fuel the fire with a milder argument on vegan cat food rather than discussing Rooki's misconduct and the appropriate path forward.
The new ToS additions introducing a section on misinformation and specifically having to spell out "Unhealthy diets, e.g. due to insufficient nutrients)" fully echoing Rooki's original points suggests that either Rooki or someone on their behalf had argued strongly for that point in the private staff discussions, again suggesting that there is no change of perspective in sight.
Given those circumstances, yes, it's a talk about punishment.
That’s also untrue. Rooki specifically distinguished that post (the shield icon) in addition to having the [A] (admin) icon next to their name.
Damn, I thought it was the case but couldn't remember.
We should call out the shield icon as a deliberate act but afaik admins or moderators always have a tag if they are part of said groups next to their name in the default lemmy UI, so if that's a concern it should be raised with the lemmy dev team, not specifically lemmy.world
Edit: specifically the mod/admin tag thing has already been an open issue for over a year, so it's certainly a lemmy UI dev discussion
The ToS had no rules on misinformation at the time.
it still had rules about animal abuse, which this misinformation, had it actually been misinformation, would have lead to. while the removal reason could have been more clear, the justification was still covered by our ToS.
new rules created to back their talking points
the additional rules provided more clarification on what we intend to achieve with them, but they would not be required. based on what we know today the removal was neither justified by the original ToS nor by the updated ones.
it still had rules about animal abuse, which this misinformation, had it actually been misinformation, would have lead to
An instance moderator repeatedly cited a rule that was not in the ToS, then undid the damage a few days later also on the basis of "not missinformation". To me, that's a clear indication of what was on Rooki's mind at the moment.
Can you explain how "animal abuse" comes into the picture? Are you saying that if an instance moderator does something for a made-up reason that is not covered in the rules, the rest of the moderators still attempt to find a reason in the rules that sticks? Understood if so, but then which animal abuse rule are you talking about? Is it the one about the visual depiction of violent content, in the same paragraph as gore, dismemberment, and so on? How does that relate to cat food even remotely? I described it as a huge stretch in my "asking for removal" post and I still see it as a huge stretch. It's hard to understand why you would need to go for that unless trying to justify Rooki's actions which were completely unjustifiable from any angle.
You're allowing animal abuse on your instance by leaving the comments up.
Totally missing the point of the thread. Read the room, dude.
They are for genocide so not surprising they can't read a room
people really hate getting pointed out when pro genocide
Agree or disagree the problem here is an admin that feels he can moderate any community on his instance based on only emotional response.
When shit blows up in his face he quickly undoes his little mistake and someone else apologizes.
An emotional response to potential animal abuse just makes the admin human. It's just plain weird to assume otherwise. The admins aren't robots, they're real people, and while I don't necessarily disagree with either decision they made, I find it very odd that people want to hide the cold fact that this decision reflects very poorly on the content hosted within lemmy.world.
We will not be removing Rooki from his position as moderator, as we believe that this is a disproportionate response for a heat-of-the-moment response.
Everybody makes mistakes, and while we do try and hold the site admin staff to a higher standard, calling for folks resignation from volunteer positions over it would not fair to them. Rooki has given up 100’s of hours of his free time to help both Lemmy.World, FHF and the Fediverse as a whole grown in far reaching ways. You don’t immediately fire your staff when they make a bad judgment call.
But banning users for calling out obvious trolls is ok. This is bullshit really. The mods have been going so hard on here it makes this place less and less appealing.
Move to a different instance. Honestly, .world is too big and has too much influence. I get most people just wanna join the biggest instance but tons of other instances federate with .world so you can still have the content without the majority convening on one instance and giving them most of the power.
What would happen if .world went down? Tons of accounts and communities would be lost, people need to spread out to different instances instead of trying to make .world reddit 2.0.
Edit: just saw you're not on .world, that's my bad. But my point still stands.
Censorship is when Kitty cat get no meat :(
So... just to check my understanding, what you're saying is that whether or not cats can survive on a vegan diet, it doesn't matter? Right? You're saying that you decided the admins overstepped and you regret approaching ambiguity the way you did? I suppose that seems reasonable. There's plenty of misinfo all over Lemmy as is, and as such there's gotta be various ways we can handle it - from top-down bans to trusting the readers.
As for the diet stuff, what, are they using lab-grown meat? Is that the TLDR here?
