Spyke

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Update to Terms of Service + New Bylaws (Protections for users)

As noted in my post on the "moderation incident", by adding more subjectivity to the rules, you are opening the door to even more instance moderator misconduct. There is already evidence of how that would go.

Rooki felt it right to intervene in the !vegan cat food thread (and got a pat on the back with the new rules made to justify their actions), then not only took no issue with comments like "Meat is not something diabetics need to worry about." but also fueled the fire in the same thread by saying "To be honest linking something like meat to death of people is like saying everybody that breathed air died."

So much for taking action against harmful dietary advice.

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Why you shouldn't use Brave Browser

Thanks. Whenever I raised the issue of homophobia or his general support of right-wing causes that threaten people's privacy (see the aftermath of Roe v. Wade for example), I got downvoted, be it on the PrivacyGuides sub where they adore the browser, or right here just weeks ago.

europe

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Elon Musk attacked German support for migrants and promoted a call to support the AfD, a far-right extremist political party

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His grandfather J. N. Haldeman was a staunch anti-Communist from Canada who in the nineteen-thirties and forties had been a leader of the anti-democratic and quasi-fascist Technocracy movement. (Technocrats believed that scientists and engineers should rule.) “In 1950, he decided to move to South Africa,” Isaacson writes, “which was still ruled by a white apartheid regime.” In fact, apartheid had been declared only in 1948, and the regime was soon recruiting white settlers from North America, promising restless men such as Haldeman that they could live like princes. Isaacson calls Haldeman’s politics “quirky.” In 1960, Haldeman self-published a tract, “The International Conspiracy to Establish a World Dictatorship & the Menace to South Africa,” that blamed the two World Wars on the machinations of Jewish financiers.

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Update to Terms of Service + New Bylaws (Protections for users)

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If you're talking about the upvotes and the supportive comments, I'm not even sure they reflect how the community would feel had they seen the full sequence of events* leading up to that decision.

As I previously mentioned, seemingly the first comment to start the chain of !vegan moderators' and subsequent Rooki actions was the impolite "don't force your shit on them" one-line comment by a user first exonerated, but later banned for trolling in another community by none other than Rooki.

The vegan comments were way lengthier, containing balanced ("it's important to do a bit of extra research", "cat nutrition is too complicated to be trying to make at home") and seemingly thoughtful takes with a link to the NCBI.

Conversely, Rooki's line of arguing contained little but outbursts like "have a nice rest of your life knowing you killed your loved pet" and "If anyone else thinks pets should be vegan i have no problem banning them for being a troll and promoting killing pets", with unsubstantiated yet specific claims like "YES cats can survive vegan diet for few months".

Sure, Rooki admitted to being emotional and said sorry after my post asking for their removal, but what's the weight of that apology if the new rules echo those same talking points, from "misinformation" to the quite specific example "Unhealthy diets, e.g. due to insufficient nutrients"?

*Screenshots sent to me by a !vegan mod after my post - verifiable via the public modlog.

games

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Epic Games Admits In Court That Its PC Store Still Isn't Profitable

I have no idea why this is newsworthy. Epic's own 2019 documents and testimony in the Apple trial showed that the company did not expect the store to be profitable until 2024 or even 2027. The strategy of heavy investment and operating at a loss to turn a profit later worked for Spotify, Netflix, Microsoft, and many others. Even this week, there are headlines like "Elon Musk Says SpaceX's Starlink Achieves Breakeven Cash Flow".

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Epic win: Jury decides Google has illegal monopoly in app store fight

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“Impairment means something is there, it’s being used, it just isn’t as good. Prevented means you shut it down.”

Epic’s expert Bernheim argues that Google’s expert Gentzkow “ignores four critical aspects of Google’s conduct,” including:

  1. Google impairs competition without preventing it entirely

  2. Google’s conduct targets comeptition as it emerges

  3. Google is dominant

  4. Google shares its Play profits with its competitors

“When push came to shove, he talked about whether competition is prevented” rather than impaired, says Bernheim.

The upshot of that: Bernheim believes Epic doesn’t need to prove Google actually blocked competition entirely. In his opinion (for Epic), Epic only needs to show there were no good alternatives to Google Play and Google Play Billing. It doesn’t need to show there were no alternatives at all.

For example, says Bernheim, Gentzkow presented a chart titled “Was Fortnite Blocked?” showing that revenue tanked on Google Play after the app was kicked off the store, but didn’t tank for Android phones that got Fortnite a different way.

But “If off-Google Play was a good substitute for Google Play, you’d see when one drops, the other goes up commensurably.” That didn’t happen: demand stayed stable outside of Play, according to the bar graph we just saw. “There’s no indication that any of the people here are substituting to off-Google Play.”

vegan

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Lemmy world vegan community - Future of community update

Thanks for the shoutout! The power move was a clear violation on the side of Rooki. Words and other fluff aside, the new rule additions are the best indication of not only the lack of change but also doubling down on Rooki's original position, as described in further detail in my recent comments.

Once I've made the last comments and it's been a few days since the Lemmy.World announcements, I will fully migrate to lemmy.zip because of this incident, so going to my user page on here should make it easy for anyone curious about the events to get a much clearer picture.

support

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Asking for moderator Rooki's removal for misconduct

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Looking at the modlog, Rooki reinstated the two !vegan moderators and restored one of the mods' comments about an hour ago. Rooki also edited their own comment referenced in the OP to say the following:

Edit: I am sorry, about my emotional decision i reinstated @Eevoltic and @[email protected] as mods After researching myself, many sites say its not healthy, one (1) research paper says it is at least NOT unhealthy, but it has few points of data.

Personally, I'm not fully satisfied if that is the end of it. The changes look like Rooki admitting that the issue is not clear-cut, but Rooki's conduct as a moderator has to reflect the rules, not something as arbitrary as Rooki's level of disagreement with someone's views at the given time.

Nobody should have to convince Rooki that something is not misinformation. Rooki (or any other instance moderator) must not even think of interfering on that basis. The word "misinformation" is not in the rules in any shape or form, and the only thing remotely close to it is Lemmy.World accepting that "The content provided on Lemmy.World is not necessarily factually true". If anything, the rules side more with the community moderators' judgement by saying "Your participation in individual communities will only be acceptable on the condition that you abide by their rules."

Edit: Added more to the sentence on Lemmy.World's rule related to misinformation.

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Feedback from all moderators

I run a community of over 11K almost by myself on reddit and I can't say I struggle to moderate it. Here on Lemmy I post to one I set up, but I'm the only one doing it. That said, I saw virtually no moderation tools, so it would definitely help to have something. However, I don't want my posts to get lost or be spread across two or more communities, as opposed to having everything searchable in one place. What would be the technical obstacle in copying the posts and preserving the dates? If size is an issue, they could be capped to a specific size, only with the metadata transferred in those cases.