Moderation conflict involving c/vegan
Intro
We would like to address some of the points that have been raised by some of our users (and by one of our communities here on Lemmy.World) on /c/vegan regarding a recent post concerning vegan diets for cats. We understand that the vegan community here on Lemmy.World is rightfully upset with what has happened. In the following paragraphs we will do our best to respond to the major points that we've gleaned from the threads linked here.
Links
Actions in question
Admin removing comments discussing vegan cat food in a community they did not moderate.
The comments have been restored.
The comments were removed for violating our instance rule against animal abuse (https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/#11-attacks-on-users). Rooki is a cat owner himself and he was convinced that it was scientific consensus that cats cannot survive on a vegan diet. This originally justified the removal.
Even if one of our admins does not agree with what is posted, unless the content violates instance rules it should not be removed. This was the original justification for action.
Removing some moderators of the vegan community
Removed moderators have been reinstated.
This was in the first place a failure of communication. It should have been clearly communicated towards the moderators why a certain action was taken (instance rules) and that the reversal of that action would not be considered (during the original incident).
The correct way forward in this case would have been an appeal to the admin team, which would have been handled by someone other than the admin initially acting on this.
We generally discuss high impact actions among team before acting on them. This should especially be the case when there is no strong urgency on the act performed. Since this was only a moderator removal and not a ban, this should have been discussed among the team prior to action.
Going forward we have agreed, as a team, to discuss such actions first, to help prevent future conflict
Posting their own opposing comment and elevating its visibility
Moderators' and admins' comments are flagged with flare, which is okay and by design on Lemmy. But their comments are not forced above the comments of other users for the purpose of arguing a point.
These comments were not elevated to appear before any other users comments.
In addition, Rooki has since revised his comments to be more subjective and less reactive.
Community Responses
The removed comments presented balanced views on vegan cat food, citing scientific research supporting its feasibility if done properly.
Presenting scientifically backed peer reviewed studies is 100% allowed, and encouraged. While we understand anyone can cherry pick studies, if a individual can find a large amount of evidence for their case, then by all accounts they are (in theory) technically correct.
That being said, using facts to bully others is not in good faith either. For example flooding threads with JSTOR links.
The topic is controversial but not clearly prohibited by site rules.
That is correct, at the time there was no violation of site wide rules.
Rooki's actions appear to prioritize his personal disagreement over following established moderation guidelines.
Please see the above regarding addressing moderator policy.
Conclusions
Regarding moderator actions
We will not be removing Rooki from his position as moderator, as we believe that this is a disproportionate response for a heat-of-the-moment response.
Everybody makes mistakes, and while we do try and hold the site admin staff to a higher standard, calling for folks resignation from volunteer positions over it would not fair to them. Rooki has given up 100's of hours of his free time to help both Lemmy.World, FHF and the Fediverse as a whole grown in far reaching ways. You don't immediately fire your staff when they make a bad judgment call.
While we understand that this may not be good enough for some users, we hope that they can be understanding that everyone, no matter the position, can make mistakes.
We've also added a new by-laws section detailing the course of action users should ideally take, when conflict arises. In the event that a user needs to go above the admin team, we've provided a secure link to the operations team (who the admin's report to, ultimately). See https://legal.lemmy.world/bylaws/#12-site-admin-issues-for-community-moderators for details.
TL;DR In the event of an admin action that is deemed unfair or overstepping, moderators can raise this with our operations team for an appeal/review.
Regarding censorship claims
Regarding the alleged censorship, comments were removed without a proper reason. This was out of line, and we will do our best to make sure that this does not happen again. We have updated our legal policy to reflect the new rules in place that bind both our user AND our moderation staff regarding removing comments and content. We WANT users to hold us accountable to the rules we've ALL agreed to follow, going forward. If members of the community find any of the rules we've set forth unreasonable, we promise to listen and adjust these rules where we can. Our terms of service is very much a living document, as any proper binding governing document should be.
Controversial topics can and should be discussed, as long as they are not causing risk of imminent physical harm. We are firm believers in the hippocratic oath of "do no harm".
We encourage users to also list pros and cons regarding controversial viewpoints to foster better discussion. Listing the cons of your viewpoint does not mean you are wrong or at fault, just that you are able to look at the issue from another perspective and aware of potential points of criticism.
While we want to allow our users to express themselves on our platform, we also do not want users to spread mis-information that risks causing direct physical harm to another individual, origination or property owned by the before mentioned. To echo the previous statement "do no harm".
To this end, we have updated our legal page to make this more clear. We already have provisions for attacking groups, threatening individuals and animal harm, this is a logical extension of this to both protect our users and to protect our staff from legal recourse and make it more clear to everyone. We feel this is a very reasonable compromise, and take these additional very seriously.
Sincerely,
FHF / LemmyWorld Operations Team
EDIT: Added org operations contact info
IDK it seems like pretty clear animal abuse to me
Cats are obligate carnivores. It is 100% animal abuse.
Can we not restart the argument please.
To me, it's a lot more important in this post to look at the response from mods and admins to a disagreement (and infighting, and mistakes made).
Personally it seems like it was handled well, at least eventually (here). Do you feel one way or the other?
Sometimes I feel like people would like to restart this argument every time it is mentioned, even after 2 threads with hundreds of comments on the topic
Who is arguing? One is factual and the other is willfully ignorant to the point of harming their animal. It's like giving flat earth any credibility, it's objectively against science.
Because what you consider a fact is based on studies that don't provide as compelling evidence as you want to believe they do.
Generally speaking, it's probably best to not do it, but calling it outright abuse requires evidence that it is causing actual harm, and the scientific consensus on it is not as solid as you think it is.
Recent academic review of many past studies have found that it's inconclusive.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9860667/
Basically, we need more studies before we can start deleting shit on accusations of animal abuse.
That brings up another side of this, the academic discussion side. It's good if the moderation policies allow discussion, since that's how we can talk about new research and changing science. We are a discussion forum afterall
If a group accounts seem to be pushing a certain viewpoint or moderating in bad faith, then that's a related but possibly separate issue
It’s important to consider that the academic discussion on the plant-based diet for cats has seismically changed in the last 3 years due to the recently published studies. I implore you to read more about the topic:
https://bmcvetres.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12917-021-02754-8
https://www.magonlinelibrary.com/doi/abs/10.12968/vetn.2022.13.6.252
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0253292
https://www.mdpi.com/2306-7381/10/1/52
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0284132
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S240584402411609X
https://www.mdpi.com/2076-2615/6/9/57
https://sustainablepetfood.info/
I've looked into this and every worthwhile study seems to point to issues with the vegan diet and then potential benefits. I've not seen one that shows serious positive aspects without negative ones. I'm open to being shown any though (aside from the one everyone seems to link where they just talked to cat owners). I'm not trying to spin this debate back up, just saying that the science does seem pretty clear.
Even in this one: According to the U.S. National Research Council’s (NRC) recommendations on nutrient requirements for dogs and cats [15,16], potentially problematic elements in vegan/vegetarian diets for dogs and cats could be: (1) insufficient protein; (2) unbalanced fats; and (3) nutrient insufficiencies [17]. For example, it has been shown that exercising dogs that consume unbalanced plant protein diets can develop anemia and a marked decrease in red blood cell hemoglobin levels but will return to health if the diet with vegetable protein is balanced properly [18].
