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Ye Power Trippin' Bastards @lemmy.dbzer0.com
Stamets @lemmy.world

Jordan Lund: An Unbiased Perspective

I've been seeing Jordan Lunds name on YePowerTrippingBastards for ages but I'll be honest? I didn't really read any of the posts. To those who know me, I generally stay within the meme area or over in my Star Trek corner getting angry over dumb shit. I am a known asshole and plenty of people do not like me so when it comes to general threads talking about people, I don't often care. But then I started seeing his name pop up as a reason to not go to either Lemmy.world or Lemmy as a whole because the moderation here was so extreme. Now I've done deep dives in the past where I drew up a metric ton of evidence against Startrek.Website and ValueSubtracted/Corgana for actively abusing their users, harassing people across multiple websites, driving misinformation and lying/gaslighting about everything under the sun. Check this first post or this post as examples of both of them being horrible people but also of the type of shit that I do.

So when I saw these accusations I figured let's look into it. The problem was that a significant portion of posts about Jordan are really heavily biased. All of them are from people who had active interactions with him and had a "dog in the fight". Me? The only times I've ever talked to him have been in passing, casual conversation either in lemmy comments or on Discord servers. I have probably had comments removed from /c/world and /c/news in the past, I vaguely recall that happening, but I also remember being fine with it. I get heated so whatever.

Every post and comment that I saw on here were from people who were worked up. Either he had pissed them off or vice versa or both. This does not mean that the posts aren't based in reality or a lie. But it does mean that it is easier for someone to dismiss as just being trolls, something that I have actually seen happen with concerns from this community in the past. Not particularly for Jordan (although, yes, for Jordan) but just in general. Whether that be from other users, other mods or other admins the reaction can be the same. But I have no such connection. So let me lay out a variety of behaviors that not only demonstrate that Jordan is unfit to moderate any community, but that he's a danger not just to the communities he moderates, not just lemmy.world, but the entirety of Lemmy as a whole. This man is doing generational damage to Lemmy that I've not seen any other user do.

Before I kick all this off, I just want to say that I have only been looking into this for about 6-7 hours. This is by no means comprehensive. There are going to be things left out because I'm simply not going to be aware of all of it. If you'd like to add more context or clarification, please be calm and clear about it and add any evidence to the comment section. Also want to say that I don't want to type Jordan out constantly so I'm just going to say JL. Lemmy.world is also going to be shortened to LW. A few others might pop up. I'm just fucking lazy.

The job of a moderator is to apply the rules in an unbiased fashion. To read the rules, interpret them if needed and then carry them out. Personal influence is not supposed to be a part of it. You're supposed to treat it like a position of authority and respect, to respect the position and not abuse it. Now, I am 100% guilty of this in the past (Search my name on here) but it's also one of the reasons why I stepped down as a mod of the majority of communities and why the few ones I still have are treated far more lightly. I turned into what I hate and that's completely on me. I realized I was turning into a terrible person and left. Jordan has not had this realization despite numerous people pointing this out to him. Instead he will say stuff like:

or other things like:

or ones like this:

Now, let's temporarily ignore the fact that he went into YPTP to actively antagonize and harass multiple users, we'll get back to that, just look alone at what this behavior is saying. He's saying that if you don't antagonize him then he won't antagonize you. That it is "fair fucking game" to increase harassment of a user if one harasses him. This is a repugnant and troll-like mindset at the best of times but in the hands of a moderator it is genuinely dangerous. Those two comments alone call into question every single removal or moderator action he has ever taken. He has demonstrated an inability to remain unbiased. That's all those comments are saying but they say an enormous amount.

But let us take a look at some of the actions he has taken, shall we?

A few months ago a Canadian used a Canadian term in referencing Canadian politics and a Canadian Government. Jordan Lund, an American, misunderstood what was being said. Instead of asking for clarification, the post was instantly removed with the logic of "Misinformation". Now, as a Canadian, the idea of an American telling a Canadian that they're misinformed about their own government isn't one that we as Canadians are typically fond of. Even less so when JL decided to double down and ignore anyone telling he was wrong. This is a running trend. Jordan is routinely faced with the real facts of the matter and not what he believes and every time he just leaves the conversation. When faced with irrevocable proof that he is wrong on any community that he is not a moderator of, he disengages. This is another demonstrable behavior that questions his abilities as a moderator. He is unwilling (or incapable) of admitting on being wrong.

"But Stamets, that's just one example!" Okay. Then how about months later when questioned on the literal exact same moment? @Blaze@lemmy.dbzer0.com called him out and again he dodged any responsibility. He ignored anyone proving him wrong and doubled down on his false understanding of reality. Not only is this woeful behavior for a mod but he's also the moderator of /c/World. With that behavior he has now categorically proven that /c/World is American-Centric to the point of rejecting any wording that isn't done in a way understandable by an ignorant American. Another moment that calls into question whether or not Jordan is capable of being impartial would be removing someones comment so they could continue the exact same argument with someone else.

But I did mention earlier that we'd get back to this so let us. Jordan has demonstrated time and time again that he looks for a fight, actively enjoys trolling, and wants to be as antagonistic as humanly possible. There are times he's summoned into YPTB with an @ but other times he isn't. Honestly I don't want to go through each and everyone of these showing that this is shitty, troll-like and antagonistic behavior. You should be able to tell yourself. The fact that the mod is going in and doubling down on being a dick is obscene. Clarifying the decision? Maybe. But actively fanning the flames and acting like twerp is pathetic and disqualifies him from the position of a mod of any community, nevermind flagship communites on lemmy.world. Here's another example of an entire thread showing he isn't fit. If you want more just look at his profile or search his name on basically any community.

Next we shall focus on him gaslighting and lying to or about everyone. Including the Admins of LW.

A few days ago, Jordan accused someone of being transphobic, homophobic, violent and racist on YePowerTrippingBastards. Both the person themselves as well as another user looked into those accusations. There were no demonstrations of that behavior. The user, @Ganbat@lemmy.dbzer0.com, gave a pretty detailed response of how Jordan was lying and unfit for the job. I highly recommend checking that out for yourself. Jordan did not respond but Ganbat also said they were done talking to Jordan anyway. @princessnorah@lemmy.blahaj.zone also looked into the accusations and couldn't find anything but could actually find things removed that were actively defending trans people. If anything, Ganbat was the dead opposite of transphobic. Norah being the one to point this out is also important as she's trans. Jordans instant response was to gaslight and deflect blame saying he was talking about someone else, not Ganbat. Odd that he did not say this to Ganbat. But this is something that was also instantly proven wrong as he directly referenced Ganbat. Norah also mentioned something that I'll get into in a moment. Jordan did not respond. But just to recap here, a cis white male just tried to weaponize transphobia against someone who was not transphobic for the sake of closing an argument and then tried to gaslight a trans woman about whether or not he just did that. Again, this discounts him from ever holding a position as a moderator.

Months ago on /c/World, Jordan Lund was talking about the media fact checking bot. He claimed that he would be removed if he removed the bot. That the moderators serve at pleasure of the Admins and they would just replace him. This is directly at odds with an Admin then immediately saying that it wasn't true.

This also demonstrates that he is not willing to take any criticism or pushback at all on things that he agrees with and would rather push that blame onto someone else to avoid it himself. Now how do I know he was actively for this? Because in the Discord channel when the bot was made and announced, Jordan was literally the first person to respond and say that he was down with this. Something I verified from two different sources and by seeing it with my own eyes.

Now, let us focus on something in that Discord server.

