Idk if it’s actually a lemmy.ml thing or what, but coming from lemmy.world, every time I see a post from .ml, like half of the comments have been deleted by moderator(s). In general, .ml seems to have really heavy handed censorship and it gives me a really bad perception of .ml overall.

I’ve been part of moderating a subreddit that has a loose conflict of interest policy, so I’ll throw in my two cents. Our policy is to avoid commenting and moderating in the same thread. There are some exceptions, like with particularly egregious violations. But even then, replying to the comment, deleting it, then banning the user would be considered an abuse of power. Instead, the common practice is to just report it for other moderators without a CoI to deal with.

I consider a conflict of interest policy to be as much about protecting the community itself as anything. Many online communities have run into trouble when someone with elevated permissions like a moderator is even perceived as having abused their powers. Community splits or failures have happened over even just one moderator “power tripping.” That’s why it’s necessary for moderators to put some restraints on themselves to maintain community trust.

The post that inspired this one had upward of 15 people given a site ban in a post with 80 comments. Several of those had a reply from the banning admin. The bans themselves may have been justified, but the optics are terrible. That’s exactly the sort of thing that has a history of eroding community trust. Even for people who have the aim of an instance for Marxist-Leninist thought, there are going to be schisms. Setting boundaries is necessary to preempt problems.

I like being on an instance where trolls get banned. It was a fun hobby to check in during reddit exodus, see some garbage comments and guess how long it’d take for it to be banned. The internet is full of freeze-peach reactionary havens. Lemmy.ml is luckily not one of them

Depends on the comment. You can both address the issues of a comment and remove it if it breaks the rules.

You’re making an accusation without providing any evidence of the supposed abuses or unfairness. Why do you feel the need to spread FUD?

What

I was also banned and had all my comments removed after having a long debate with a mod on the world news sub. When I did not accept their viewpoint, they eventually nuked everything and just banned me.

And the debate was all about whether government propaganda news sources were good sources of media. I was asserting that they weren’t and that you should be able to use whatever tools exist to assess them for bias.

But they really don’t like it when you undermine their sources of information.

It’s inevitably an alienating shit show whenever I have to interact with users from .ml, since they go out and pollute other instances.

In fact, if you look at the history of many of the users in this thread who are upvoted for insulting you, you can see them polluting and insulting their way all over the place.

I am shocked just SHOCKED that a .ml admin would use such tactics. It isn’t hinted at at all by the community or it’s behavior (LMAO /s).

Seriously, using mod powers to manipulate the conversation is a tankies wet dream. This isn’t surprising or even unexpected.