Did you read the study they linked and really think that what you posted was the same kind of thing?
…everyone is arguing? Considering the studies given by both sides, and the constant promotion of that one brand of vegan cat food, it’s hard to give one side a clear objective win (though I do lean toward giving the cat meat).
That's the carnist personal bias seeping in. The majority isn't always right about everything, consider this when veganism is brought up.
That is outright false and there is no need for false equivalencies. As studies support the fact that a plant-based diet is healthy for cats.
As reputable Kibble brands have the needed synthetic taurine, B12 and vitamin A.
Sources:
https://bmcvetres.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12917-021-02754-8
https://www.magonlinelibrary.com/doi/abs/10.12968/vetn.2022.13.6.252
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0253292
https://www.mdpi.com/2306-7381/10/1/52
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0284132
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S240584402411609X
https://www.mdpi.com/2076-2615/6/9/57
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YxjGa0MXfAc
People like drama.
Cat drama in particular seems to always hit maximum outrage really fast.
Animal abuse is a touchy subject for many people, yes.
People like to virtue signal about things they don't know anything about.
Carnivores like to call vegans animal abusers.
Bro can you not
See everyone just loves drama, no matter which side they are on.
*Carnists. Carnivores have no choice in consuming meat. Carnists delibrately choose to do so even when it's not required.
but if the cat enjoyed the vegan food and the food provided all the nutrients, would you have an issue with it?
To me it just indicates how much of the Lemmy population hasn't studied any bio past maybe first year HS level, or any advanced chemistry either for that matter. And how much people on the internet like fighting with vegans. The two influences together are very powerful.
Or maybe people just don't like animal abuse? It's okay to sometimes just go with the straightforward explanation. Don't abuse cattle et all for human diets, don't abuse your cat via its diet, and so on.
There's some fallacious reasoning right there when cats can be healthier on a plant-based diet:
https://bmcvetres.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12917-021-02754-8
https://www.magonlinelibrary.com/doi/abs/10.12968/vetn.2022.13.6.252
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0253292
https://www.mdpi.com/2306-7381/10/1/52
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0284132
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S240584402411609X
https://www.mdpi.com/2076-2615/6/9/57
https://sustainablepetfood.info/
Sure, understandable. But their scientific arguments for it being animal abuse are very distinctly first year bio-tier.
If it's a tricky line between keeping your cat healthy and unhealthy, just get a different pet.
Hey the more education you have the more likely you're to be vegan.
It is relevant though, since the issue of it being animal abuse or not is central to the whole thing.
Is it not animal abuse? Then what has happened in this post is correct.
Is it animal abuse? Then this post shows that the admins will roll over if they get enough push back from a group of users.
The reason given by Rooki for most of the actions was "missinformation", not anything related to animal abuse. One of the two mods was demoted for "endangering pets". At the time of the incident, the only vaguely related rule was 6. Violent Content that talks about visual content depicting dismemberment, murder, suicide, animal abuse, and so on. Though the OP is confusing and at times inaccurate, it still accepts that "at the time there was no violation of site wide rules."
The response of mods and admins is that they removed content that promotes animal abuse and that got people mad enough so they went and restored the content promoting animal abuse.
Lying about the situation does not make you correct.
Thanks, we're trying to chime in where we can and do hope the post at least helps provide some transparency on what happened. 🙏
Whether a pet gets the food it needs isn't something you can even have an opinion about. You can have understandings, misunderstandings, or the scientific understanding itself could change. Anything attempting to hone that is fine.
To frame something like that as a disagreement is fundamentally dishonest. The question is what's nutritionally best for cats. We and our stupid feelings are secondary. I don't even have any familiarity with the subject myself, I only know it's not the realm of opinions. Cats need meat or they don't, in certain amounts, types, at certain intervals, etc.
And yet this binary assumption that you're taking completely for granted for some reason is fundamentally flawed. Cats need amino acids from meat that they cannot produce themselves. The scientific research being conducted is over whether these amino acids can be artificially produced and vegan cat food fortified with them in such a way that the cats can properly absorb them. If yes, then voila, you have healthful vegan cat food.
This also supposes that there are not other essential (to cats) nutrients beyond taurine that would be absent.
True. I believe B12 is the other big one, although that is trivially supplemented to my recollection.
To be fair, I have a pretty strong opinion on pets getting the food they need. My opinion is that not feeding an animal appropriately is, at best, neglectful.
The great thing is that it's easy to find out what is an appropriate diet for any pet, clever scientists figured it out and wrote up guidelines for us to follow. Here in the UK for example we would follow the European FEDIAF;
https://europeanpetfood.org/self-regulation/safety
So long as you're following the guidelines and giving your pet all the nutrients it needs - regardless of how they're produced (vegan food is fine so long as it replicates the full dietary needs of the animal for example) - you're good 😊👍
I know it's silly to have to point that out, I'm not sure why people argued over it (I didn't see the original discourse). But yes, just to reiterate, it doesn't matter how you prefer to source the food - vegan, halal, whatever fits your beliefs - just so long as it is a nutritionally complete diet for the animal <3
On the subject of admin/moderation, it is wonderful to see the team trying to be thoughtful, transparent, and kind even in the face of high tempers and heated beliefs. I wish we had more of this calibre of person out in the world :-)
Vegan food is the opposite of replicating the full dietary needs of anything
Ok, I'm a literal butcher but citation needed. You're just being obnoxious (and this isn't even the topic of this thread)
Oh god, oh fuck, we need to get the word out to these highly educated nutritional scientists, cardiologists, gastroenterologists, endocrinologists, pulmonologists, oncologists, bariatricians, and nephrologists that "it's the opposite, actually" as soon as possible. I'll bet they'll feel like idiots when they need to retract the dozens of meta-analyses and systemic reviews they've meticulously authored both showing that plant-based diets tend to be healthier than omnivorous ones and giving explanations for why.
A lot of these studies are funded by vegan grifters so no yeah no
Look at the studies before making such claims, cats are actually healthier on a plant-based diet with synthetic taurine, B12 and vitamin A through the form of reputable kibble brands.
Sources:
https://sustainablepetfood.info/
https://bmcvetres.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12917-021-02754-8
https://www.magonlinelibrary.com/doi/abs/10.12968/vetn.2022.13.6.252
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0253292
https://www.mdpi.com/2306-7381/10/1/52
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0284132
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S240584402411609X
https://www.mdpi.com/2076-2615/6/9/57
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YxjGa0MXfAc
Yep. The doublespeak here is wild. "Controversial topics can and should be discussed, as long as they are not causing risk of imminent physical harm. Therefore, we are leaving up comments that cause imminent risk of physical harm."
Forget the particular details of this issue. It feels way, way more strongly like they're trying to duck out of having to take action.
https://www.benevo.com/vegan-cat-food-from-benevo/
We've had safe and healthy variants of vegan cat food for 20 years. Trying to elevate the question to animal abuse speaks entirely to personal ignorance.
Cut and paste blurb from a marketing website from a manufacturer. That you cut and pasted from your top level comment which currently is at -30 due to it's lack of actual sources or anything of value.