There have been comments floating about with screenshots saying that Jordan has access to a bot that has admin abilities. I can confirm this. I do not know whether he still has access to it but he did for at least a year. How do I know this? Because I did as well. When I originally ported over to LW, I had my own personal stalker who was following me around and harassing me. An admin who is no longer active gave me access to the bot to deal with this person. I cannot speak to the full abilities of the bot, especially as the development of the bot has switched to another admin/mod who I'm not friends with. But the bot when I had it was capable of banning a user (permanently or for a period of time) from the entirety of Lemmy.World as well as removing posts. This bot was designed specifically for spam and CSAM as we're talking like a year and a half to two years ago. CSAM was still being slammed in waves and anti-lemmy spam from reddit was still coming in strong. Access to the bot was extremely limited and only given to users that were trusted to not abuse the bot and only use it for spam, CSAM or in the case of two people, harassment. I was one of those two people. Want to guess who the other was?

I did not pay much attention to the usage of the bot. I did not pay much attention to the discord server in general. But I can say that I saw Jordan use it at least once for a harassing user. I have no idea whether or not that was valid as I wasn't looking into it. At the time he was just a dude in the server who I occasionally chatted with. I knew nothing about him. But then again I'm an oblivious fool who didn't even know PugJesus existed until really recently. At the time I had no second thoughts about the usage of it. I only used it a handful of times, less than 5. Either for accounts that were self-admitted alts of my stalker or of CSAM when admins were not available. Because of that I didn't pay a ton of attention to the channel where the bot was being used but the most active user of the bot that I saw during that time was Jordan Lund.

All of this so far has just been actions of his that demonstrate that he's not fit. Now let's talk about who he is and let us start with him being a racist. This is a news article about him. The whole thing is essentially about how he as a white man is surprised to find out there are negative feelings about Portland. Negative feelings about Portland and Oregon being extremely white and racist.

Still, Lund said he doesn’t see much racism in his day-to-day life. He’s certainly never experienced it.

Right.

"I think Portland had a variety of problems. Race is definitely one of them, yes. But I don't know that we could classify it as the most important problem. if you look at the homeless situation, there's definitely an income inequality problem, a mental health problem. there are a whole lot of more pressing problems besides race."

Jordan? A lot of those are based on race. But this is just me nitpicking. The real problem is this.

And despite his politics, he struggles to find sympathy or kinship with the Black Lives Matter marchers who occasionally disrupt his commute home to protest police violence. "I do pay attention to them. I think primarily as somebody who works in downtown we tend to be aware of things like that more because of the disruption it causes. I don't think the disruption they do is particularly productive. It takes people who would ordinarily be on their side and go, why are they doing this to us? The Portland Police didn't shoot anybody recently that I’m aware of. If they want to be productive in their protests, they should go to where these events are happening."

This man was just met with the fact that his place is known for being racist and xenophobic and his first instinctual response was "Go protest elsewhere." Yeah... the call is coming from inside of the house Jordan. You're the racist that people are constantly talking about. Racism isn't just burning a cross. It's not just shooting up a black church. It can be quiet and insidious and you are actively helping further that by dismissing a right to protest so you can get somewhere faster. Moreover, a protest to make people aware of a problem with racism. A problem you only became aware of when someone hit you in the face with it because you keep ignoring it around you like with these protests. And if you're worried I'm taking him out of context with that article? I'm not. He reiterated it here in his own words.

Now let's move onto the fact that he's transphobic as fuck. He went to /c/Transgender and posted a Matt Walsh video. Then there's the whole thing earlier about him claiming someone else was transphobic who wasn't. Not only is that extremely offensive to the dude you claimed it of but also extremely offensive to every trans person in existence for you to claim that you know better than someone else. He's using the trans community for his own benefit but has not demonstrated anything that I've seen of support of that community. Just active hostility. Check his modlog for the record. There are some other interesting things in there like him stalking someone and spamming the same comment over and over again.

Next up? Zionism. He has repeatedly removed posts that are critical of Israel or pro-Palestinian and that's fairly well documented. Again, just searching his name and Zionist or anything on any community here gives you more than enough to look at. You do have to filter through it a bit because a lot of people are, justifiably, pissed as hell but it does mean that the language of the comments can seem inflammatory and trolling him. Something that he has leaned into quite heavily and used as a shield. But these two posts stand out to me as particularly obscene. One such example is his patented refusal to ever address proof to the contrary. He listed a source as being antisemitic while using the justification of a Zionist source. When given a litany of Israel critical cartoons but none that are actively antisemitic, he refused to engage. Honestly the entire post also demonstrates a shocking amount of logic that isn't outright Zionist but dancing around the edges and leaving the outline of one. Especially when he says that he'll allow the post of the slain journalist to be posted when he "starts writing for a reputable news source again. Of course when pressed, he gaslit again saying that it wasn't the person he was talking about when it clearly was.

Conclusion

The man is a genuine danger to Lemmy.world. I know plenty of people who refuse to engage with the communities on the instance as a whole because they do not trust the mods here. When questioned why it always ends up being Jordan or someone like FlyingSquid who was basically Jordan 2.0. There was so much shit happening behind the scenes with that dude with him actively torpedoing friendships left right and center. He started to crash out hard because no one was supporting him anymore. Yet people still support Jordan and I have no idea why. My only assumption is just his state of health. He's not in the best shape and the only thing I can think is that no one wanted to rock the boat with him to add extra stress on him going through something massive but doing that is also an enormous disservice to the people on Lemmy. And I do mean Lemmy as his behavior makes us all look bad. I've tried to get someone recently on reddit to move to Lemmy and their argument was that they will not because the mods here are worse than the mods on reddit. When I asked for an example, they linked me to Jordan. I even found a comment out in the wild saying to not join Lemmy because of Jordan and when I contacted them to ask if I could add their comment to this post they ended up deleting it and their whole account.

Jordan is incapable of sustaining impartiality, is incapable of accepting fault, is incapable of accepting any viewpoint different than his own, is incapable of learning anything new, is racist, is transphobic, supports Zionism and abuses his position at the drop of a hat. He does not meet the basic qualifications of a reddit moderator, never mind ones of a Lemmy user. The fact that he is the face of multiple enormous communities while routinely doing these things means that the entirety of Lemmy.world looks bad. But because Lemmy.world is also one of the biggest instances and one that often a lot of people end up falling to first, he also ends up being the face of All of Lemmy Moderation.

I'm actively calling for him to be removed from any and all moderator positions. He has proven time and time again for months that he is not capable of holding these positions in a way that treats the platform, the users and even himself with respect. Also going to say here and now that I'm seriously considering leaving Lemmy.world and going elsewhere and this is playing a big part in that. I post so much because I like adding to a community I enjoy being a part of. A community that I can be proud to be a part of.

I don't have much in the run of pride right now.

313 comments

  • JL banned me from worldnews for reporting a Gaza Genocide denier; his justification was that, because he makes an exception to the rule against genocide denial for Gaza genocide deniers, me reporting them was uncivil and against the rules. They also banned my from politics for "misinformation" because I said Kamala Harris supported Israel.

  • Thanks for this investigation. You're a good man, and thorough

  • I'm one of the people who refuses to engage with any .world communities because my comments kept mysteriously disappearing (without any trace in the modlog) for the crime of holding Leninist views. I historically blamed PugJesus for this but this admin bot thing with JordanLund makes so much more sense (PJ is a bad faith moderator but historically their shit has shown up in the modlog)

  • Hey mom look I'm famous.

  • I like the way he just. Never replies to people after he's said something. It's like he really thinks every rebuttal of his is a mic drop that doesn't need further defending.

