A note on Universal Monk:

Are you familiar with toxoplasmosis? The disease that mutates into different forms so a bunch of different animals can host it and pass it along.

This is a long article but it's really good, it's worth a read and it predicted a lot of the discourse of the last decade: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage/

The sort of gist of it is this: the more grey area / ambiguity in a topic, the more we pop our own identity into our stance on it. And so if that thing is controversy, we argue about it so much more if there's room to self-insert our identity in that grey area. It spreads and spreads to a bunch of different hosts. It becomes a meme via argument by infecting a bunch of hosts to pass it along.

And that's Monk.

Pretty early on, it was very clear that they had no actual understanding of the topics they were talking about. I tried in their first few weeks to engage with them and so did others. Only to find nothing there. No opinions, and all counter-arguments were clearly copy & pasted off of Wikipedia. Things like "we have X amount of members in Maine".

Please.

Eventually they stopped trying to engage altogether, and instead moved into a deliberate pattern of line-toeing retorts. None in good faith. But, more importantly, never with enough substance to interrupt the ensuing argument, while simultaneously always enough comment traffic to perpetuate the thread.

Monk is a memetic toxoplasmosis source vector. Through pure ineptitude or irony, I think they've accidentally turned more people against third parties than for them, but maybe that isn't their goal.

Even now there's an undercurrent of "I don't think I even disagree with them". Well, how could you? They haven't said anything worth disagreeing with, have they? What have they said, though? Not much. Nothing recognizable as an opinion in defense of the third party articles. Often, just enough to establish a veneer of plausible deniability.

It's a sophisticated form of trolling and it's recognizable to anyone with a long history of community management online. There are some people who never seem to be directly at fault for things, yet every single time you remove them, the temperature goes down.

You don't need to actually build a case against these people to know that the equation is simple: when they're around, everyone is angry. When they aren't, people get along better.

Anyway, my point is this: you can tell who is contributing in good faith and who isn't, because they will attempt to say what's on their mind. It might be the worst take you've ever heard in your life, but it has a concretion to it. Monk has no concrete substance, they simply like to stir the pot.

HOW do you post here 1.9k times in two months? I have like 7 posts in over a year and I feel somewhat active.

I’m not complaining about any decisions mods have made, I’m legitimately asking cause that seems crazy. 32 posts a day is a LOT.

Good they have been trolling us for a while. Also, thank you for your efforts and you are appreciated.

Firstly, thank you for that ban. Did you notice the duplicate section in my comment? Low effort comments, dismissiveness, refusing to engage in good faith even when someone treats him very respectively, and copy-pasting the same responses many times is only one of several signs this is a troll. This behavior breaks rule 4.

No memes, trolling, or low-effort comments. Reposts, misinformation, off-topic, trolling, or offensive.

I do not understand how anyone could possibly look at the evidence I provided and say "nah, not a troll".

For your convenience:

I think the bigger issue here is the indiscriminate obvious trolling.

The fact that it took "bad judgment" and not the reading between the lines for their sealioning and bad faith arguments and faux "friend" comments points towards the need for strengthening our community standards.

Allowing people to come in and troll under the guise of "I'm following the rules lolololol" makes the mods look like rubes.

Oh holy fuck it's only 15 days away! Anxiety!

Also having seen the guy, makes sense you can't ban bad takes (or at least, shouldn't) but my sense is he just likes to be infamous. Hell, this is a post about his banning, even! He's probably loving the attention.

Still, I've got my Lemmy heroes --- obsessive posting can be used for good, like a certain maneuver named after a certain starship captain.

I’ve handled users like this similarly in some of the communities I head up here. I try not to touch the content unless it is obvious misinformation and that violates instances rules. That said, if their content and or comments are clearly intended to create discord, pester, or pester in a passive aggressive manor, then they get the boot.

I wish we had some sort of sort filter that hid aggressively downvoted content and comments. That way the “knights of the new” could bury problematic content.

People don’t like the idea of mods having to censor users, but they also don’t want their feed full of downvoted posts or infighting.

That boii went super saiya-cringe mode.

"I'll keep posting what I want, when I want, where I want, and respond to people how I want. Whether it is "working" or not. Thank you!" - Monk

This is when I realized it was all in bad faith and I stopped giving him the benefit of the doubt.

Maybe some kind of rate limiting would work for cases like this. Anyway, i doubt we'll see that one again after the 15 days are up. At least for the next four years.

The Dark Monk is going to write some erotic friend fiction about you, jordanlund.

You gotta know they’re absolutely loving this shit right now. An entire post dedicated only to them? Where they are the topic of discussion? That’s probably the biggest badge of honor someone like them could earn here.

I’d wager it’s bookmarked and will be read several times a day for months to come.

Good, thank you for addressing this! I think the temporary ban is a perfect solution. I only care about this because of how close we are to the election, and this solves that problem.

I approve of this action and appreciate the transparency. Thank you for doing something about this individual.

Another perfect example of the dude being completely a not-troll and just innocently neurodivergent in these comments:

https://lemmy.world/post/21123227

...right @jordanlund@lemmy.world ?

They clearly make all these weird communities so they can not answer to any mods and they can control the narrative.

They are making Lemmy worse. They are violating rules 4. The mods can deny it all they want, but if you read this very thread, it's clearly not just me saying it and it's not just their shitty opinion we don't like.

They are looking to stir shit and maybe influence an election, and 99% of the time gotten away with it Scot free. We cannot handwave away the fact that they've spent around 2 hours a day just writing posts. That means something. And it means something that practically everyone hates what they're doing. And the stats I've been posting speak volumes.

This is really timely - I am sharing a screenshot that may be important.

UniversalMonk appears to have created an alt last week, UbiquitousMonk. I saw an initial flurry of posts following the UniversalMonk format 12 minutes after it happened, but knew it was a different account and not just a rename because I had to re-add my "propaganda" tag in my Connect app.

I commented just noting the flurry of third-party posts as odd, and they responded with something in Russian. Then everything was deleted, comments and posts.

I don't know if that was meant as satire, if it was the same poster, or - maybe - a mistake and the Russian text is evidence of a misinformation campaign origin. I'm sharing the comment screenshot for mod visibility.

Edit: sorry, I can't embed this image, so here's the link: https://imgur.com/a/9wzgSxR

They should stick to writing mildly interesting short horror stories

While you're all here we should take a moment to recognize that folks like universalmonk are mentally ill and need help!

We can all take a few moments after having seen what unadulterated brain-worms can do to a person and share thoughts on how we could better the metal-healthcare field.

Talk to your friends, talk to your coworkers, message your favorite politician! We can change the world and limit the number of people who behave like universalmonk.

Thanks for coming to my ted talk.

Thankyou :D

@jordanlund@lemmy.world did this get reversed? Because I'm seeing posts again when I'm not signed in on a mobile client. Or did they move to another instance?

I posted this to him actually

My background is psychology, developmental, business, design and more. Currently learning communication. He removed my comments for “off topic” when about he mentioned worker rights. Thus is one the most important

Video to him

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