This is not helpful to anyone and you may be out of your depth if you think it is.
I am not taking a position on feeding cats vegan food. I am just pointing out you are arguing so weakly you're actually doing your position a disservice.
Your argument is very weak, you are just citing a company that sells vegan food for animals, a very clear conflict of interest.
For instance, I can also cite some Google PR page on how much they care about privacy.
Eta - modifying the diet of a domesticated animal for your convenience seems to run contrary to the premise of minimising animal cruelty.
You might be surprised at how much corn, grains, and other non-meat stuff there is in cat food. Particularly in cheap dry kibble that nobody typically bats an eye at someone feeding to their cat.
This conversation just seems so weird to me. The number of people who feed their cats anything similar to what they’d be eating in the wild is minuscule.
Meat isn’t some magic substance, biological chemical reactions turns grass into cows. That you think you can’t take those nutrients and make them bioavailable to an obligate carnivore is absurd. Ever seen an impossible burger?
And if you think the cruelty stems from the idea that cats wouldn’t like it, I gotta say. I have my cat on an expensive grain free meat heavy diet. And I know for a fact that he goes crazy for the cheap shitty corn based purina kibble. He has busted into other people’s homes to steal kibble from their cats.
So is it cruel for me to feed him a more nature based diet when it’s clear he prefers corn based trash?
I don’t see any reason why a functional vegan cat food couldn’t exist.
Is domestication animal cruelty?
Thank you for sharing this. People need to learn more about this topic before they speak like armchair nutrition experts.
"Our vegan cat food is totally safe and normal", says the vegan cat food manufacturers.
You have to be a vegan to believe that bullshit lmao
So, by your logic, shouldn't there be a bunch of malnourished and dying cats as a result of people buying this food and only letting their cats subsist on it?
Where are the outraged customers? Where are the lawsuits?
People who are dumb enough to spend extra money on vegan food for their carnivorous pets aren't usually smart enough to realize it was the problem.
And as for the few that eventually figure it out, they're smart enough to realize saying "I fed my carnivorous pets a vegan diet" does not reflect well on them.
So you have no evidence at all and are purely speculating. Gotcha
My evidence is vegans of Lemmy going up in arms against moderation because they deleted content about feeding a carnivorous animals a vegan diet.
That isn't evidence that the aforementioned cat food will cause cats to become malnourished. That's just you speculating to confirm your existing biases.
You're making the genetic fallacy. If you dont believe the source then read the reports from the independent animal nutritionists mentioned above.
I appreciate your comments here, even if the people you're trying to educate completely ignore you and downvote you because they have no response to the fact that vegan cat food exists.
I'm not vegan, but the hysterical ignorance espoused in this comment section is bewildering.
Shitty McDonald's burgers exist, it doesn't mean they are healthy and safe to eat.
And humans weren't made to eat tablets and get injected with mixtures from syringes.
IDK it seems like pretty clear human abuse to me
If medical drugs can be made to be safe and compatible with humans there's nothing stopping it for the same happening for vegan food for cats
Your comment deserves more upvotes.
I think people are misunderstanding your comment as anti-science :(
No, people are down voting it for being a bad argument, because humans can in fact make the choice not to take those tablets or get those injections.
But these cats that are forced a vegan diet can't.
Oh sure, they could choose to not eat, and die a bit faster than they would on the vegan food, but no animal will choose to ignore food when they are hungry.
My infant child has less agency over what he eats than my pet dog. They both get vaccinated over vocal objection.
Humans do not, in fact, get to make these choices. Other, older, wiser humans routinely make these decisions on their behalf.
Cats don't get to have a choice in a lot of things.
I fail to see how food would be the bad compared to sterilization, breeding, medical injections, outings and other things infringing on their autonomy.
Oh well...
I am not a vegan, but I do try to make food choices that are as ethical and healthy as I can... or at least as far as I can afford.
Cats are carnivores. Fact. This is not debatable. But I think you could also meet or exceed a cats nutritional needs from other sources. Whether those sources are readily available and whether a person is sufficiently meeting those needs... that's another can of worms.
Generally, I'd argue that if you are hell-bent on a vegan diet, then you should not own carnivorous pets. No matter how well meaning you are, there is a significant chance that you will inflict harm on your pet, and that is unacceptable.
I think what people generally want is not reddit. The mods in reddit have almost no accountability from admin.
Oftentimes comments are removed just because a mod doesn't agree or like the content.
I was banned from r/Ukraine simply for saying we shouldn't demonize the entire population of Russia for the actions of their government. I later argued with the mod through their "arbitration process" and he would not unban me. (What really hurt is that I'm Ukrainian. It was an improvement sub for me)
No one wants that! Please don't let that happen here!
I was banned from /r/grindr for suggesting it's ok for trans people to use it. It's legitimately one of the most blatantly, unapologetically terrible mods I've ever seen, and it's just him.
I'm personally of the opinion that if a community is poorly moderated, you should just make a new community that is better aligned to the level of moderation users actually want and not to rely on a centralized admin team. They should really just be preventing serious abuse, like grooming, and provide support and advice to mods.
Ultimately its not sustainable and gives Admins too much centralized power to determine to that level what is and isn't appropriate mod behavior. I get that what you experienced is generally dickish behavior, but that can easily spin out of control when it relies on admin judgement calls like that.
In reality, even admins don't hold the ultimate power. This is a federated platform and there are lots of other instances. It's an extension of the sentiment you express - if people don't like how things are done on one instance, they can move the community, or even start a new instance.
The comments in here are unbelievable. This post was about the systemic moderation issues that lead to the incident, the team's response to it, and how to deal with such a problems in the future.
Half the comments: CATS CAN'T EAT VEGAN
The other half: CATS CAN TOO EAT VEGAN
There are people here who need to go back to fucking reddit.
All I'm getting from this entire saga is that vegans on here are lunatics. From forcing this nonsense on pets, to all of the follow-up, this is a very bad look for the community, from somone looking in from the outside.
This is some cultish behavior...
The integrity in this post is off the charts.
Love to see it.
Thanks, we're always trying to do better and learn from our mistakes.
Absolutely agree. This is an issue where it could have easily been covered up, but the leadership opted for total transparency.
They admitted the mistake, showed how it happened, and worked out an agreement with the community to avoid the problem in the future.
Forget comparison to corporate media (it's not even close), I've seen issues in the Fediverse handled 100x worse than this.
The only person with integrity I see here is the admin that initially removed the comments promoting animal abuse. Those that backed down and restored the comments caved to the pressure of an extreme, insular community and sided against *defenseless animals. I see no integrity in their actions no matter how they try to spin it.
Firstly, as said repeatedly, scientific research is inconclusive. Secondly, removing an entire mod team should still need consensus among other admins consulted.
Bull fucking shit on the scientific research being inconclusive.
show me a conclusive review on replacing meat with vegan amino acid & stuff supplements
Here are the studies you’re asking for:
-https://sustainablepetfood.info/
-https://bmcvetres.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12917-021-02754-8
-https://www.magonlinelibrary.com/doi/abs/10.12968/vetn.2022.13.6.252
-https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0253292
-https://www.mdpi.com/2306-7381/10/1/52
-https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0284132
-https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S240584402411609X
-https://www.mdpi.com/2076-2615/6/9/57
Nice, are there non-MDPI review articles? MDPI is a bit controversial.