  • Thank you for this comprehensive write up. I've seen the name thrown around and run into them in the wild a few times, but never knew about any of this. This is revolting.

  • God, even his user profile is cringe inducing, with the custom "lemmy.world community moderator" images. He's made this his entire identity. His profile banner literally says "chaotic good, the right thing, the wrong way". Him being correct is his priority above all else.

    Someone with that profile should not be a moderator for anything.

    And then you add all of his behavior to the mix.. why is he still a mod on any community?

  • Given the answers, it doesn't seem like JL is actually reading any replies to his comments ever. Either that or he's incapable of digesting any new ideas.

  • we have started looking into reports about jordan a few days ago, and we have already identified several occasions where he has been acting in ways that we don't consider to be acceptable for a member of our community team. it may still take us a few more days to come to final conclusions for how we will proceed with this, as this is something that needs time for a proper review and discussions within the team. we all have lives outside of lemmy, where we need and want to spend our time, and something like this takes hours to properly review.

    one of the things we have already discussed will be establishing an internal CoC for community team members and people higher up in the team, which includes ensuring that we keep a certain level of professionalism in our interactions, even if another party doesn't. we're obviously all humans, but that doesn't mean we don't have responsibility for our actions, especially if it's not a one-off thing. we will also consider if this may be something to establish for community moderators in general, but for now our primary focus is on people in positions above a regular user or moderator.

  • While this post is not technically following the rules of this comm, it is absolutely within the spirit of this comm which is meant to speak truth to power. Just saying before anyone bring this up.

    J.L. is a massive PTB. In fact he's such a PTB he could have easily been the icon for this comm :D

  • Thank you for bringing up the transphobia. For the vast majority of trans people, it causes us a lot of mental harm to read through that awfulness. That's a big part of why Blahaj is so strict about it with moderation, it's a shield to protect its users, who mostly would rather miss out on some good interactions than deal with any transphobic psychic damage.

    Part of all this is that we rely on allies to let us know when someone has been transphobic. It keeps us safe from that psychic damage, and is an important way to show us that you care about our existence. So accusing someone of it, either negligently or deliberately, directly to a trans person, is a huge violation of that trust. Using that accusation as a bludgeon against someone you don't like is pawbably the worst thing you could do to a trans person, outside of being directly transphobic yourself. And you're right, it makes you transphobic when you do it.

    • Of course. It's intolerable in every meaning of the word. I think one of the first memes I posted to Lemmy, at least the first non-Trek meme, was one of the meatball from Aqua Teen Hunger Force saying "Respect my trans homies or I'll change your pronouns to was/were". I've also been accused of being transphobic, falsely, in the past and it deeply hurt me and pissed me off. Granted it was from a known troll user who was banned from nearly every instance so no one believed it but it still enraged me. Seeing Jordan do the same thing to someone else is abhorrent. Watching him then gaslight you into saying he was talking about someone else is jaw dropping.

  • @ruud@lemmy.world this guy is the current face of your instance. Is this how you want to present yourselves?

  • I’m still incredulous about how much time he spent during that stupid MBFC bot saga insisting that The Guardian was actually a rag that can’t be trusted. Like, I have my issues with The Guardian (so many issues), but pretending they aren’t a paper on par with something like the NYT is either bullheadedness or America-centric ignorance.

    Dude tried to snidely tell someone else that a different paper (I don’t remember which one) needed significant evidence to criticize it as untrustworthy, because it was a Newspaper of Record, and linked to the Simple Wikipedia page for that concept (really, dude?)… which listed The Guardian as an example.

    That cracked me up, honestly. I don’t want to get into the nasty ways I’ve seen him react to being told a comment is bigoted if he doesn’t think it is. Bro can’t cope with being told other people don’t agree with him and aren’t going to change their minds, so it seems like his go to response is to insult and bait them into doing it back so he can delete their comments/ban them.

  • I've had him tagged "dork of a mod" since that whole "journalists can't publish their own writing or they're not credible" thread that you referenced near the end.

  • Wow yeah, I've seen a lot of Jordan's posts on here and I'm sure if I looked I've had an argument with him at some point, but I had no idea about the article or the admin bot. If your response to BLM boils down to "what about black on black crime" I don't think you should have mod or admin power here.

    • Completely agree. Any single one of these things in this post is disqualifying if you take it alone. Together? Wow.

  • Oh hai thar.

    Dunno why this didn't pop up in my mentions, but hey, what can ya do.

    In regards to my interaction with jordanlund, I actually did contact the head admin of .world, Ruud, as promised. I received an affirmative response, stating "...someone moderating on .world should represent the rules and values of the instance," and that "this doesn't sound like he does," though this far there doesn't seem to have been anything visibly done. Of course, I can't comment on things happening behind the scenes.

    And I may have missed this in the main content of your post, but it's also worth noting that, in the midst of his accusations of transphobia, PrincessNorah found evidence of transphobic behavior in Jordan's modlog.

    Edit: yes I missed it lol

    • Dunno why this didn’t pop up in my mentions, but hey, what can ya do.

      I believe people mentioned in the body of a post don't get pinged. Comments work, but posts don't.

      And holy shit Jordan. Zionist, removes people who call him out, hates black people, and trans people. God damn, these is the dude .world has defended for years.

  • Thanks Stamets. I greatly appreciate the deep dive. There have been many posts about him here, but as you called out they were mostly from people still actively incensed from recent interaction with him, or they were written in a way that seemed to expect significant familiarity with him or his previous actions. It made it easy to dismiss them out of hand. This lays it out in a way that is accessible to people not already informed about him.

    Hopefully this results in some change. This is concerning behavior and statements for any mod, and especially so for a mod of such popular/flagship/public-facing communities.

    • I just kept seeing posts about him over and over again but I couldn't really tell what was going on. This post was me slowly realizing what type of user he is and then feeling a compelling urge to package this all together in a way that isn't just people being angry and easy to dismiss.

  • Damn, that's a long post. I'll have a deeper look later, but thank you already for writing it.

  • im personally very close friends with jordan and i can assure everyone this is unfounded slander

    i didnt read this but i assume its about that he voted for hillary but he has in fact since apologized to the community

  • re the Jordan transphobia ban, I had made a post about this a while ago when it happened, which was how I found out about the discord bot. absolutely incredible that anyone would use discord as the organizing medium for something like this. Just baffling to me that moderation was being delegated via discord, often with no record of what the removals even are. it seems to have just enabled petty and retaliatory behavior flying under the radar.

  • whoa, one of those was mine. Just pretty new here, didn't know about all this history. To be fair, we had a perfectly courteous exchange. That being said, if there are significant years of complaints, we all know that means it needs to be corrected.

    https://lemmy.world/post/35643362/19281817

  • Firstly, I read all of your posts in Anthony Rapp/Paul Stamet's voice with his superiority tone.

    Secondly my only real interactions with Jordan have been in small communities like comicbooks, or the stuff that is posted here. I appreciate your deep dive though.

    • Firstly, I read all of your posts in Anthony Rapp/Paul Stamet’s voice with his superiority tone.

      God... they do come off that arrogant don't they? lmao

      Thank you <3

  • I am sort of of two minds about this. I really dislike this type of expansive witch hunt against some particular big name mod which is a frequent Lemmy occurrence (which for some reason always includes the accusation that they're a "Zionist" whether or not it is true). I've stuck up for JordanLund in the past. However, I will say that I think his judgement as a mod and style of interpersonal interaction on Lemmy is really bad. This list includes a bunch of pretty fair examples, you can actually see a brief conversation between me and him in one of them which goes about the way that a lot of conversations with him go. Thanks to Stamets for doing all the homework to dig up detailed examples and discuss them, it's clear you put a ton of sincere factual effort into putting this together.

