Quadruple moderation is killing Lemmy. It’s a gift to Reddit
There’s a rule about online communities I want people here to understand: the 90-9-1 rule.
Roughly 90% lurk, 9% comment, and 1% create.
Additionally - lemmy monthly active users is stangant at about 35k monthly active and not improving:
https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/stats
When I first got to Lemmy, I had trouble finding enough content I was interested in even commenting on. So I figured: why complain about the lack of content when one can start posting it myself?
That’s why I post so much.
If people don’t post, most Lemmy communities simply don’t have enough creators to sustain themselves. You need posts before lurkers can lurk, commenters can comment, and some of those people eventually become creators themselves.
I’m not posting just to flood Lemmy. I’m trying to help solve one of Lemmy’s biggest problems: not enough content creators.
And frankly, doing that has been a nightmare.
Lemmy has a quadruple-moderation problem
Every active content creator has to survive four layers:
- Community moderators can remove your posts or ban you from the community.
- Your home-instance admins can ban your entire account.
- Receiving-instance admins can block/ban you for everyone on their instance, even though you don’t belong to it.
- Public moderation history means those decisions follow you. One moderator’s decision can influence another and snowball into more moderation.
For prolific content creators, that’s brutal.
I’ve had multiple accounts banned over one or two posts that somebody didn’t like. Months of posting, comments, engagement and contributions can effectively disappear from a community because of a couple of moderation decisions.
And the more you contribute, the worse the odds become. If you make hundreds or thousands of posts, eventually you’re going to post something that one moderator somewhere doesn’t like.
You don’t need one moderation team to tolerate you. You need multiple independent moderators and admins, across multiple servers, to remain aligned indefinitely.
There’s almost no cost to deleting a creator
This is another major difference from Reddit.
There is generally no financial investment in a Lemmy community’s content. A volunteer moderator can ban someone who contributed months of posts and comments and lose all of that person’s past and future contributions without losing revenue, salary or investment. Did you know all creator posts are wiped out from lemmy after account banned?
The creator paid the cost in time.
The community loses the content.
The users lose something to read and discuss.
And the moderator who pushed the button may personally lose essentially nothing.
So who benefits from making prolific content creation this difficult?
Because it certainly isn’t Lemmy.
And this creates an enormous attack surface
I genuinely have trouble believing that everyone complaining about prolific posters simply doesn’t understand this dynamic. At some point I have to question whether some of it is deliberate.
If I were Reddit and wanted to undermine a federated competitor, this is exactly where I’d attack it: its content creators.
You don’t need to hack Lemmy. You don’t need to DDoS instances. You don’t need to take anything offline.
Lemmy already provides the mechanism.
Report prolific contributors. Call their posting “spam.” accuse them of being bots. Point moderators toward their public moderation histories. Get one account banned somewhere, then let that decision influence moderators elsewhere.
Eventually the creator gets tired of fighting and leaves.
I’m not claiming I have proof Reddit is doing this. I’m saying Lemmy’s architecture makes this kind of subversion ridiculously easy, and Reddit would be an obvious beneficiary.
Reddit doesn’t have this same federated quadruple-jeopardy problem. You’re primarily dealing with the moderation of the subreddit you’re contributing to.
Lemmy desperately needs more people creating content, yet its moderation structure makes life progressively harder for the people who create the most of it.
At some point we should be asking:
Who actually benefits from that?
A plea to admins: protect your creators ban reddit agents instead
Before banning someone, look at who is contributing and who is reporting.
If an account with zero posts in years reports someone who has contributed hundreds of posts, don’t treat those two users as equally valuable to the health of the community.
That doesn’t put creators above the rules. Remove bad posts. Warn people. Moderate proportionally.
But stop throwing away months of content and future contributions over one or two posts someone disliked.
Creating content takes time. Reporting takes seconds.
Protect the people actually building your communities.
edit: I am reposting from reddit - there is no rules against that. its actually great thing for majority of lemmy users!
This reposting tool is open source - i’ve never been hiding the fact im reposting from reddit.
people get only high quality pre-dozed, pre-moderated content.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/lemmy-deep-lighthouse/
I think more people should be using similar tools and populate lemmy with content. - htis is the only way to move that 35k mau number and creat conditions for more OC on lemmy
edit 2 " but we dont want content" argument.