We don't know if it's bad for them therefore we shall feed our carnivorous animals tofu and beans.
Average vegan IQ moment
I'm not a vegan. I'm saying that the topic is inconclusive, and we should not treat removing the comments as a clear-cut good action. From what I can see, the debate is quite heated and not isolated, so it probably has validity.
When is science ever “conclusive”?
That very concept is anti-science.
Nowadays “the science is inconclusive” is used to weasel out of corners that grifters paint themselves into.
Scientific consensus now there’s a concept worth understanding and putting forth in arguments such as this one.
If you think it's inconclusive that cats are carnivorous, please never own a pet
No vegan suggested feeding cats only tofu and beans. Weird strawman.
Only weirdos who feed their cats tofu and beans would bother replying to a 3 month old comment on a drama that has washed over.
Smort. Clearly ahead on the dunning kruger graph.
I happen to agree with the position on diet. But that's not really the point here.
Any community interested in truth and safety must have a consistent measure for truth. Human civilization relies on scientific consensus. That concensus can change, and it can be flawed, but it's really the best system we have. Admins/ have stated that they are relying on that for their decisions.
In this case, there is not a strong enough consensus to make a determination. I haven't reviewed the research personally, but I'm confident that the admins have. They made the right call based on the information presented.
Not that I think Rooki was wrong with what they did. But it doesn’t take a genius to figure out how fast such stuff can get out of control.
Thing happened. Admins reflected on thing. Came up with solution. Communicated solution with community in an understandable and transparent manner. Perfect.
If that lazy fucks over at Reddit would have been half as good as you with theirs jobs, we probably wouldn’t be here to begin with.
Wow. I have no involvement in the original issue and I'm definitely not as familiar with the circumstances and details as others. There may be a lot missing here.
But this feels like a very mature, logical, empathetic, well-intentioned response and the kind of thing I like to see.
Feeding a carnivore a vegan diet indeed is animal abuse. Cats can survive, but survival and healthy are not the same. Cats on a vegan diet get sick much faster and die younger, statistically according to vets. I'm a vegan, I have cats, I feed them meat. If you don't like feeding your pets meat, get a herbivore pet instead.
The way things were handled may have been wrong, but animal abuse should be banned from Lemmy imo.
There could be a technical fix for this. Lemmy could use a system that requires certain moderator and/or admin actions to require a 2-person authorization, and temporarily put the action in an “under review” state for a set amount of time.
For instance, an admin removing content would replace it with a placeholder for up to 2 days. If another admin accepts the change then the comment is removed. If no other admin responds then the content is put back.
This is pretty much Change Management.
Would be fine as an option that could be enabled, especially for larger communities, but an instance run by a single person wouldn't be able to host communities if it was a built in requirement for all communities.
Of course.
You can't fix people problems with technical solutions. I know tech folk like to think they can, but it really doesn't work. Sometimes you simple needs some rules, guides, and a good book to slap someone with.
Maybe not fix, but some things can certainly help.
Solid idea. One consequence of this would be the possible delay in removing material that really should be removed as fast as possible, though.
Which is why the content would get masked until a 2nd person approves or it gets unmasked.
Right, but that content will still exist server side.
Change Management can account for that, but if it’s truely that big of a problem then there might be legal or other compelling reasons to keep the content server side and inaccessible.
One person would be a good determiner of that.
In theory a good idea, but there is lots of content that needs to be gone serverside asap - either because it's CP, otherwise illegal, spam that clogs down the Fediverse/can even be used to DoS a server,etc.
Illegal things probably need to be retained as evidence. It’s many times illegal to remove evidence if you think it’s possibly relevant.
I’m not a lawyer, but I’d consult one about this.
It depends very much on the legislation - in many legislations it is absolutely illegal to retain it.
Anyway, there are more than enough non-evidence class materials that need to be removed asap.
A slight modification, it could be implemented as a suggested action where the admins (or mods) can ask for a second opinion when they feel it's appropriate.
That way urgent actions can happen right away, and potentially controversial actions can be discussed. It should solve the problem without forcing a specific workflow
I was just thinking about this: peer review admin actions. A first admin could initiate the action, then the peer review could be assigned randomly to another admin - randomly so that admins can't create specific cartels to team up on specific topics.
Personally, I like this idea. But it can be equally abused if two admins colluded to agree with each other. But, I think it’s at least better than nothing.
I would imagine this would need to be done at the software level to be most effective. You should request this sort of feature from the Lemmy team to integrate into both the backend and the UI.
If you do create issues for this request, you should post back here (or whatever related community) so people can upvote the issues to show the devs we really want the feature.
More backstage work for admins who are NOT paid. No.
Upvoting and commenting for visibility, this is a great idea. Though concur with snooggums below that it would need to be an opt-in option.
I think a 3 person team is better. 1 mod/admit marks something for moderation. 2 other mods need to agree to mod. If 1 of the mods disagrees, it stays.
This is inspired by true events in September 1983, where a russian command post in charge of their nuclear weapons caught on radar 4 incoming missles, supposedly fired from America. The captain in charge turned his key to fire every nuke they had at America. The second in command turned his key as well. The third in command refused. His logic was if America was going to fire nukes, why fire exactly 4 nukes and only 4 nukes, all targeting the same location? Would it not make sense to deplay thousands if you're trying for a surprise ambush?
Those nukes that America fired? Clouds. The Earth was at just the right rotation for 30 minutes to confuse the russian radar into interpreting 4 missle shaped clouds as solid objects.
America was almost turned to dust for no reason, 2 weeks before I was born. Because of some happy fluffy white clouds, that even Bob Ross will admit almost DID cause an accident!
So yeah. Maybe we do a 3 mod system.
This reads like more misinformation so I had to look it up. I’m seeing that it was one person that made this decision.
I'm replying to someone suggesting that in the future it should be a 2 man process. I'm suggesting it be a 3 man process. Nobody is suggesting this already happened.
I mean it could be granular like with 2 up to all admins.
We’re not dealing with nukes.
But any standard change management process can do that. I don’t think 3 people need to be involved in most matters.
Well, on the Internet, damage to reputation might be irreversible, but damage to content won’t.
I appreciate you guys owning up to this, especially since a lot of people here seemed determined to ignore the actual issue and just start a redditesque circle jerk about vegans.
Animal abuse isn't an opinion. It's evil. And malice by ignorance that could be corrected is malice.
Stop apologizing for doing your jobs. We all have opinions and raise them loudly in the Fediverse so I understand your natural reaction and want to communicate well. But IMHO this is troll feeding. If they posted in favor of human genocide, you'd close a ticket, and move on, not write an apology for taking it down.
Good news, thanks for the open communication.
You're welcome!✌️❤️ We try and be easy to get a hold of as well.
I'm reminded of an article talking about an outage at Yahoo! back when they were huge. It turned out the whole outage came down to one person messing up. The manager was asked how they let the person go and they said "Whatever the cost of that outage we just spent it on training, that person will never make that mistake again, nor will they allow someone else to make it".
If you have mods trying to manage things and they make a mistake you don't axe them, you discuss the situation and work in good policy for going forward. This one case is costly to the community, but nowhere near as costly as losing someone with this experience.