    I think a vital question is what the moderation on the big lemmy.world communities should look like. My impression is that there is some significant fuckery afoot (a distinct tendency to deliberately run cover for troll/propaganda accounts for example), and I don't really think Jordan is behind it, although there is a habit of shoving him to the front to take the blame for it when it happens. I feel like there's going to be kind of a shortage of people willing to go through the daily struggle and effort of being a mod of a super-busy community, which not only makes it hard for the mods to take time and patience to make great decisions 100% of the time, but also opens the door for people who are motivated to abuse the position and makes it harder to justify getting rid of them once they're in place.

    • I think a vital question is what the moderation on the big lemmy.world communities should look like.

      Not that.

      I don't really think Jordan is behind it

      All of it? No. But a significant portion? Yes. Moreover, he's the face of a lot of this moderation and what other people are going to look for as a template.

      There is a habit of shoving him to the front to take the blame for it when it happens

      Absolutely and wholeheartedly reject this concept. He brings himself into the threads and argues with everyone insisting that what he did was right. He both admits to his behavior and doubles down constantly.

      I feel like there’s going to be kind of a shortage of people willing to go through the daily struggle and effort of being a mod of a super-busy community, which not only makes it hard for the mods to take time and patience to make great decisions 100% of the time, but also opens the door for people who are motivated to abuse the position and makes it harder to justify getting rid of them once they’re in place.

      So we should not remove an abusive moderator because good moderators are going to not want to join because they're going to worry about being kicked out but it somehow makes it easier for more abusive mods? That's effectively what you're arguing here and not a suggestion that holds any weight at all.

      • All of it? No. But a significant portion? Yes.

        So what I'm talking about is things like setting it up so UniversalMonk gets to stay around for far longer than the community feels he should be, and then people are getting mod sanctions for getting in slapfights with him. That's a much bigger problem than just one mod being a dickhead in some kind of user interaction. My impression, and maybe I'm wrong, is that Jordan didn't set the policy in that case, he was just the face of putting it into practice. Honestly maybe I'm wrong in that. But I do feel like for a community of the size of lemmy.world, we should be able to find out specifically who is responsible for decisions like that, and be able to talk with them. Whether or not Jordan is around, there's still a massive problem in the moderation if decisions like that can kind of drift into codification silently, without anyone really being the one who decides to try to justify it.

        You're saying that Jordan decided all on his own to step forward and justify it, which is on him, which is 100% fair also, and I agree on that score. Also, him being a dickhead in user interactions sometimes is still a problem, regardless of anything else that's going on.

        (Honestly in general I just don't think that the "lords and peasants" model of moderators vs. ordinary users is a good one, I think a lot of issues like this are pretty inevitable under that model. I actually like Bluesky's user-driven and voluntary moderation model much better. But that is a separate discussion.)

        Moreover, he's the face of a lot of this moderation

        He brings himself into the threads and argues with everyone insisting that what he did was right. He both admits to his behavior and doubles down constantly.

        Yeah. Not being able to admit error is a really bad trait in someone with a lot of responsibility. That's not his only sin but it is a big one.

        All I'm saying is that I think there is moderation on lemmy.world that is openly malicious, from a clique of moderators whose names you hear much less often, and I've observed on Reddit this process of sort of knocking out moderators who are guilty of something-or-other to pave the way for the quietly malicious moderation. I've seen it happen on Lemmy to a couple of moderators who I liked a lot more than I like Jordan. I think looking at the whole picture and what the end state is going to be is valuable here, whether or not that picture includes Jordan specifically.

        So we should not remove an abusive moderator because good moderators are going to not want to join because they're going to worry about being kicked out but it somehow makes it easier for more abusive mods?

        No, that's not what I'm saying at all.

        I don't really have an opinion on removing Jordan. I'm just offering my agreement with you that his judgement and way of interacting are often pretty bad. That's the factual basis, and then what people do after that can be up to their decision.

        Mostly what I'm trying to add to that is that I think keeping in mind the end state and what we do want things to look like is a good idea. That can help with taking the factual basis into a concrete decision... it's sometimes not a good idea to jump from "this person is objectively a problem in these specific ways" to "get rid of this person and things will be better" without modeling out what the future state is going to be and specifically what a good solution would look like.

  • This thread is going to be fun to watch!

    As someone who’s been the target of witch hunts myself, I don’t think anyone should be “banned from all of Lemmy.”

    I also wanna say that it kinda feels a bit icky that someone would put this much effort into “researching” a person they don’t like on Lemmy, even if it’s @JordanLund@lemmy.world EDIT: After reading the thread and seeing more examples of his behavior, I don't feel that icky about it anymore.

    I think everyone needs to take Lemmy way less seriously. You all act like posts here are world-changing shit. You all need to go outside more.

    Anyways, fuck .world. I vote this is PTB!! haha

  • I'll keep beating this drum until the situation changes: the best solution is to block .world and move on. I've done so, and I have zero shortage of interesting content to look at or places to discuss $topic. And anyway, it's not healthy for one instance to have too many users or too many communities. The point of federation is to spread out, so the network is resilient to problems.

    • Blocking an entire instance because of one crappy redditesque powermod means he wins.

      • Ding ding ding.

        That's why this "I don't interact with .world" at all bothers me so much. I get if you've got problems with administration but if it's seriously just the moderation of a couple of communities that is forcing you wipe out the whole thing and leave then you're... sort of part of the problem. I made this post because I didn't want to be on an instance with this kind of behavior. Could I have left instantly and went to another instance as admin buddies keep recommending I do to join theirs? Sure. Might I leave and go to another instance? Oh 100% if Jordan just gets a slap on the wrist. But I had to at least try something. I did my part in trying to make the community a better place. How the community responds details to me on whether or not I leave.

    • You do you, but I think blocking a whole instance because of some bad mods is an overreaction. Particularly when that is the largest one on lemmy. Getting bad mods identified and removed would fix it for you and everyone else, without needing to sacrifice access to a lot of quality content and conversations.

      Also, finding lemmy.world moderation to be intolerable but continuing to post regularly to lemmy.ml makes me doubt your judgement.

    • Cool.

      Here's the thing though.

      I'm not a defeatist who is willing to just go "Well it's fucked, let's move on." I'd like to actually try instead of just giving up at the first sign of trouble and writing it all off. So... no. The best solution is not to block and move on. It might be for you because you are unwilling to attempt and try and fix it but it's not the best for me or universally.

      The point of federation is to spread out, so the network is resilient to problems

      Yes. But the point is also not to let cancer fester so it can spread elsewhere but be aware of it and take care of it. I'm not about to lop off a fucking arm because the fingernail has a fungal infection.

      • That's fine, clearly what goes on on .world is important to you. I'm just here to use the platform and not find myself drowning in the results of shitty moderation on there, nor in comments from people who quit reddit 2 weeks ago and haven't fully detoxed yet.

        The sum total of all that mess, for me, is that I have no interest in contributing to communities on .world, so I block the instance. And when Lemmy 1.x ships and allows me to block comment threads from .world users, I'll transfer my one community that I mod to an account which doesn't block .world, and block comments from the instance on my personal account as well.

        I only started using Lemmy in earnest recently and I'm not emotionally invested. It sort of supports your point that something needs to change, given that it took me only a few weeks of active use to determine .world was enough of a mess that I was willing to "cut off an arm," for what I perceive less like a hangnail and more like gangrene.