The fuck you dont. who the fuck is we?
And this is why I don’t buy the argument that the people still here represent what users want.
Look at the numbers.
- Fediverse: ~14 million registered, ~1.17 million MAU.
- Lemmy: ~756,000 registered, ~35,000 MAU.
Lemmy has had three quarters of a million accounts created and only about 4.6% of that number is active monthly.
Obviously that doesn’t mean 95% were all regular users who quit. But it does tell us something important: the people currently active are a tiny, self-selected fraction of everyone who has tried this platform.
So when 30 existing users say “WE don’t want more content,” you’re hearing from the people the current system successfully retained. You’re not hearing from the enormous number of people who tried Lemmy and aren’t here anymore.
Maybe instead of assuming the remaining users have figured out what Lemmy should be, we should be asking why so many people tried it and didn’t stick around.
This comment is correct despite the unpopularity.
There is a difference between organically reposting memes you come across and setting up a bot to sync two newsfeed.
I agree. That doesn’t mean that particular comment is incorrect.
But it’s not a blind feed sync. That’s the important distinction.
There are filters for upvote thresholds, post age, community-specific rules, content requirements, and AI-assisted moderation before anything gets posted.
The end result is essentially the same content I would have selected and posted manually. I’ve just automated the repetitive work of finding, filtering, checking, and submitting it.
Automation changes the amount of manual effort required, not the intent or selection criteria. in fact lemmy.world specifically has a rule allowing automation.
You can disagree with my thresholds or posting volume, but calling it “syncing two newsfeeds” makes it sound like I’m blindly mirroring Reddit. I’m automating the curation I would otherwise be doing by hand.
It’s correct only when you think quantity is everything and quality doesn’t matter. Do you think someone posting into a community because they think that community might like it is the same as copy pasting every post from one community into another community?
I think most people on lemmy/Piefed prefer quality over quantity.
No, the entire comment on it’s own is correct. Most content on social media is from people sharing, linking, commenting on, or remixing content found somewhere else.
The comment doesn’t say anything about quality vs quantity. They’re only talking about the state of social media and how it is built up.
My personal opinion on sanitation’s contributions is that a lot of it is spam. I’d prefer to have people manually reposting instead of this bot-like action of reposting a lot of stuff automatically, it can make communities feel empty. But all of that is aside from the comment I replied to which is ultimately correct about social media.
I’ll clarify a bit because I think I didn’t do a good job before. The meat of places like Reddit or Lemmy isn’t the posts. If posts were all we care about everyone would be using RSS instead. The meat is in the comment section, the discussion the post generates. That’s where most of the new content lives, unless you want to argue that you have no original thoughts and the comment you made is some remixed content from somewhere else. So OP is correct that posts are usually people remixing content found elsewhere, but posts themselves are not how sites like this live. The post is just the bone for the meat to stick to, something to focus discussion. He is wrong in the sense that he’s putting the focus on posts and essentially saying “If posts exists, discussions will happen”. But the focus should on the discussions and posts serve the purpose of focusing discussion.
And that’s where the quality vs quantity point comes in because there are two ways to create these sources of discussion. The first the quantity approach, which is what sanitation is doing it, by slinging shit at the wall and seeing what sticks. Eventually 1 in a 100 posts becomes a point of discussion. The other is the quality approach. Instead of automating away posting shit you do it manually. You find something you want to share and then you take the time to make a post. The manual labor does something that automation can’t, it puts a human element into the post. It puts intentionality into it because you are choosing to post it in the place you think best suits for that post and you’re personally invested in that post which means you’re open to engage with the discussions that might happen because of this post. Automation gets rid of both of those things and actually makes it worse because it fills feeds with posts that have no human element to it. It drowns out actually interesting posts. That’s actually part of my criticism of Reddit comment section because at some point Reddit comment section became flooded with low effort one-liner comments designed to get as many upvotes as possible and those low effort comments drowned out interesting threads so your ability to have meaningful conversations actually dwindled even though the overall amount of “conversations” increased. The same thing happens with posts which is why we both agree that sanitation is doing is spam. It drowns out interesting posts by filling the feed with uninteresting posts and nobody wants to shift through shit to find something interesting.