EDIT: Guys I am just checking my understanding - maybe check your own if you think such a comment does not contribute to the discussion.
As for the diet stuff, what, are they using lab-grown meat?
No, the food is plant based and has all the essential nutrients, either inherently or added (like synthetic Taurin for example).
Edit: People who downvote this are disagreeing with objective reality. Anti-Vegans are way more obnoxious than any vegan I ever met. Weird people.
Lol i was expecting to get a lot of downvotes for asking clarifying questions without having any opinions formed. The internet doesn't like that. ME SMASH!!
I thought the whole point of lemmy is you cash be as crazy as you want and they will leave you alone unlike reddit
HaHaHa! Well done #threadiverse. The system mostly works. As a vegan and dog father, I watched this play out and found it both funny and instructive. Hell hath no fury like a cat owner on the moral high ground.
Vegans causing controversy. This is my complete lack of surprise.
Vegans have their rights to opinions just as you and me. This is not about t vegans vs us, but about how to handle disagreements We never learn if we just sensor everyone we disagree with
disagreements
So do anti-vax people get their rights to options?
What about religious fundamentalist homeschoolers?
Parents who refuse their children any medical treatment because prayer is enough if you have faith?
Racists?
Where do you draw the line if it's not animal abuse? Especially presented in a way that someone might fall for the misinformation and not know they're harming their pet?
sensor
It’s weird how you can not really notice words are homonyms until you see them spelled out…
The mod log of their community says otherwise. People keep repeating that Vegans are being attacked, and honestly it seems to go both ways from what I've seen. I was curious about the situation and the single comment in this thread that stood out initially I believe has since been deleted but was literally using the word "carnivore" as a slur.
Several people are making it vegans vs carnivores here regardless of what the post was actually intended to be about. I'm not sure (since I believe this post was intended to be informative) that this comments section should even exist. But since it does I think it probably should have been limited to comments specifically about the verdict and the changes and rather explicitly excluded the hot button issue that touched all this off.
I've blocked the vegan community here after a single visit there and haven't looked back but this comment section is very much tame in comparison.
As soon as someone in a position of power shows their willingness to use that power to further their own agenda in any way, rather than for the benefit of the community, they should immediately and unequivocally have that power withdrawn.
Rooki has showed us all who he is, and what he is willing to do with power. He has not felt any consequences. In future, he’ll just be more cautious with how he abuses his power.
Like everything else in the real world, there are far more shades of gray than the singular black and white way of handling things than how you're representing it. Stop for a moment and think about your own actions growing up, going to school, getting a job, being in a relationship, etc. In every scenario, I guarantee you've made mistakes or poor decisions of varying degrees. I also guarantee you that some of those were abuses of power, even if most of them were very small ones. Being caught making those mistakes doesn't always have to end in a 100% revocation of whatever power or potential power you have. Good responses tend to take into account all the nuance, including stakes and severity, and punishment is often used only as a tool of reinforcement that then lets the person have the opportunity to later show that they can and have grown and won't make the mistake again. That is what's happening here. If they do something like this again, even and especially with the changes being made, then yeah, it's time for further action. Until then, the actions themselves that were harmful have been reversed and they've taken the time and effort to make the changes they described. Let them learn and grow.
TL;DR: You don't get put to death for every crime, even many bigger ones; you get a measured response and an opportunity to grow.
Thank you for giving us grace. It's appreciated.
Like how vegans abuse the power they have over a chiefly carnivorous animal by forcing it to conform to a diet it would not naturally choose, just so they can feel good about themselves?
I think you need to accept the fact most mods will and do abuse their power, usually without even realizing ho much they suck.
I understand that nothing is forcing me to remain on this instance, so I require no reminder, but every single new pinned "all" post that I see at the top of my feed makes me dislike this instance more and more.
I haven't encountered a single admin here that I don't dislike. Every feature that is added is pointless. (Most recently, the "media bias" bot or whatever you call it.) Just waiting for ads now. There shouldn't need to be a "misinformation" section in the handbook. If someone doesn't like that being vegan the right way is good for you, they can block the community they think is offending them.
Pointless.
I know this is the internet, so my expectations should be pretty low, but I'm honestly really disheartened and taken aback by all of the comment sections on the posts related to this one. Everyone just spewing opinions, no facts, no research, just hearsay. We are a very disappointing group of people I'd say and we should try and do better.