        But yes, it's not just poor moderation. I also don't like reddit ass comments from reddit ass users, and I do things like block the bsky bridge on microblog fedi for reasons which include both the stink it brings and an idelogical commitment to not boost content from there on fedi. Everybody has their own way of doing things, people who believe my way is full of shit, or that they want to participate in positive change on .world, shouldn't block it. I'm just here to enjoy my time and share/discuss interesting links, and exposing myself to .world would detract from that aim more than it furthers it.

      1. I'm back in the big-name LW communities now since I semi-moved to Piefed, and I don't like it. There's always an incredible amount of stupidness, in addition to often some pretty bad moderation. I used to just avoid them because the experience is almost always better in the smaller communities. Lemmy.world itself is fine, a small community there is really no different than a smaller community on most servers, but the big popular ones are nigh unbearable, there are always shouty people with just really bad opinions.
      2. I do feel like there's value in not ceding the ground. Lemmy.world is bad because when Lemmy gets big, it gets bad, because its moderation model isn't sustainable without a significant amount of pain. I don't know what the answer is, but somebody should solve it if Lemmy is ever going to grow much beyond its current size or it's going to get exponentially worse.

  • Whew! Home stretch, and we're back to the very first thing I talked about here:

    Next up? Zionism. He has repeatedly removed posts that are critical of Israel or pro-Palestinian and that's fairly well documented.

    The Pro-Palestinian contingent on World is VERY active and VERY angry with good reason. Unfortunately they often make rule breaking posts that have to be removed.

    They aren't removed for being Pro-Palestinian, they're removed for a variety of reasons, Youtube video links, image posts, Twitter, and blog posts.

    But these two posts stand out to me as particularly obscene. One such example is his patented refusal to ever address proof to the contrary. He listed a source as being antisemitic while using the justification of a Zionist source.

    That post wasn't removed for Zionism, that post was removed for being a Substack Blog. We don't allow blogsites. Full stop. The response was the typical whining "But, but, Dropsite is legitimate news!" and my response as always is "Don't care, no blog sites."

    Why? Blog sites have no accountability. Anyone, literally anyone, can set up a blog site. Just like anyone can post on Twitter, or Facebook, or upload to YouTube.

    Yeah, we don't allow any of those sites EITHER. CNN might have a very good Twitter post, that's going to get removed too. ABC on Facebook? Hell no.

    As a mod, I'm not going to engage in a debate over "But, but, you allowed THAT Facebook/Twitter/Substack post, why not miiiiiiiiine?" (and Jesus, THAT conversation happens way too often as it is when we miss a post that should have been removed but either got missed or was never reported.)

    When given a litany of Israel critical cartoons but none that are actively antisemitic, he refused to engage. Honestly the entire post also demonstrates a shocking amount of logic that isn't outright Zionist but dancing around the edges and leaving the outline of one.

    Honestly not sure what you're saying here? I refused to remove cartoons critical of Israel and... that... somehow means I'm Zionist? Or Zionist adjacent? 🤔

    Wouldn't removing them make me a Zionist? I dunno, I've been up for 17 hours now maybe I'm misreading what you're saying here.

    Anyway... That's pretty much it for me tonight. Whew! That was a LOT! I'm going to need to bookmark these the next time this stuff comes up. "Here, read this."

    • Your behavior in these comments throughout this thread have honestly been just as bad, if not worse, than the entire post I made in the first place. You disqualified yourself over, and over, and over and over again. You behave like a petulant child who is incapable of admitting fault. You lash out at everyone and openly admit to trolling other users and punching back when you should act like an adult and get over it. You will lie about things that are directly linked either in an attempt to gaslight other users into buying your story or because you've genuinely deluded yourself. Admins are in this very thread openly contradicting you and questioning whether or not you are fit for a moderator position but your arrogance and dismissive attitude has only proven every single one of us correct.

      You belong on reddit. Not lemmy.

      I'm done with you. You're an embarrassment and one so low on the totem pole that I'm kinda done leaning down to speak to. I have no respect for you. Only disdain. And that's the last thing you'll ever hear me speak to you directly.

    • You did not help your case whatsoever, so sharing these in the future will make you look even worse. Congrats, I guess?

    • It's only a news site if it uses a custom CMS. Otherwise it's just a sparkling blog.

    • The Pro-Palestinian contingent on World is VERY active and VERY angry with good reason. Unfortunately they often make rule breaking posts that have to be removed.

      That rule being "don't sass the pro-genocide contingent."

      • That rule being "don't advocate violence" which is something Lemmy is all too fond of, Pro-Palestinian or otherwise.

    • So you wander in off All, which is one of my biggest pet peeves on here, into a trans community, you paid no mind to which community you were actually in and spouted off in what should have been a conversation by and for trans people, ignoring community rules, and you shared a vid from a known transphobe. All of this bullshit about Drag is ignoring that so much of the conversation was that even if Drag is a troll, Drag's pronouns should be respected anyway. It was the worst conversation you could have gotten involved in as a clueless cis person.

      NEEDS actual alternate pronouns for legitimate mental health reasons.

      Jesus fucking Christ dude. There's no charitable way to interpret this. This is heavily into the medicalization of trans people as written and very much a "trans people are mentally ill" statement, and even if you claim you "worded it poorly" you're still saying "there are true trans people and fakers, and I, a cis person, get to decide which is which, and who should get their pronouns respected or not" which is also a gatekeeping argument in line with historic abuses of trans people. Fuck right off with this shit.

      (Is Drag a troll? IDK. Drag probably needs therapy either way, and it's easy to either respect Drag's pronouns or block Drag. All of this discourse is just letting transphobes go mask off on neopronouns in general which is part of why Blahaj went with the rules they did.)

    • You accused me of being transphobic because I refused to use drag's preferred pronouns after drag's treatment of other trans people on Lemmy, which resulted in me being banned from Blahaj.

      I want to be clear, it was absolutely wrong of me to do that, and I accept that and have not contested the ban because it was clear misgendering, and I should not have denied a trans person the right to be referred to by whatever pronouns that person chooses. Even IF drag is absolutely a shitty person.

      Of the two of us, I've admitted my wrongdoing and accepted responsibility for my actions. Drag did not deserve that. But Jordan, you clearly do not think your actions were transphobic, even though you did the exact same thing. So if I'm transphobic, why aren't you?

      I've committed myself to being better in the future, perhaps you can do a little introspection and likewise make that commitment.

      • Because, buddy. Jordan is a special boy who can do no wrong. It's that shrimple.

      • Of the two of us, I’ve admitted my wrongdoing and accepted responsibility for my actions. Drag did not deserve that. But Jordan, you clearly do not think your actions were transphobic, even though you did the exact same thing. So if I’m transphobic, why aren’t you?

        An extremely valid point. Jordan?

    • Brilliant that you were banned as transphobic due to drag drama and deny the accusation, and yet claim one of our users is transphobic for being banned for having a similar opinion to you on drag. Your hypocrisy knows no bounds.

      • I appreciate you, db0, but I think I have a moral obligation to say that what I did was absolutely transphobic. I did actively misgender drag. While I may have thought at the time that drag deserved it, it doesn't change the fact that I denied drag the same rights I would have given to any other trans person. And that wasn't right, because I don't get to decide who gets to be referred to by their chosen pronouns. My ban from Blahaj was absolutely deserved.

