lvxferre

I always tell myself I should hop into Piefed more often. And I never do it.

...at this rate I'm low-key wishing my instance shifts from Lemmy to Piefed.

So like I said, and thank you for making it clear, you are missing the point. // I’m explicitly saying that the root cause of dog piling is moderating selecting for a culture that confirms to their biases

Nah, it's the complete opposite - you confirmed that I accurately understood your false claim. I understood your claim and I believe it to be wrong. I'm calling it bullshit.

Simple evidence that you're wrong: dogpiling happens even in real life. Even if there's no bloody "RL mod" selecting for a culture that confirms their personal biases. If A happens in the absence of B, that shows that either

1. B is not the root cause of A; or
2. There are at least two independent causes for A.

Ockham's Razor makes short work of #2.

[I listed earlier another evidence, by the way. Right at the start. Go dig it.]

[shifting goalposts] The issue isn’t the dog piling. it’s that moderation specifically selects for it when it meets their biases, and only enforced policies selectively.

Nope. Dogpiling is itself also a problem. And both problems interact. However, one problem is not the cause of the other.

Communities through the process of their creation create the rules and norms they abide by; not a side bar with some words on it.

That argument would be valid if and only if the written rules had absolutely no effect whatsoever on the community's behaviour.

The rest of your comment boils down to a verbose turd of red herring sprinkled with a "chrust me, I have kwalifikashuns 2 say dis, than I'm rite ur rong". I did read it fully but I'm not arsing myself with it.

I don't think I'm missing the point.

What I'm saying is that the rules would still help, even if you have a strongly editorial moderation cultivating a comm reactionary to minority opinions. Because the root cause of dogpiling is not in that moderation and their practices - like you said, the moderation is only selecting for/against it, but the root is in human nature.

And depending on how the rule against dogpiling is made, it could even curb down strong editorial tendencies.

Not being able to downvote

As said in the very comment that you're replying to, and as OP confirms, the downvotes are not the relevant part here.

You are not contributing to the discussion by insistently hammering on a marginal point, across multiple comments.

Not being able to downvote or reply is discouraging engagement

In some cases you do need to remove some forms of engagement, because they go against the goal of creating an active and vibrant community where users can discuss a certain topic. Engagement is the metric, not the goal.

And in the specific case of dogpiling, it's rather clear that it's the sort of engagement that goes against that goal.

The question here is how.

creating an environment that only allows toxic positivity.

"Toxic" is a weasel word that means nothing and everything at the same time; ask 1000 people what it is, and all 1000 will give you different answers. If you must use it, define what you mean by it, as I'm not going to assume.

I mean I can point you to it explicitly happening.

And I can also point you to situations where dogpiling happens regardless of any reasonable stake the mods would have on that discussion. If it happens with or without editorial moderation, then editorial moderation is not the cause.

I’ve been working on something broader that focuses on how editorial moderation shifted specific sub’s into echo chambers over the course of 2023-2024 to cultivate a community with a largely homogeneous perspective that was antiseptic to dissent. So I’ve been pulling and working on the data for this for quite a while.

I’ve got ample evidence to support my above statement. This isn’t speculation, and moderation has even explicitly said that they’ve moderated in a fashion to cultivate specific political narratives that agree with their biases.

If you have data to show already, do it now.

The "mute replies" button would be great, indeed. It would solve one of the issues with dogpiling. But other two remain:

1. it discourages the participation of new users - because those are seeing the dogpile in full force, and they know they'll be dogpiled once they say something the local hivemind disagrees with
2. it adds unnecessary noise to discussions - because it's a bunch of people saying the same shit over and over

Neither thing is welcome when you think about community growth.

Dogpiling affects even views that are orthogonal to what the mods would enforce. So it's a more of a general problem.

I've noticed the start of the dog pile is typically not the issue. Often it starts by accident; like two users coincidentally replying the same thing to a third one, seconds apart, because they didn't see each other's reply. I feel like most people would immediately see it and say "nah, coincidence".

The issue is how it keeps going on and on and on. So perhaps this could be addressed by avoiding the pile to grow, instead of just avoiding it from beginning? Basically, different rules for early and late replies.

I'm just throwing ideas in, mind you.

The downvotes are an example of behaviour typically associated with dogpiling. Focus on the unreasonably large amount of replies adding practically no information each.

A few potential ways to address this:

1. a rule against dogpiling
2. a rule against replying without adding new information
3. harsher enforcement of rules when you notice someone being dogpiled

I'd probably pick #3 but all of them are problematic: #1 and #2 can be misused by the mod because they have huge grey areas, #3 creates double standards. ("So you're saying a «go drink bleach» is OK, but «this is dumb» is not???")

Got it - sorry for the confusion then!

And I need to admit that your take of the mod = Maxwell's demon thing is way more interesting.

The perfect place wouldn’t allow them [people bringing their own shit?] anyway.

As in, isolating the system? No perfect isolation is possible; and even if it was, it would limit the amount of information/entropy of the place. In other words the community would get stale and die.

We could pretend moderators are like Maxwell's demon, able to sift the newbies one by one; if they're bringing shit, don't let them in. The amount of energy necessary to do so makes it unfeasible.