As for the vegan diet for cats issue, in general people who do vegan diets for kids and animals run a high risk of causing harm. Is it possible to do correctly? Maybe. Is it likely that an individual who is not trained in that field will manage it? No. But should it be investigated? Sure, but o my with experiments that actually do teach us something, no wasted studies of 3 weeks on a diet and checking blood tests, or comparing vegan kibble to omnivore kibble. Still, the same issues plague human dietetics and we don't have the answers there either, so yeah, maybe we should all chill a little and work together rather than identifying with one side of the argument and vilifying the other.
A sensible, compassionate, gracious and humble response? I thought this was the internet?
Yeah, I was as taken by surprise as you. I guess thats one of the reasons I keep using Lemmy after ditching reddit
Thanks! Yeah, a lot of the team (and users) came from Reddit, so feel ya on that.
Try to be as transparent as we can and keep things as healthy as we can for the community.
Thank you for your measured, reasonable, and frankly reassuring response. I appreciate that moderation is a very difficult task and I want to thank all of you, both for your work and for how you've acted when faced with a difficult situation. This is exactly how I would've hoped this response would be. I do hope that your resolution to discuss these things beforehand can help avoid similar issues in the future.
To be clear, while the idea that discussion is welcome is good the moderators of c/vegan do not tolerate discussion. Any opinion that goes against the orthodoxy of the echo bunker leads to a permanent ban. If you express any opinion other that, "It's fully acceptable to force your extremist philosophy on an obligate carnivore by feeding it an unnatural vegan diet" you will be banned. It's an incredibly closed minded and intolerant community.
I don't agree with the outcome of THIS situation, but I DO agree with the idea that mods and admins are not gods on the fediverse. I like the concept of checks and balances, even if I disagree with the ruling. The fact that it's not a god complex one person rule is better than what reddit has.
That being said, you can be vegan, but give your cat some chicken! Cats LOVE chicken! Why would you want to deprive your cat of what they love? If they were neighborhood cats, they would instinctually be killing birds ALL THE TIME!!! So it's not YOU killing the chicken. It's your cat. Don't like it? Don't get a cat.
I don't get a dog. Why? Because I'm never home. That would be unfair for a dog to just NEVER get to go for a walk, just because I'm home like 10 hours a day. And even that is mostly sleeping. Wouldn't be fair to the dog. Just like it's not fair to the cat to never have chicken.
Can we not relaunch the argument that turned into a black hole, pulling everyone on Lemmy into a hellish void? Let's keep the cat diet discussion in c/vegan, c/cats or some other devoted sublemmy.
Can you elaborate? I want to understand.
I am not involved in the action above but it seems fair.
Cats love their beef food. It's not normal for cats to eat cows.
All the vegans I meet in real life are normal ass people.
By the beard of Zeus, what a horrible day to be literate and morbidly curious.
These comments feel like a basketball game, except there's a wall in the middle and teams are just scoring points on their own hoop. Also every two comments someone throws a shovelful of shit over the wall.
Cats are not vegan lol
To be totally honest you have nothing to apologize for. Dogs and cats are metabolically different to humans and cannot survive on a vegan diet unlike us. Forcing obligate carnivore pets on vegan diets is certainly animal abuse.
I remember when there was a growing campaign to ban r/nonewnormal on Reddit due to it being a hub of medical disinformation and conspiracy theories surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic, and that this led to a blackout much like the later API protests.
Rather than read the room and introduce a new rule banning medical disinformation, Reddit's Tintin-looking moron of a CEO instead threw out tonnes of BS statistics on brigading likely plucked out of his own sphincter, and banned the subreddit because their activity exceeded this arbitrary percentage he made up.
And before you tell me this guy's figures were legit, aren't we forgetting that he pathologically lied about his interactions with the Sync developer? Spez is a snake.
@lwadmin For full disclosure I agree with rooki on this topic.
I may have missed it in the write up but I think the vegan mods needlessly escalated the situation by trying to ban and remove comments from an admin.
I am not saying I always agree with rooki but I respect his job as an admin.
The mods of vegan treated him disrespectfully in his capacity as an admin by deleting and banning him.
You should cover this in your terms of service.
Seems like a reasonable conclusion to me. Thank you for communicating as well as for your time and effort spent handling this in a careful and mature way.
Thanks, when thing gets out of hand, we try and take a step back as a team and evaluate how to do our best to fix things for both our site and the community as a whole.
Lunatic vegans on lemmy? No way dude
I love the compassionate intervention that allows @[email protected] the opportunity to learn and correct his behaviors and models that level of compassion. Thank you very much! 😊
Me too.
Can you people trying to restart the original argument take that shit elsewhere? This is a discussion about how to approach moderation.
I've heard evidence that it was a fairly toxic community there anyway.
We should be careful to avoid creating communities that are echo chambers. Ie, it should be a community discussing veganism, not a vegan safe space where people abuse you if you disagree
Otherwise, in 5 years time you end to with scenarios similar to reddit or on beehaw
I left beehaw because I half agreed with the community, someone in a "safe space" abused me, and a beehaw admin overlooked that abuse and instead insisted I was starting a flight (simply because I didn't 100% agree with the community it seemed)
We also risk scenarios where vaping or drug communities could grow and become toxic in the same way. We also should be as scientific as possible and avoid becoming Facebook.
I'm not sure about the cat thing, but to me, it seems like it could at least be used as animal abuse
I have a question: what is the FHF? Searching that acronym without context leads to what appears to be unrelated organizations.
FediHosting Foundation, it's our parent non profit.
What's crazy is all the admins had to do was look at that subs modlog prior to the controversy to see this was all most likely a troll:
https://lemmy.world/modlog/1309?page=3&actionType=ModRemoveComment
That mod team doesn't give two shits about "free speech".
Let them migrate to their own instance, changing all of lemmy.world's rules and making all those sticky threads is about as much as you could feed a troll.
I'm glad you're sticking to your guns on this. At the end of the day, it should NOT be up to the admin team who are not subject matter experts to determine what is and is not considered "truth" especially in cases where there is still active research on the topic.
I also can totally see how this topic can elicit a knee jerk reaction, because people have been known to put animals on vegan diets irresponsibly, but we don't block people from posting "chonkers" or obese cats which is literally the same thing where people will often intentionally overfeed their cats for this aesthetic which is also clearly abuse in the exact same vein.
I also think its a good thing you reinstated the admin after some reflection and a well thought out response and statement. It doesn't seem like they are on some crazy power trip either.
I’m not involved with the original drama - nor do I want to entertain it to begin with - but good on you guys for being transparent
What... So the rules don't matter if enough people get angry, I see
Why don't they just make their own instance?
The mods at the lemmy world vegan community don't see things the same way. From this post:
Codified anti-vegan bias based on reactionary views? That's unfortunate. Glad I'm not on that instance.
this is a welcome post, i was a little worried what this was going to be like, but you didn't manage to cannibalize yourselves over it so thats good.
Regardless the internet wouldn't be the internet with stupid squabbles like this one.
I was reading through the Section 8 Misinformation, there seems to be a typo:
Thanks! We fixed it in the next update we push.
Fixed!
