Ahoy me hearties!
To run alongside the discussion on the simplified Golden Rules for the instance, I decided to post a separate proposal for a single rule addition.
The proposed rule is: Off topic comments and downvote trolling to protest the use of genAI images is not permitted in our communities.
Edit2: The community feedback has been strongly positive, thanks for all your feedback. Notably, quite a few folks would like it to be more generic, to cater for future scenarios as well. So taking that into account, and adding the rationale for the change, I came up with:
To protect our communities, community members and mods from abuse: no comment trolling, dogpiling, or downvote trolling is allowed.
I hope that works for most folks, and please feel free to leave more comments if you can suggest an improved wording. I do read them all.
It would only apply to communities where GenAI art is not disallowed by the community rules, so mods can opt in or out.
Since the rule will likely attract some pushback from the anti-GenAI crowd, I wanted to run this proposal as a member vote to confirm we have broad support.
Exhibit 1 - dbzer0 Main Sidebar for context
Be Weird, Download a Car, Generate Art, Screw Copyrights
Communities about Anarchism, Generative AI, Copylefts, Neurodivergence, Filesharing, and Free Software.
Our instance has been associated with genAI art since its inception, because the founding admin, db0, has also spent years developing and maintaining FOSS Projects like AI Horde (a crowdsourced distributed cluster of image generation workers and text generation workers) and Haidra.
We have a number of popular genAI communities on our instance including:
Exhibit 2 - The Problem
This is the recent experience of one of our community mods:
“From the moment I started the [redacted] community here people have been brigading it trying to suppress it, and had I not had the sense to ban the droves of anti-AI trolls who come to downvote it into oblivion. They probably would be continuing to do so in insanely large volume. A lot of the users who come to downvote do so with empty no content accounts, but a lot are also trolls from the !fuck_AI@lemmy.world community. I’ve also received a fair amount of harassment including threats and bad faith accusations from it like people saying I’m a pedophile or saying I’m pretending to be nonbinary over the fact that I like and use genAI. Really awful behavior that has no place on this instance of this community.”
This sort of thing is hateful and should not have to be tolerated by our users. Let’s call it what it is: bullying and harassment.
Exhibit 3 - Escalating Problems
If you take look at this post from today in the lighthearted Lefty Memes community, it’s a total shit show of offtopic comments. I’m not going to re-litigate the whole experience here since there is a YPTB post about it here.
This sort of brigading is completely unwarranted and I regard it as hostile bullying behaviour towards our community members and moderators. It completely derails the comments and goes way off topic for the community. Even after repeatedly asking these users to open a meta post about the issues they clearly wanted to talk about, instead of brigading the comments, I was mostly ignored and eventually pretty much gave up on trying to moderate the post.
Conclusion
In summary, as an admin on this instance I’ve noticed a significant uptick in the amount and volume of trolling in our communities by this group of users. I’d like to make sure we have this rule in place so that we can continue to effectively moderate the instance for the enjoyment of our community members, and to protect our moderators and admins from abuse.
Thank you for your consideration. If you have any suggestions to improve the rule, or thoughts on the topic you wish to share, then please do so in the comments.
Edit: for detailed voting information see this post. But in summary, please upvote if you support the rule addition or downvote if you are opposed.
Acknowledged governance topic opened by https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/u/flatworm7591
This is a simple majority vote. The final tally is as follows:
- For:
(2), 
(1), (4), 
(7), 
(2), 
(1), (2) - Against:
- Local Community: +0.4
- Outsider sentiment: Positive
- Total: +18.4
- Percentage: 95.00%
This vote has concluded on 2025-05-12 01:19:44 UTC
Reminder that this is a pilot process and results of voting are not set in stone.
Thanks votey mcvote bot
- For:
I recommend a moderation bot for controversial communities that
- bans accounts who only downvote in the community after some number of downvotes if that account is active
- bans accounts immediately on downvote if they have zero post or comment activity over some window of time
- bans accounts immediately if they downvote posts and all comments in the posts. That’s a strong signal they really don’t like the community
I’ve suggested this before. I think this would be a very good solution to combat vote manipulation and brigading. I know some people would prefer it done manually but honestly doing it manually is kind of a chore. I’d rather have a bot take care of the lowest common denominator and take care of the rest that slip through manually.
This issue will likely also help with the problem by preventing drive by throwaways from making an impact.