I'm also really disheartened by the actions that took place in /c/vegan that this post is describing that caused policy changes. Another example for me on why anarchy and removing power structures is needed. Honestly, why should /c/vegan or any non-mainstream community want to remain associated with this instance? I am vegan, and didn't know that community existed, but seeing how hostile non-vegans are in there... Forget about it.
Just terrible all around. What a calamity of a community we're creating.
Hello,
It seems like you've been here for a couple of months. How is it so far?
I appreciate the suggested pivot in tone:
The fediverse still confuses me at times: choosing an instance to join, finding communities, subscribing to communities, and staying logged in have all been problems I have. I came originally for ergonomic keyboards, joined a few more communities and found that I can visit daily and see a page of interesting and relevant posts (after constantly logging in again).
I still visit both Reddit and lemmy.world. I really want fediverses and community owned instances to become mainstream. I'm really tired of enshittification and mis-moderation of Reddit and Facebook, which is why I'm here. So to see a massive mishandling of moderator powers here, without the result removing the moderator which I think is appropriate in this case, is a huge setback for me. A moderator of lemmy.world single-handedly disenfranchised an entire community. That sucks. And not only did it suck there in /c/vegan, but now even the comments here people are continuing the argument. Just really twisting that knife of disenfranchisement into the broader community.
Fortunately, I can explore joining a different instance and avoid lemmy.world communities; something I can't do with Reddit or Facebook.
If you’re comfortable pivoting to ml, there’s a good vegan community on hexbear. World preemptively defederated from that instance though, so you’d need to make an alt or change servers.
So, because removal is too much punishment there'll be no punishment at all, even now in the second draft of damage control.
They could remove the moderator's ability to post for a period of six months. But, they've not chosen it.
Seems it's time to go.
Hey I mean, this is Lemmy. If you are unhappy about an instance's moderation it's a free fediverse, you can always create a better-moderated one. That's part of the spirit after all.
If you are unhappy about an instance's moderation it's a free fediverse, you can always create a better-moderated one.
I could also call your implied false dichotomy part of the dumbing down of America, then make a new account elsewhere and no longer participate in threads originating from this instance.
Using the Hippocratic oath as a guide is stupid. It only applies to medical personnel that take the oath, and medical personnel haven't taken that oath since at least the 60s because it actually has a lot of unethical shit incompatible with modern morality. For example, the original Hippocratic oath is against abortion. Does that mean that Lemmy is anti-abortion now? It also forbids surgery for kidney stones, are the admins certified to make this kind of medical decisions.
Just write or choose a good ethical framework that is actually relevant for the management of online communities. There's better, more modern shit out there that also includes the principle of do no harm. Lemmy.World is handled by amateurs.
Just write or choose a good ethical framework that is actually relevant for the management of online communities. There's better, more modern shit out there that also includes the principle of do no harm.
You know what would be helpful here? Actually naming and/or linking to some of these better frameworks you think they should consider using.
The reactionary vegan hate is real.
Good to know admins wont ever face any consequences
Will your next statement address the existence of a bot that lets community moderators site-ban and IP blacklist accounts without any appeal process?
Between the MediaBiasFactCheck and this bot how much power does Rooki have over the instance?
won’t ever
Hmm, is that fair?
“may not face removal for single offenses“ sounds like it
If we saw repeated problems with someone and heard no explanations or received the same explanations continuously, at that point I would certainly say it gives the appearance of there being admins who “won’t ever face any consequences“.
None of the rule changes make it less likely that someone like Rooki will use their power to push a view. They justify the misconduct, as they echo the reasons used by Rooki at the time of the incident while the post is also misleading about them.
What bot are you referring too?
Have a look at [email protected]
Tl:dr "Just trust us. We'll totally come to a consensus at some point eventually, pinky sware. In this case, despite the admin being a pompous sack of duck vaginas, we're not going to do anything about their censorship. We're probably going to continue censoring things we don't like in the future, but only when we agree on it with 0 public comment."
Yw
Wtf? An essay on cat’s diet? Is this becoming reddit? Please tell me no
The comments were removed for violating our instance rule against animal abuse
I really don't get this point. With the same logic, you can remove any person giving meat to their cat, or more generally, eating meat themselves. No matter how much most people try to ignore it and not think about it, the absolute overwhelming majority of meat is produced in absolutely cruel and gruesome circumstances, which every pet owner would consider torture.