        In the time since, I've thankfully been made aware of my problematic behavior by the people who care about me, and I've come to realize how my actions were wrong and make trans people unsafe. They were right to call me out, because there isn't a good excuse for what I did. I take full responsibility for it, and while apologetic that I ever stooped so low, I make no excuses. I did something transphobic. I can't go back and change what I did, but I can make sure I don't do something shitty like that again.

    • Your opinion is your own. They may be a troll. They may not. But the rules are there for you to follow, not for you to ignore whenever you please. The fact that you seem to believe that you are able to ignore rules like neopronoun usage on a community because you disagree with the person and think they're a troll demonstrates extremely concerning behavior. It shows that you're willing to say transphobic things as long as you believe the person is a troll. This is not tolerable. Whether or not they are is completely irrelevant. You refused to follow the rules and instead refused to follow the neopronouns. A rule that was put in place because other people seeing other users misgender people or use the wrong pronouns feels kinda gross. They may not have the context that you or I do. Your behavior is unacceptable.

      I also refuse to believe that you saw a Matt Walsh video, a dude who plasters his face and name on everything, and did not know what you were grabbing. Especially when you refused to engage with the rules and seemed to be actively trolling another user. Trolling another user by using transphobic behavior. Kind of suggests to me that you're willing to do transphobic things to trans people you don't agree with or have labeled a troll in your own mind.

      Then there's also the fact that you lied about whether or not someone else was transphobic, attempting to start a witchhunt with zero evidence. When pressed on that fact you then tried to gaslight a trans woman about who you were actually talking to. Something that was easily disproven in that very thread and that you were, in fact, gas lighting.

      In a fair and just world, anyone who makes a mockery of trans issues, whether it’s dragons, demons, or attack helicopters, should end up in a rogersimon10 reddit comment.

      Then you should end up in a rogersimon10 reddit comment, whatever the fuck that means. You continually prove that you're incapable of admitting fault and keep gaslighting/lying. You are not qualified to be a moderator.

  • This is a news article about him. The whole thing is essentially about how he as a white man is surprised to find out there are negative feelings about Portland. Negative feelings about Portland and Oregon being extremely white and racist.

    News article is probably too strong a term. The local NPR affiliate asked for people who had stories about race.

    So I told this true story:

    This is, oh, 30 years ago or so now. I had a job that involved commuting back and forth between Portland and Chicago (eh, not really Chicago, but if I said "Schaumberg" and "Hoffman Estates", you wouldn't know what I was talking about).

    So I was in a cab and the cabbie was chatting away. It comes up that I'm from Portland.

    "Portland, huh, you don't have much trouble with black people there, do you?"

    Literally the first thing out of his mouth. And I'm more than a little surprised. Is this the first thing people think when they hear "Portland"? Pre-Portlandia, so I guess we have that going for us now. Even odds it's "put a bird on it" now.

    So I laughed it off... "No, you know, I know both of them and they're good people."

    So I called NPR and told that story on their recorder and they came out and interviewed me. I know, I was surprised too!

    “I think Portland had a variety of problems. Race is definitely one of them, yes. But I don’t know that we could classify it as the most important problem. if you look at the homeless situation, there’s definitely an income inequality problem, a mental health problem. there are a whole lot of more pressing problems besides race.”

    The thing you have to understand is that the Chicago cabby wasn't 100% wrong. Portland is LILLY-fucking white. It's more diverse now than it was 30 years ago, but when I say "more diverse" I mean 67% white, back then it was probably 75%? More? I don't have those stats handy.

    When you have a population that is 67% a monoculture (not entirely accurate, there's a significant 1st generation Eastern European community) race is NOT the issue here that it is elsewhere.

    There are SUPER ugly reasons for it too. I won't trouble you with the history lesson, you can Google it if you want. Specifically how as a state Oregon was founded on the idea that black people couldn't own land or the whole history of Vanport.

    And despite his politics, he struggles to find sympathy or kinship with the Black Lives Matter marchers who occasionally disrupt his commute home to protest police violence. “I do pay attention to them. I think primarily as somebody who works in downtown we tend to be aware of things like that more because of the disruption it causes. I don’t think the disruption they do is particularly productive. It takes people who would ordinarily be on their side and go, why are they doing this to us? The Portland Police didn’t shoot anybody recently that I’m aware of. If they want to be productive in their protests, they should go to where these events are happening.”

    This man was just met with the fact that his place is known for being racist and xenophobic and his first instinctual response was “Go protest elsewhere.”

    Yup. Because Portland protestors are, by and large, morons "the common clay of the new West."

    Protesting here is interesting, people will protest for any and all reasons or no reason at all. But when the city turned upside down for George Floyd, a horrible event that had fuck all to do with Portland, all they did was a whole lot of nothing.

    The problem was this, during the day you had the BLM protests, largely a bunch of white people virtue signalling, "look at me! I'm doing something!" But when the sun went down, black block took over the protest. Largely a bunch of angry white anarchist kids, mostly not even from here, who only wanted to break shit and set fires. Look up the vandalism directed at the Oregon Historical Society as an example.

    But all in all, the protests from both BLM and Black Block, did nothing. Portland became a punchline on Fox News and for Trump. He opened an illegal operation here where people were literally being black bagged off the streets by federal agents.

    They COULD have done something effective, like protest where the crimes committed by shitty cops were actually happening. They did not. And continue being ineffective.

    You know all those 50501 protests? Portland LOVES that shit. Do you honestly think Trump is going to go "Well, if PORTLAND is protesting..." LOL. Back under George H.W. Bush (not W., his DAD) he called Portland "Little Beirut" because of the constant protests.

    dismissing a right to protest so you can get somewhere faster. Moreover, a protest to make people aware of a problem with racism.

    We KNOW. That's why I have a problem with protests in Portland. They are preaching to the choir here.

    What I want to see are EFFECTIVE protests, and that's not what Portland does. It's hard as West Coasters because, from a national media perspective, if it didn't happen on the East coast it might as well have never happened.

    You want to do another million man march and shut down D.C.? Man, GO FOR IT. I think the last time we approached that (not counting January 6th) was the womens march with all the knit hats? That one was awesome.

    A bunch of white liberals in Portland patting themselves on the back for being white liberals? For Instagram views? We don't need that.

    Next comment.

    • The problem was this, during the day you had the BLM protests, largely a bunch of white people virtue signalling, "look at me! I'm doing something!" But when the sun went down, black block took over the protest. Largely a bunch of angry white anarchist kids, mostly not even from here, who only wanted to break shit and set fires. Look up the vandalism directed at the Oregon Historical Society as an example.

      But all in all, the protests from both BLM and Black Block, did nothing. Portland became a punchline on Fox News and for Trump. He opened an illegal operation here where people were literally being black bagged off the streets by federal agents.

      My guy, the 2020 BLM protests were some of the biggest progress that got made on actual people's issues this century. Did you not notice that after four high-profile killing in one year, and those massive walls of names, no bodycams, tepid reform, repeated riots in individual cities after a fucked-up incident that wasn't defensible, all of a sudden the big walls of names dried up (or had some kind of reason, the kid actually did have a gun or something) starting in 2021?

      Your assessment that the crowds of people chanting in Portland had nothing to do with that doesn't mean it had nothing to do with it. What's your assessment of what happened that brought such an intense reduction in police brutality nationwide during that one year? Or do you not think that happened?

      You want to do another million man march and shut down D.C.? Man, GO FOR IT. I think the last time we approached that (not counting January 6th) was the womens march with all the knit hats? That one was awesome.

      A bunch of white liberals in Portland patting themselves on the back for being white liberals? For Instagram views? We don't need that.