That’s an interesting idea if we could give it some conservative defaults to avoid false positives.
personally, I hate any automated bans. I think a human should be responsible for every ban.
the irony of insisting that a real human be involved, in this thread, is not lost on me.
I agree in other cases but with this not really. I hate having to manually go through and ban every no-content dipshit downvoting. It’s why I stopped posting to my AI dragon community. Having a bot take care of the low hanging fruit automatically would easily reduce the burden and might make me more inclined to post there again. I’ll obviously still have to take care of the ones the bot misses, but that’s better than having to comb through every one of them to individually ban them one by one.
Yeah agree with you on that matey, just an auto-report would be fine so we can take a look.
I’m not a fan of that. Would be nice if it took out the most obvious downvoters so I don’t have to go through manually banning all of them. False positive risk in my use case is very low and I’d probably need to ban the ones the bot misses anyway. Worst case scenario someone might get an appeal. Probably isn’t going to happen for most drive-by downvoters though.
Mr /0 bot already does this, we just need to wake him up
Wanna give it a go on a test community?
As in auto reports :D It shouldn’t [keyword: shouldn’t] be too hard to implement vote-manipulation checks
What would it auto report exactly? From what I can tell you can’t really report votes themselves, only posts and comments. You also can’t edit or resend reports on posts and comments once they’re done.
I’d want multiple down votes to be the trigger, not a single down vote, and the result to be an alert to the mods/admins, not an automated ban
I fully support the sentiment, but as others have noted, calling out genai specifically is a bit limiting.
I would potentially propose something more to protect our other comms at the same time that might potentially get brigaded; IE: piracy
“Off topic comments and downvote trolling to protest the spirit of our communities for contentious topics will not be permitted.”
Just my thoughts. Cover butts here if a change is made anyway since many of the core vibes of db0 are fairly contentious to begin with.
I’ve rewritten the proposed rule at the top of the post, if you want to check it out.
Yeah I could get on board with that.
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Aye
I don’t really care about genAI or have any strong opinions but damn, that behavior is not okay at all… I really hope we go through with this change. I wouldn’t want to see people like this continuing to behave in such a way here, makes it feel very unsafe or unwelcoming. God forbid I accidentally crosspost an AI meme from Reddit without knowing and get swarmed with hate and anger. That doesn’t seem like something that should happen here, or anywhere at all really.
I’ve rewritten the proposed rule at the top of the post, if you want to check it out.
While it wasn’t a genai image, this reminds me of a similar but wonderfully handled situation I ran into that is an example of what we SHOULD see:
I’d posted a meme on response to a comment that contained a laptop held by the critter in the image. The content of the screen was generic and irrelevant to my current intended reply.
Another user commented to me about the content on the screen being associated with some niche racism group I’d never heard of… But the comment was very much “you should be made aware” and not antagonizing.
I was able to edit that part out of the image and update my comment, and thanked the user. They in turn replied with appreciation for the attention to the issue.
This interaction set a gold standard for my expectation on discussions here. If the posting of a genai image somehow is controversial for some reason, I’d expect at least a chance to explain or correct if it is received inappropriately, vs just attacking what may have just been the first image chosen to convey a thought.
Anything less just reeks of attempts to just be an ass.
Personally, as an artist and also in regards to sustainability for example, I’m very AI-sceptic, but I get that this instance is pro AI, so I think it’s a fair point. I can disagree but don’t need to shove my opinion into dedicated AI communites/instances.
I’m just in for the other topics like foss and copylefts to name a few, if anyone wonders why I’m even here with my account.
One thing I’ve noticed is no one is judging anybody for being here. It makes sense that not everybody is everything.
Nice to see this expressed, whether we knew it all along or not.
I say yeah, it’s the most sanity-inducing option to have both communities coexist.
Disagree. Rule is too narrow- make it broader about brigading and not AI specific.
I’ve rewritten the proposed rule at the top of the post, if you want to check it out.
I agree with this rule. People who disagree with the usage of GenAI can do that, but they need to stop brigading and harassing unrelated content and communities. It’s also often seen on other websites, where Anti-AI posts (often very loosely related to the actual topic) get moved to the top of the community. I don’t accuse people of intentionally organizing and brigading, but websites with algorithms are just more likely to show these posts to anti-ai people if they interact with that type of content, even if the community is unrelated and they have literally never posted in it before.