(Edit: And for the record, I'm not even vegan myself (and also don't own a cat), just calling out the hypocrisy.)
There's a very simple solution to all of this. Just require the user upload a form showing that their dog or cat consented to being converted to veganism in defiance of their very nature 👍
I have a bunch of cats I feed vegan diets to, but to anyone concerned that I'm doing animal abuse, don't worry - occasionally, I wring one of their necks and chop it up to feed to the others, so clearly I'm not abusing them.
Seriously though, I do not understand how non-vegans are all getting on their high horse about "animal abuse" when their preferred course of action is just abusing different animals. Cats do not hold a higher moral standing than other animals just because they look cute. You know they feed cows literal shit? Do you think that's part of their "natural diet?"
I don't have any cats or other pets, but even if the worst claims are true, the people doing it would be no worse than what carnists do every day. It's simply that abuse against certain categories of sentient beings is so normalized that people don't even recognize it as abuse, no matter how bad it is.
lol Lemmy turning into reddit with its "amazing" moderators and ban hammers. not surprised.
There are so many ignorant comments of people not realizing that you can feed cats a plant-based diet with taurine.
so this is an endorsement of animal abuse from the admins?
It is an endorsement of allowing discussion of a controversial topic that didn't break the posted rules.
Feeding a cat a vegan diet is animal abuse because it requires a workaround for their biology as an obligate carnivore instead of just feeding them what they have evolved to need. If a vegan can't properly feed a particular pet, they shouldn't have the pet.
But we should be able to discuss it unless the rules for the community are changed to prohibit that kind of discussion.
we do not consider feeding a cat vegan food as animal abuse, provided there are no health issues arising from this.
most of the research i've looked at seems to point out that there are various pitfalls, e.g. just feeding a cat vegetables will result in malnutrition. having synthetic additives for this can be one way to address that problem. just because something is sold as vegan cat food that doesn't necessarily imply that it's healthy for the cat, as some of the articles were pointing out that some of the cheaper ones were lacking the right ingredients.
as an example, "my cat now only gets potatoes and apples and nothing else" would be considered animal abuse.
additionally, if moderators were to remove arguments pointing out the risks of e.g. missing nutrients in a civil discussion and leaving the other side that just argues "vegan cat food works" without any arguments as is then we would also consider this animal abuse.
in this specific incident the conversation was certainly not civil, which is unfortunate, as this situation would likely have gone a very different way if it was.
This looks to be more an endorsement of moderation principles and rules, not determining truth of comments.
For the difficulties in determining what's true, see the kerfuffle about Media Bias Fact Check.
This is an endorsement of freedom of speech even if your ideology disagrees
You obviously did not read or comprehend the post, and are attempting to troll in Bad Faith.
If you had read and comprehended this post, you’d have found that they updated the by-laws to include language to prohibit animal abuse. You’d have also read their reasoning for what they did in their post-mortem to Rooki’s actions.
Do better.
I was looking for the super hyperbolic nonsense statement, surprised it took me this much scrolling honestly.
Maybe Lemmy is getting better....
I've seen many comments on Lemmy glorifying hunting and fishing and nobody gets angry when they don't get removed. Someone makes a comment about the theoretical possiblity of vegan cat food and people freak out when they reinstate it.
its almost as if like people can make conscious decisions for themselves, yet have to be proper caretakers for animals that can not make such decisions, even if it includes going against the owners inbuilt beliefs, because it is in the best interest of the animal which is reliant wholly upon your care taking.
I’ve seen many comments on Lemmy glorifying hunting and fishing and nobody gets angry when they don’t get removed.
Hunting and Fishing is the circle of life. As long as we do it as humanely as possible it is necessary to feed 8 billion people. In fact in some instances it can be ecologically helpful, like culling invasive species. The same cannot be said for continually feeding an inadequate diet to a living animal.
Someone makes a comment about the theoretical possiblity of vegan cat food and people freak out when they reinstate it.
To me there's a fine line between discussing "the theoretical possibility" and recommending it to cat owners. Of course it's theoretically possible, but as far as I can tell it has not been proven in practice yet, and should not be recommended.
Tldr: we will do more internal talks, was right just needed to tell mods why they were removed, just talk to admins if happens again so we can quietly handle it.
This is what you came up with after all that time?