I suppose it's good to take any opportunity to clarify moderation policies but... all this over cat food? Jesus Christ people, have some perspective. Not every topic needs to devolve into a debate about free speech and censorship.
Thanks for the continued work in maintaining a community!
🍿
You mention censorship like it's something that never happens here. Mods delete comments they don't agree with all the time.
good response. love knowing there are adults in the room turning pissing contests in to practical policy.
Drama time 👏 and vegan drama no less. Always feels really nourishing
All of that was over people fighting about feeding a carnivore pet plant based pet food? You're f*cking kidding me right?
This is complicated. 🤔
Speaking of mod power abuse, some days ago one of your mods deleted my (very mildly) snarky comment for "mod harassment", which I didnt even know they were until that point. I suggested they should be a little less petty and argumentative in random comment chains.
I did not report that bs at the time because I honestly dont give two fucks about the guy and have since blocked him, but I'm sure you can find it in the mod logs.
10/10 vets understand the science behind the consensus.
But anyway, let's hear what the accountant and physicist think, since that's going to be relevant.
And yet do I see correctly, that nothing at all was done about the mods that removed posts stating with proof, that the AKC agrees that cats are oblate carnivores and should not eat vegan cat food.
This whole thing reads like an apology to those who were wrong to begin with.
There's a sad, ironic element of humor that vegans are inadvertently advocating for animal abuse. ):)
wtf???
It feels like Lemmy is growing up. Love to see it.
It's good to have these issues. I still look at Lemmy as v1 of something that will eventually be quite different and the moderation and admin questions are not easily solved.
It seems like there are some good ideas in the comments, but another might be community voting for mods. Its interesting to me how undemocratic these democratic platforms are. Might be something to consider in future versions of Lemmy.
I have seen instances organize votes for their admins. Could be an option indeed.
I would not recommend being on a media moderated by the principle of what makes a person popular, of the users should have a say, it should be over the rules and how to interpret them, not over which person er as individuals prefer
Interesting, both stances have their pros and cons
I agree
Ah, the statesman vs the populist argument :)
Republic vs democracy, etc.
Right.. Im not even from the US. But sure, the labels versus the listening to each others viewpoints arguments 😊
It's a tough debate that's been around way longer than the US has.
Sure, Id say it is more about representative "democracy" where we vore on who have power versus actually participating in the decisions. Like, do we wanna vote over which representant who are most charismatic, or do we wanna discuss the decisions as a society and decide what decisions to implement?
I have cats, and I never would have responded to somebody the way rookie did in that thread. Also sounds like it's less "heat of the moment" When people are coming forward with other stories where he's been very emotionally charged during conversations.
But, all that aside, why is a backend programmer for lemmy an admin/mod at all?
I'm guessing someone on /c/vegan took umbrage with the fact that cats are obligate carnivores and didn't want to hear anything else.
Edit: I find my upvote/downvote ratio unbelievable for this comment. Astounding how controversial facts are.
Please. Don't stoke the fires of Mordor. They're cooling off. Please. Give it 10000 years.
Indeed.
Vegans aren’t denying cats are obligate carnivores however the belief that “plant-based diets are unhealthy for cats” is becoming less true with the recent studies in the last 3 years proving that cats can thrive on a plant-based diet so long as it contains synthetic taurine, B12 and vitamin A through the form of reputable kibble brands.
Sources:
-https://sustainablepetfood.info/
-https://bmcvetres.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12917-021-02754-8
-https://www.magonlinelibrary.com/doi/abs/10.12968/vetn.2022.13.6.252
-https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0253292
-https://www.mdpi.com/2306-7381/10/1/52
-https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0284132
-https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S240584402411609X
-https://www.mdpi.com/2076-2615/6/9/57
Umbrage doesn't mean denial.
Someone is acting emotional before looking at the facts.
I really don’t understand their position.
Cats cannot make a moral choice so what are these folks going to do when they see their “vegan” cat take down a bird or a mouse?
The fact that domesticated cats are notorious hunters really does make this whole thing pretty fucking funny tbh.
Im guessing you want to kill all cats
Im basing my guess on the same as you do - imagination
Ps Im not a vegan
You are just being terrible.
Can someone link to the post on ![email protected]? I wanna see this shit show 😅
Just get a tortoise ffs.
Good Job!
That's not true at all. The reason given by Rooki for the actions at the time was "missinformation" [sic]. The ToS had no rules on misinformation at the time.
That's also untrue. Rooki specifically distinguished that comment (the shield icon) in addition to having the [A] (admin) icon next to their name.
In your post, you accept that the vegan comments were valid, thus Rooki was in the wrong. Why does an instance moderator get to interfere (and impact what the readers see for days) with absolute impunity and new rules created to back their talking points? Rooki was not even asked to pause their activity while you looked into the conduct. There was no punishment to discourage those acts at all. Where in the world does one side admit to being at fault but the remedy still favors that side only?
Edit: post->comment
You're allowing animal abuse on your instance by leaving the comments up.
Agree or disagree the problem here is an admin that feels he can moderate any community on his instance based on only emotional response.
When shit blows up in his face he quickly undoes his little mistake and someone else apologizes.
But banning users for calling out obvious trolls is ok. This is bullshit really. The mods have been going so hard on here it makes this place less and less appealing.
I propose to conduct following experiment: we close a cat with juicy beef steak and juicy lettuce. We remove the owner and all people from that room: we only watch that cat with cameras. Guess what will be eaten :-)?
So... just to check my understanding, what you're saying is that whether or not cats can survive on a vegan diet, it doesn't matter? Right? You're saying that you decided the admins overstepped and you regret approaching ambiguity the way you did? I suppose that seems reasonable. There's plenty of misinfo all over Lemmy as is, and as such there's gotta be various ways we can handle it - from top-down bans to trusting the readers.
As for the diet stuff, what, are they using lab-grown meat? Is that the TLDR here?
EDIT: Guys I am just checking my understanding - maybe check your own if you think such a comment does not contribute to the discussion.
I thought the whole point of lemmy is you cash be as crazy as you want and they will leave you alone unlike reddit
LOLOL
HaHaHa! Well done #threadiverse. The system mostly works. As a vegan and dog father, I watched this play out and found it both funny and instructive. Hell hath no fury like a cat owner on the moral high ground.
Vegans causing controversy. This is my complete lack of surprise.
This is not a productive comment. It's probably best to discuss the pros and cons of veganism and it's followers somewhere else.
tbf, pwning vegans is one of the internet's most time-honored traditions. Up there with harassing women.
But yeah, you're right.
What if they're American vegans who use the imperial system of measurement, don't own a bidet, and microwave their water for tea? Should I break out the cross and hammer?
Hmmm. Do they use Apple products? That one seems to be a pitchfork target too.
Do they do crossfit? Are they an Arch Linux user?
Some are vegetarians that use Ubuntu and do weigh lifting... 😉
Ok, metric system, is better. As is having a proper kettle. Microwaving water is only ok if the water contains ramen 🍜.
It’s a joke.
Vegans have their rights to opinions just as you and me. This is not about t vegans vs us, but about how to handle disagreements We never learn if we just sensor everyone we disagree with
So do anti-vax people get their rights to options?
What about religious fundamentalist homeschoolers?