We don’t need that here.
I am for the rule change.
Gen AI is a great invention. That doesn’t mean i cannot be critical of how it gets shoved into spaces where it doesn’t belong, because a shitton of money get injected in it by venture capitalists in their neverending search for the next big thing.
But that’s not what’s happening here, where people are using (local) models to create images to enjoy and to be creative and not data centers wrongly answering inane questions.
The current models are snapshots of the current human culture, and should belong to all of us. i don’t think it’s fair to come here and behave like a drunk in a dive bar because they suddendly became friendly with rights holders (who have tried to fuck over single users downloading some shitty pop songs with life destroying lawsuits)
P.S.: I am a big piracy advocate, since i have been strapped for cash for my whole life and i would have been excluded from a lot of society and culture if it weren’t for the pirate hat. I therefore understand that current models would have been prohibitively expensive to create when taking every single copyright claim into consideration. I also think that for future models there should be a mechanism to make sure that creators get their fair share and the possibility to opt out if they really do not want to be included.
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I heartily agree with your comment and it’s points. Your phrasing and insight into the topic is a boon!
Seriously though, you nailed many of the thoughts I’ve had about this far better than my own attempts at turning them into language.
had I not had the sense to ban the droves of anti-AI trolls who come to downvote it into oblivion. They probably would be continuing to do so in insanely large volume.
Moderators have to deal with brigaders, trolls and other ne’er-do-wells on all sorts of communities, particularly communities dedicated to controversial subjects. If the moderators are banning these accounts, then the only remaining issue is downvotes. Downvotes are not your “score” in the game of social media. It’s just a number. Why should admins be stepping in to try and dictate the meaningless numbers next to comments and submissions? This is an issue that should remain in the hands of the moderators.
If people don’t support reddit warning people for upvoting Luigi posts, why should they support policing downvotes on this instance?
Downvotes are not your “score” in the game of social media. It’s just a number. Why should admins be stepping in to try and dictate the meaningless numbers next to comments and submissions? This is an issue that should remain in the hands of the moderators.
The problem is that they do downrank communities and when people brigade communities it is an suppression technique. That’s the whole reason why there are people brigading communities with multiple accounts. And it’s why mods are fighting back against it.
I feel that this is already covered by the golden rules- namely “1. Don’t be shitty” and “6. When going to other communities, respect their and our rules” in the recent proposal.
The issue here is that certain comms affiliated with genai are being targeted by downvote brigades and trolls, yeah? I won’t pretend to have the technical knowledge to provide a solution, but I would rather see efforts to generally combat that happening on /0, rather than carving out rules for targeted groups each time the issue arises.
To be clear, I’m not saying that genai users don’t deserve a space where they can discuss their interest. I just don’t think that carving out special protections is an actual solution to the problem.
Hmm I think you are right we could fall back on those existing rule, but hopefully the rewritten rule (see top of post again) is more general and does add something about protection of our users and communities.
I like the rewrite! Many thanks for taking the time to actually read and consider community feedback :)
(I get that’s the whole point of this comm but it’s still refreshing compared to the wider Internet)
Yeah, a few folks have made a similar suggestion to make it more of a general rule. Thanks for your feedback. I’ll update the wording with a v2 soon.
Anti-GenAI users have plenty of platforms to share their views. Derailing discussions and brigading in other communities serves no purpose but to foster an adversarial relationship between communities.
I generally don’t like making a rule banning a viewpoint, but I don’t see what positive contribution that viewpoint adds in this specific context, especially when asserted so aggressively and off-topic.
I’ve rewritten the proposed rule at the top of the post, if you want to check it out.
I think this is an issue with the all feed. Controversial communities would be more peaceful if there was a tick box for “show posts on all feed”
I don’t agree, people need to accept that there are communities they don’t like or use the block button. Otherwise they should be banned for brigading, trolling, or harassment. It’s not rocket science, we don’t need new Lemmy features. We need people to behave themselves or we ban them.
I’m in favor of this change. This crowd of people are obviously entitled to their own opinions are objective fact and attack others who don’t agree, or try to attack and suppress spaces which don’t hold their beliefs. Hence the brigading. So I do believe we as an instance should take a stance against anti-AI trolling and the Anti-AI trolls that crawl Lemmy as aggressively as they do.
I vote to implement this change.