      The women's march was a few hundred thousand people in DC, and 3 million worldwide. BLM was somewhere from 18 to 26 million in total in the US, and produced concrete change to one of America's absolutely urgent problems. I don't think most people here care about the pussy hats or the awesome.

    • I'm too white to really weigh in here but this just stinks of racism. It sounds like a lot of dismissal of POC because Portland is white despite you knowing that Portland is white. A lot of 'protest elsewhere'. I'm also not as familiar with Portland as other people. So I cannot weigh in on this comment specifically and will leave it up to people who actually can speak to this.

      • As a white foreign portlander his comment just reads to me like some Grandpa Simpson nonsense.

        the city turned upside down for George Floyd, a horrible event that had fuck all to do with Portland

        This comment is one of many that show he doesn't know what he's talking about, but he's gonna keep talking about it anyway.

        The city didn't turn upside, there was protest that took up a block or two. Downtown got slightly deader than it already was because of covid and not having anything good except Powell's.

        The BLM protests here had everything to do with Portland and the cancer that is the PPB - our police department. Their chronic systemic issues and their brutal response and tactics.

        He shows no understanding of how protests work in general or what the actual situation and issues were here but he still knows what would've made the protests EFFECTIVE.

      • Oregon began as a whites only state that's getting presented as 'oh it's just like that, we don't have those problems with racism here because it's a monoculture'

  • Now, let us focus on something in that Discord server.

    There have been comments floating about with screenshots saying that Jordan has access to a bot that has admin abilities. I can confirm this. I do not know whether he still has access to it but he did for at least a year. How do I know this? Because I did as well. 

    Yup, still have access to it. For the longest time it really didn't work that's unfair. It worked poorly. Lots of times it would do nothing, some times it would work. Other times it would just error out.

    I just found out the other day when we were dealing with the Dwazou ban evading accounts that it was working again and it was really somewhat helpful shutting that down. The ban worked, the remove content? Not so much.

    I used it again a few days ago when someone was posting, I shit you not, neon sign spam. LOL. Does Lemmy have a significant audience for "neon signs for your man cave"? Somebody thought so.

    But really I only use it when a) it's super obvious like you and I had with our stalkers, or b) (like the Dwazou and neon crap) there's entirely too much of it to remove manually.

    The reason I prefer manual removal is the same reason I don't like the "Remove Content" checkbox when banning a user, it doesn't seem to correctly populate the modlog. If I'm removing someone for cause, I want that documented. It helps everyone going forward to see "Ok, yeah, this guy was making Nazi comments".

    But if we're talking about 40 posts hawking neon signs? Yeah, nobody needs to see that. Modlog or not. I don't know if that's a bug with "remove content" or intentional design.

    • But really I only use it when a) it’s super obvious like you and I had with our stalkers

      Just your comments alone in this thread have proven you are not trustworthy with this. I saw you use it against harassers, sure, but now I don't know whether those people were actually harassing you or whether you were just throwing a hissyfit. That's the issue here. Once again, you're throwing up a ton of mud to try and blind when the issue is not the bot but that you cannot be trusted with such power and it should be immediately removed from your power. You are a liar. If you are lying about things we can openly prove then the assumption naturally would be that you're lying about everything else as well.

      I eagerly await your next lie.

      • You didn't seriously expect him to ever admit they banned someone just because they could, right? 😁

      • I can't make you believe anything, so there's no point trying. I promised you an honest response to what is, in effect, a lengthy diatribe, I did so. If you can't accept that, then there's nothing more to say.

  • (Whew) Ok, that's better, back at it...

    Months ago on /c/World, Jordan Lund was talking about the media fact checking bot. He claimed that he would be removed if he removed the bot. That the moderators serve at pleasure of the Admins and they would just replace him. This is directly at odds with an Admin then immediately saying that it wasn’t true.

    This also demonstrates that he is not willing to take any criticism or pushback at all on things that he agrees with and would rather push that blame onto someone else to avoid it himself. Now how do I know he was actively for this? Because in the Discord channel when the bot was made and announced, Jordan was literally the first person to respond and say that he was down with this. Something I verified from two different sources and by seeing it with my own eyes.

    As you say "moderators serve at the pleasure of the admins" and also the top mod of whatever community they have been added to.

    It is not my "job" to second guess the Admins. They run the show, full stop. So when an Admin puts a lot of work and creates a bot, I'm not going to tell them "Hey, don't do that."

    Specifically, with the MBFC bot, yeah, I thought, and still think, it's a good idea. Was it perfect? Well, no, but it was the best we could do for free. Or free-ish, TBH I'm not sure if there were fees involved in the API use. I can tell you the alternates I looked at were more money than I personally would pay.

    The alternative is manually checking every site, especially those that get reported. In most cases we'd see a report of something like "This is a propaganda site!" and the MBFC bot was right there marking it "Questionable". Easy peasy, get that crap out of here.

    The real problem was with small, new, or niche sites. I remember once a report in World that a particular site just "didn't look right". And, yeah, it looked SUPER janky. Like Geocities 1998 janky. But the reporting at first pass LOOKED solid (this was before all the AI nonsense going on now).

    The bot knew nothing about it. Nobody did, it was kind of a cipher. I initially allowed it based on 2 things, the reporting appeared accurate, and it was for part of the world that was under-represented news wise, Africa.

    Then we found out the reason the news looked legit was it was just a copy/paste from other legitimate news orgs without attribution. Yeah, removed.

    But when the complaints on the bot came in, I told people honestly "Hey, I'm open, what's an alternative?"

    At best the response was silence, at worst it was angry noises. So we put it up to a vote and got the bot gone.

    Next comment:

    • It is not my "job" to second guess the Admins. They run the show, full stop. So when an Admin puts a lot of work and creates a bot, I'm not going to tell them "Hey, don't do that."

      Accurately communicating up what the community's reaction to some policy is, is part of your role as a moderator. Or, it should be. Except in extreme authoritarian structures (which I do not think lemmy.world is), one person can be "in charge" of the whole endeavor but it is still permitted to disagree with them about things, or point out when something they did is causing a problem, because there's not a single person on earth for which every single thing they do is a rousing success with no problems in its first iteration.

      I think you actually had a lot to do, ultimately, with wasting the work they put into the bot, because stubbornly refusing to address the community's widespread concerns with it transformed the issue from "okay the first version wasn't right but with the new behavior we actually think it's tolerable" into "we fucking hate the bot please get rid of it and stop just constantly assuring us it's actually a really good thing and we don't understand as if we are children."

      Specifically, with the MBFC bot, yeah, I thought, and still think, it's a good idea. Was it perfect? Well, no, but it was the best we could do for free. Or free-ish, TBH I'm not sure if there were fees involved in the API use. I can tell you the alternates I looked at were more money than I personally would pay.

      But when the complaints on the bot came in, I told people honestly "Hey, I'm open, what's an alternative?"

      At best the response was silence, at worst it was angry noises. So we put it up to a vote and got the bot gone.

      Man... I literally had a conversation with you way back when where I offered, and then followed through and delivered, a replacement for the bot that used the Wikipedia reliable sources list, which unlike the MBFC list is not a bunch of shit. It would have also been free, and fixed at least some of the issues that led people to hate the bot. (I can't speak for anyone else, but the very poor quality of its decisions about sources was probably the main reason I didn't like it.) I offered to make it a drop-in API replacement, and that wasn't wanted, so I redid it to work locally and handed over the code. I literally gave you a free alternative that was objectively better. I don't think my work on it was ever deployed, although there was a sort of halfhearted attempt to add some links to Wikipedia to the bot which didn't seem to use my code, and shortly after, the MBFC bot was disabled (and honestly at that point it was probably a lost cause already).