Parents who refuse their children any medical treatment because prayer is enough if you have faith?
Racists?
Where do you draw the line if it's not animal abuse? Especially presented in a way that someone might fall for the misinformation and not know they're harming their pet?
Right.. where do you draw the line? You are straw-maning a lot here, as the person sensored wasnt an anti vaxer, religious fundamentalist, opponent of medicine, racist or even promoting denying cats meat without careful consideration
But ye, you',d probably sensor me too, as Im against racism. Im pro choice. Im against capitalism. Im post colonialist. Im pro trans rights. I'm an intersectional feminost.I think every person no matter skin colour, gender, identity or background should have access to free public health care. Hell, I don't even want people who got rich parents to get access to superior health care as we as a society should give everyone proper health care
So keep on straw manning, as you probably want to sensor me too
It’s weird how you can not really notice words are homonyms until you see them spelled out…
The mod log of their community says otherwise. People keep repeating that Vegans are being attacked, and honestly it seems to go both ways from what I've seen. I was curious about the situation and the single comment in this thread that stood out initially I believe has since been deleted but was literally using the word "carnivore" as a slur.
Several people are making it vegans vs carnivores here regardless of what the post was actually intended to be about. I'm not sure (since I believe this post was intended to be informative) that this comments section should even exist. But since it does I think it probably should have been limited to comments specifically about the verdict and the changes and rather explicitly excluded the hot button issue that touched all this off.
I've blocked the vegan community here after a single visit there and haven't looked back but this comment section is very much tame in comparison.
Who said they don’t? I just find it hilarious that one of said idiotic opinions (cats should be vegan!) is the cause of so much controversy.
Yeah, kinda.. no one said that. But hey, haters gotta hate
I mean, it says the post was about cats and vegan diets. But whatever.
Still, when they use words like “meatsplained”, I think vegans can also be haters just as much.
As soon as someone in a position of power shows their willingness to use that power to further their own agenda in any way, rather than for the benefit of the community, they should immediately and unequivocally have that power withdrawn.
Rooki has showed us all who he is, and what he is willing to do with power. He has not felt any consequences. In future, he’ll just be more cautious with how he abuses his power.
I understand that nothing is forcing me to remain on this instance, so I require no reminder, but every single new pinned "all" post that I see at the top of my feed makes me dislike this instance more and more.
I haven't encountered a single admin here that I don't dislike. Every feature that is added is pointless. (Most recently, the "media bias" bot or whatever you call it.) Just waiting for ads now. There shouldn't need to be a "misinformation" section in the handbook. If someone doesn't like that being vegan the right way is good for you, they can block the community they think is offending them.
Pointless.
I know this is the internet, so my expectations should be pretty low, but I'm honestly really disheartened and taken aback by all of the comment sections on the posts related to this one. Everyone just spewing opinions, no facts, no research, just hearsay. We are a very disappointing group of people I'd say and we should try and do better.
I'm also really disheartened by the actions that took place in /c/vegan that this post is describing that caused policy changes. Another example for me on why anarchy and removing power structures is needed. Honestly, why should /c/vegan or any non-mainstream community want to remain associated with this instance? I am vegan, and didn't know that community existed, but seeing how hostile non-vegans are in there... Forget about it.
Just terrible all around. What a calamity of a community we're creating.
Good to know admins wont ever face any consequences
Will your next statement address the existence of a bot that lets community moderators site-ban and IP blacklist accounts without any appeal process?
Between the MediaBiasFactCheck and this bot how much power does Rooki have over the instance?
Using the Hippocratic oath as a guide is stupid. It only applies to medical personnel that take the oath, and medical personnel haven't taken that oath since at least the 60s because it actually has a lot of unethical shit incompatible with modern morality. For example, the original Hippocratic oath is against abortion. Does that mean that Lemmy is anti-abortion now? It also forbids surgery for kidney stones, are the admins certified to make this kind of medical decisions.
Just write or choose a good ethical framework that is actually relevant for the management of online communities. There's better, more modern shit out there that also includes the principle of do no harm. Lemmy.World is handled by amateurs.
You know what would be helpful here? Actually naming and/or linking to some of these better frameworks you think they should consider using.
So, because removal is too much punishment there'll be no punishment at all, even now in the second draft of damage control.
They could remove the moderator's ability to post for a period of six months. But, they've not chosen it.
Seems it's time to go.
Tl:dr "Just trust us. We'll totally come to a consensus at some point eventually, pinky sware. In this case, despite the admin being a pompous sack of duck vaginas, we're not going to do anything about their censorship. We're probably going to continue censoring things we don't like in the future, but only when we agree on it with 0 public comment."
Yw
The reactionary vegan hate is real.
Wtf? An essay on cat’s diet? Is this becoming reddit? Please tell me no
I really don't get this point. With the same logic, you can remove any person giving meat to their cat, or more generally, eating meat themselves. No matter how much most people try to ignore it and not think about it, the absolute overwhelming majority of meat is produced in absolutely cruel and gruesome circumstances, which every pet owner would consider torture.
(Edit: And for the record, I'm not even vegan myself (and also don't own a cat), just calling out the hypocrisy.)
There's a very simple solution to all of this. Just require the user upload a form showing that their dog or cat consented to being converted to veganism in defiance of their very nature 👍
This thread is not about your vegan vs antivegan-take but how to approach disagreements. In this regard you failed, and luckily, you are not an admin
What do you mean? All I suggested was that disagreements could be settled with an online consent form.
Id say the vegan person talking about how hard it is to make proper and healthy vegan food for cats understand cats better than a person who want to require consent forms from cats
But ye, what do I know. Im not a cat, nor am I a vegan
While we're at it why not look for a way to force horses to only eat rare steak? I'm sure we can find a healthy way to do it if we try hard enough!
Why on earth would you do that?
I don't know, same reason you'd force a cat to eat a vegan diet, I suppose.
Some form of mental illness that either makes you incapable of understanding the damage you're causing to the animal, or that makes you enjoy its suffering. 🤷♂️
you realise that vegans are not force-feeding cats cucumbers and lettuce right?.
It's scientifically formulated biscuits. That cats enjoy.
I have a bunch of cats I feed vegan diets to, but to anyone concerned that I'm doing animal abuse, don't worry - occasionally, I wring one of their necks and chop it up to feed to the others, so clearly I'm not abusing them.
Seriously though, I do not understand how non-vegans are all getting on their high horse about "animal abuse" when their preferred course of action is just abusing different animals. Cats do not hold a higher moral standing than other animals just because they look cute. You know they feed cows literal shit? Do you think that's part of their "natural diet?"
I don't have any cats or other pets, but even if the worst claims are true, the people doing it would be no worse than what carnists do every day. It's simply that abuse against certain categories of sentient beings is so normalized that people don't even recognize it as abuse, no matter how bad it is.
lol Lemmy turning into reddit with its "amazing" moderators and ban hammers. not surprised.
They actually said that they could have handled it better and made some procedural changes.
That's...the opposite of what was said here.
There are so many ignorant comments of people not realizing that you can feed cats a plant-based diet with taurine.
so this is an endorsement of animal abuse from the admins?
It is an endorsement of allowing discussion of a controversial topic that didn't break the posted rules.
