RFC: Should I start handing out 1-day "cool off" bans to thwart flamewars?

OK peeps, I am seeing a lot of flamewars lately which go off-topic of this comm. I am also getting dozens of reports about people reporting each other for "rudeness" or "trolling". I don't want this comm to start becoming a drama haven, so I want to try and prevent people getting worked up like this.

What do you think about me starting to deploy strategic 1-day bans for people who I notice are getting into flamewars? If not, what else do you suggest to help people remain civil?

Don't just upvote/downvote. I won't take these into account, I want actual comments about this to better make a decision.

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97 comments

I dont like the idea of banning people for speach that isnt calling for actionable violence.
U could just delete the whole comment thread (from point of off topic onward) for reason "off topic" and that would solve almost everything.
Im not sure how reporting works never done it and nobody has reported anything on the community i mod. But i can see that people would abuse it it an attempt to silence their opposition. I think bans for clearly bad faith reports is fair.
U think people should at least be warned prior to being sent to the sinbin.
- Moderator reports are currently not federated with remote Lemmy instances - so with your account being on Lemm.ee and the !news_summary@lemmy.dbzer0.com being on a different instance, whatever reports are being made you are not able to see them. This is only one of the many ways in which moderator tools for Lemmy suck ass atm. Another way is how that list of reports cannot be sorted or filtered in any way, besides resolved yet or not.
  
  I’d rather mod reports not be federated. A lot of mods are power tripping and who the hell wants to earn a reputation as being a problem from some dick head mod across the entire federation?
  I know it has downsides but I’d rather things stay decentralized.
  
  The power tripping mod is the one who will be earning a bad rep across the fediverse. Why should they get away with it.
  
  And you don’t think as someone who isn’t a mod, but also isn’t a liberal, won’t end up getting auto blocked from instances just because they have a backbone and threaten capital?
  You’re just asking for a new Reddit. Block stupid mods and don’t go to their communities.
  
  Well thats incredibly annoying. I suspect its not federated cos the devs dont want that much moderation transparency hence modlog doesnt tell u which nod did what (it shoukd default to transparent and if people have issues change the settings)
  
  That is intentional - the modlog used to say who, but then it changed and now it just says "mod".
  Though the lack of federation of reports is planned to be fixed, somewhere in like 0.19.20 iirc (the current version is 0.19.18).
  
  Ik its an instance setting u can change. Why should mods not be accountable to their actions im yet to hear a valid justification.
  Welp will be good once reports federate at least.
  
  I think I am not a fan of that "feature" either, though tbh I don't really care. It's not like you can have a conversation with any of the mods to find out why something happened, if they ban you or lock the thread - even Reddit had modmail, but here we have... uh... ah... well, this gestures around>.
  If we want something different, then we need to build it. As PieFed, Sublinks, and K/Mbin have all been doing, but they haven't even approached reaching feature parity with the likes of Lemmy yet, much less Reddit. It would take a lot more contributors to the code to make that happen. Fortunately PieFed is in Python and Sublinks Java, or something like that, whereas Lemmy is in Rust that so few are willing to learn.
  Right now the best thing that someone can do to help contribute, other than writing code, is to create & mod a community that is better than sucky alternatives, and/or contribute to existing communities to offer actual content that would make this Threadiverse worth visiting.
  e.g. there was !fediverselore@lemmy.ca and !meanwhileongrad@sh.itjust.works, but OP created this community to be a bit different from those. And we who come here often appreciate that :-).
  
  I didnt realise piefed was python. Does it federate with lemmy and have lemmy style votes? Also does it use flask?
  
  I am posting to you from it now, so yes:-). It also has a ton of other features not in Lemmy - Categories of Communities, hashtags, the ability to block all users from an instance without needing admin approval, YouTube embedding, and so much more.
  On the other hand, it's not really ready for people without the early adopter mindset bc some of the foundationals are missing - searching is primitive, notifications are often wonky, the ability to tag a person with @ is non-existent, etc. I use it as my daily driver, but I also revert back to Lemmy alts daily as well to use those features missing on PieFed, i.e. I wouldn't yet recommend it to someone who has never tried Lemmy.
  Unlike Mbin it does not connect to Mastodon or have an alternative voting scheme. PieFed connects to Lemmy using the same ActivityPub protocol - the same communities, posts, votes, users, etc. It does have an option in testing for fully anonymous voting using faked server names but I always thought it was an odd concept and so never opted into it.
  I did not personally know what Flask is until you asked and I looked it up, but anyway the codebase says yes.:-)
  Here's a test for a PieFed community link: !piefed_meta@piefed.social. This is where options for the upcoming roadmap for 2025 are currently being discussed. I've already voted and commented but you can test to see voting working first-hand from Lemmy if you like:-). Edit: oops, I meant to link to !piefed_2025@piefed.social. Ofc just like any community on a Lemmy instance, since surely nobody from your instance has joined this new community yet, it won't have any posts - but that still shows how the behavior is identical to that of Lemmy!:-) I did subscribe to it from Discuss.Online in case you want to see how it looks from Lemmy in the meantime.:-)
- None of these already as clear but as you suspects. Neither will simply deleting comments pass uncontested (there's a post in ytpb right now about me doing exactly that) nor is "bad faith reports" obvious to those making them
  
  (there's a post in ytpb right now anoint me doing exactly that)
  LOL
- U could just delete the whole comment thread (from point of off topic onward) for reason "off topic" and that would solve almost everything.
  If gotta to be done, that's how it should be done
- I dont like the idea of banning people for speach that isnt calling for actionable violence. // U could just delete the whole comment thread (from point of off topic onward) for reason “off topic” and that would solve almost everything.
  Then the flame war continues in another comment chain.
  
  Maybe, but it does serve as a warning to knock it off, so if that happens then a stronger response is warranted next time.
  
  Using it as a warning is fine, but you can't do it if you're against banning people, like the other user is.
  
  The other user (at least, the one you responded to) was just trying to define where they would draw the line, saying both:
  I dont like the idea of banning people for speach that isnt calling for actionable violence.
  But also:
  I think bans for clearly bad faith reports is fair.
  U think people should at least be warned prior to being sent to the sinbin.
  So they aren't fully against banning people.
  
  Fair.

97 comments