Feeding a cat a vegan diet is animal abuse because it requires a workaround for their biology as an obligate carnivore instead of just feeding them what they have evolved to need. If a vegan can't properly feed a particular pet, they shouldn't have the pet.
But we should be able to discuss it unless the rules for the community are changed to prohibit that kind of discussion.
vaccine denial is also allowed when a sub has no rules against it?
Yes, although should be a rule that prohibits promoting antivaxx misinformation. If communities that discuss medical topics don't have rules against promoting disinformation, they are not being moderated very well.
Keep in mind there will need to be an opportunity to explain why something is wrong, and that requires explaining what it is.
How can vegans justify having pets at all?
Even if you hold that opinion, vegans should be allowed to disagree with us and argue why we are wrong
This is where you and I disagree
we do not consider feeding a cat vegan food as animal abuse, provided there are no health issues arising from this.
most of the research i've looked at seems to point out that there are various pitfalls, e.g. just feeding a cat vegetables will result in malnutrition. having synthetic additives for this can be one way to address that problem. just because something is sold as vegan cat food that doesn't necessarily imply that it's healthy for the cat, as some of the articles were pointing out that some of the cheaper ones were lacking the right ingredients.
as an example, "my cat now only gets potatoes and apples and nothing else" would be considered animal abuse.
additionally, if moderators were to remove arguments pointing out the risks of e.g. missing nutrients in a civil discussion and leaving the other side that just argues "vegan cat food works" without any arguments as is then we would also consider this animal abuse.
in this specific incident the conversation was certainly not civil, which is unfortunate, as this situation would likely have gone a very different way if it was.
Docking tails, snipping ears, and a bunch of stuff we do to dogs is abuse even if they don't have health issues down the road.
One issue with feeding cats a vegan diet is that cats hide their pain, so if the diet is causing pain due to a lack of nutrients that don't have obvious external signs like death, they could be suffering for their entire lives. We don't have long term studies about other health impacts from a lack of meat, and the primary focus has been keeping them from dying. It should be assumed that there are other negstive side effects we cannot see when at least one missing enzyme kills the cat.
Plus the only possible outcome is that some vegan is able to avoid feeding an obligate carnivore they voluntarily adopted the wrong diet.
I never said that it only requires harm down the road.
Cutting body parts off or even just cutting them without good medical reason (e.g. risk of death without amputation) is of course also animal abuse.
For hiding pain, you're attacking a strawman, because I already addressed that in my previous comment.
This seems like the wrong post and the wrong community to be restarting this fight.
By this logic, oxygenating a fish tank to provide the fish with oxygen is animal abuse. You are artificially adding the necessary oxygen into the water, after all.
Okay, so this is just factually wrong.
Putting oxygen in a tank is necessary for the health of the fish. Feeding a cat meat is necessary for the health of the cat.
It’s also a false equivalence.
There is no workaround for oxygenating fish tanks; we don’t find something that ‘might work as well as oxygen’ according to poorly done studies. We just give them oxygen, the thing they actually need to live.
I don't see the falsehood of the equivalence at all. Living things need certain atoms and molecules as inputs. Provide those, and the living thing lives. The rest is just vibes.
The problem here is they need specific molecules. A vegan diet does not give cats those correct necessary molecules.
A century ago you might've been right, but not anymore.
Any molecule found in meat can be found or made in other ways if we want. The body is complicated, but not that complicated.
It doesn’t work. No study shows it does, save for a few poorly-done ones paid for by vegan think-tanks, and even those are ambiguous. Maybe one day we will manage it, but right now we can’t.
Oh man, it's clearly more complicated than you realize.
This looks to be more an endorsement of moderation principles and rules, not determining truth of comments.
For the difficulties in determining what's true, see the kerfuffle about Media Bias Fact Check.
This is an endorsement of freedom of speech even if your ideology disagrees
You obviously did not read or comprehend the post, and are attempting to troll in Bad Faith.
If you had read and comprehended this post, you’d have found that they updated the by-laws to include language to prohibit animal abuse. You’d have also read their reasoning for what they did in their post-mortem to Rooki’s actions.
Do better.
I was looking for the super hyperbolic nonsense statement, surprised it took me this much scrolling honestly.
Maybe Lemmy is getting better....
I've seen many comments on Lemmy glorifying hunting and fishing and nobody gets angry when they don't get removed. Someone makes a comment about the theoretical possiblity of vegan cat food and people freak out when they reinstate it.
its almost as if like people can make conscious decisions for themselves, yet have to be proper caretakers for animals that can not make such decisions, even if it includes going against the owners inbuilt beliefs, because it is in the best interest of the animal which is reliant wholly upon your care taking.
Hunting and Fishing is the circle of life. As long as we do it as humanely as possible it is necessary to feed 8 billion people. In fact in some instances it can be ecologically helpful, like culling invasive species. The same cannot be said for continually feeding an inadequate diet to a living animal.
To me there's a fine line between discussing "the theoretical possibility" and recommending it to cat owners. Of course it's theoretically possible, but as far as I can tell it has not been proven in practice yet, and should not be recommended.
Hunting and fishing for sustenance could be described as the circle of life. Trophy hunting and catch and release fishing are not. Something something we are not the same meme.
yes, clearly I was talking about for sustenance, hence mentioning "feeding" multiple times. If you want to petition the admins for banning trophy hunting discussion I might be in favor of that.
We do not need to hunt or fish to feed 8 billion people. In fact overfishing is a big ecological issue. And hunting and fishing are the circle of death, not life, as we don't need to hunt or fish to survive, assuming you live in a technologically advanced civilization.
Well, animal abuse is okay as long as it's done to an animal you don't care about. That's just the circle of life.
I can't tell if this is sarcasm, sorry
Haha sorry, it's definitely sarcasm. I'm just tired of people who have no idea what they're talking about using any opportunity to try to dunk on vegans with the same old tired arguments we've heard and refuted to deaf ears hundreds of times before. It gets real old.
I'm not saying all of our current meat and fish systems are perfectly humane and sustainable. I agree a lot needs to be corrected and reduced there. What I am saying is you can't completely eliminate all animal based sources of food from the planet and expect to feed everyone adequately.
Why not? It's not like everyone would turn vegan overnight. It would be a gradual change and our food infrastructure would change with it
Funny seeing carnivors arguing over whats animal abuse an whats not.
Like you would have fucking clue ?
Tldr: we will do more internal talks, was right just needed to tell mods why they were removed, just talk to admins if happens again so we can quietly handle it.
This is what you came up with after all that time?
The site admins are below the org operations team, so you can "go to their boss" / "talk to a manager" if you have a issue you feel is being handled unfairly.
Excellent reply that again answers nothing. Well done PR team
https://fedihosting.foundation/lw-team/
Just search the next higher person and click on him, you will get redirected to their lemmy profile.
Interesting, @[email protected] I didn't know you were so high in the chart! 😄
I just try and keep everything running and everyone as happy as I can ❤️.
I was going, at one point, to be a social worker, in another life 😁.
I also do my best to stand behind both the team and the Fedi as a whole. It's tough, but worth it heh heh.
Yeah he is one of the oldest i would say, one of the first.
Old man up in here!
So yes only answer is do it quietly next time