      Do you really not remember that whole thing that happened? I can probably dig up the code still. Do you want me to send it again, would that help refresh the memory? I mean it's fine, I didn't really expect it to get used TBH. I was curious whether the lemmy.world people were actually interested in a solution, or if that whole thing which you just repeated here today was just a lame excuse. Turned out it was an excuse, and you're out here repeating it now.

      You also said that if you tried to remove the bot, admins would refuse and you would just be replaced as a moderator. When other people finally talked to the admins on your behalf, the reaction was more or less "oh yeah it's fine if you don't want it" and then it was removed. The same thing had happened in !news@lemmy.world previously, which I'm pretty sure I pointed out to you (which counterpoint you ignored). Do you not remember this happening? Can you not grasp that that kind of thing is going to have an impact on whether or not people want you in the role of moderator?

      Honestly man I'm not trying to dogpile on with people here criticizing you, but you cannot be in a role of responsibility if you're interacting this way. To me this is worse that the various misdemeanors people are listing out about some individual moderation decision. My main issue is it seems like you just have a strong disrespect for people in the community a lot of the time. Not seeming to hear someone's explanation or assistance with something, and just reverting to your previous explanation as if it hadn't happened, or just falling abruptly silent in the conversation when someone calls you out on something and abandoning the thread pretending it hadn't happened, or giving explanations which are very transparently not the accurate explanation, makes it seem like you think they're just a NPC and you're trying to get through the dialog tree and shut them up so you can go back to whatever you wanted to do that's more relevant than them. You cannot be in a trusted role in the community and do stuff like that.

      Or, I mean, you can, I guess, for as long as the admins are okay with it. You are free to do whatever you like, and I don't agree with some of the criticism that some people have leveled at you, but this kind of disrespect for the people in the community you're partly responsible for is definitely going to make them not want you in that role.

    • It is not my “job” to second guess the Admins.

      You approved of the bot. You were the first to jump on the bot when it was suggested in the Discord server. Literally the first to respond with the words "Looks solid to me!" Moreover, the link in the post openly demonstrates an admin responding and saying they do not understand why you ever thought that the Admins would remove you. You have been told already by the admins that your reasoning is false and faulty. You are seriously going to publicly double down and move the blame to them after @Rooki@lemmy.world had said that the ball was entirely in your court and always was?

      You continue to gaslight and lie about things that are provably false as well as double down on shifting all blame towards Admins instead of taking any responsibility.

      Once again, you continue to demonstrate that you are unfit to hold any position as a moderator and should not only have your modship removed but at this point should be banned from lemmy.world for lying about Admins.

      These multiple comments of yours seem to be designed to try and drown out the complaint with your own false reasoning. Try to muddy the waters so it's hard to tell what the original complaint was. Problem is that I grew up in a very rural area and playing in mud was a passtime. You throwing up all this crap doesn't do anything other than show you don't have a shield. You're just hoping to blind.

      • Specifically, with the MBFC bot, yeah, I thought, and still think, it's a good idea.

      Ewww. You really need to just step away from modding, and just be a normal Lemmy poster. You're in too deep.

  • Next we shall focus on him gaslighting and lying to or about everyone. Including the Admins of LW.

    A few days ago, Jordan accused someone of being transphobic, homophobic, violent and racist on YePowerTrippingBastards. Both the person themselves as well as another user looked into those accusations. There were no demonstrations of that behavior.

    As I stated in that thread, modlog says otherwise.

    https://lemmy.world/modlog?page=1&actionType=All&userId=11119076

    Specifically:

    The response I got was "Hey, that's not necessarily homophobia/transphobia" and my internal reaction was "Are you shitting me?" my external reply stands. "Tell that to someone being misgendered."

    I want to add here, this is EXACTLY the kind of user that makes YPTB impossible to take seriously and why I tend to be less than kind to YPTB users. Is it fair to paint everyone with a broad brush? No. But when you see over and over again:

    "kill yourself", harrassment, personal attack, harrassment, harrassment, harrassment...

    But it's all there in the log, you can read it yourself. These are the people hanging out here and the people other perfectly innocent people are choosing to hang out with.

    Super hungry, grabbing food and I'll be back for more...

    • Motherfucker you did way worse and posted a Matt Walsh video about it on top! How is this transphobia but your behaviour isn't? Holy shit your blatant hypocrisy blows my mind.

    • As I stated in that thread, modlog says otherwise.

      And he continues to gaslight by linking to Cryptagion after specifically calling out Ganbat instead in the past. You know, as that specific part your responding to explicitly said. That's the part where you tried to gaslight a trans woman.

      You have once again proven an inability to accept fault and admit when you've made a mistake. This is disqualifying for a moderator. You do not deserve to hold your position.

      Take your time. I'm watching Doctor Who with a buddy while we laugh at your desperate scrambling.

    • Hey look you're gaslighting again! Please point out to anything Cryptagion has said that is transphobic! We can point out to your transphobia, so where's Cyptagion's?

      I want to add here, this is EXACTLY the kind of user that makes YPTB impossible to take seriously and why I tend to be less than kind to YPTB users.

      So you think having your bad faith, smug assholery documented is ironic? Or is it like a big joke to you? Would you just like people to ignore your history and habits?

      But it’s all there in the log, you can read it yourself. These are the people hanging out here and the people other perfectly innocent people are choosing to hang out with.

      If you can link them, I think the mods/admins of db0 will remove and ban them. They have before for users of even our instance in other communities.

  • Here's another example of an entire thread showing he isn't fit. If you want more just look at his profile or search his name on basically any community.

    This entire thread

    That thread? Really? You have no idea what that was all about.

    @Bonus@piefed.social made a post that broke the rules of the community. I quite politely explained that it was removable, why, and told them how to fix it. @Zaktor@sopuli.xyz then interjected themselves when the issue was all but resolved, decided to be an asshole, said it was an example of bad moderation, etc. etc. The usual attack, attack, attack. And it wasn't even their post!

    OP fixed their post and actually apologized to me for having to put up with Zaktors bullshit and there was no harm done. Surprise! Zaktor turns up in YPTB and I was pointed here by the very same user who was moderated and corrected their post.

    Next comment.

  • But I did mention earlier that we'd get back to this so let us. Jordan has demonstrated time and time again that he looks for a fight, actively enjoys trolling, and wants to be as antagonistic as humanly possible. There are times he's summoned into YPTB with an @ but other times he isn't. Honestly I don't want to go through each and everyone of these showing that this is shitty, troll-like and antagonistic behavior.

    Do not mistake refusing to back down from a fight with seeking out a fight. It doesn't take an @ to bring me here. More often than not someone sends me a PM along the lines of "You seeing this shit?" and honestly, I don't unless someone links me to it as was the case with this post.

    TPTB has this idea that mods in general (and me specifically) are no lifers just looking for excuses to fuck with people. I can't speak for other mods, but that's not the case for me.

    I clear the mod queue, and in my idle browsing of the groups I moderate, I remove content I come across organically. I might see a post clearly showing "youtube.com" or some other obviously bad domain and go "Well, fuck, that has to go."

    Hilariously, just the other day an established user, @TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world posted a video to Politics and I had to reply in the effect of "Dude, you know better than that!"

    There was no drama there, they got their links and communities mixed up, eh, it happens.

    But I'm not stalking communities or users looking for people saying shit about me, or trying to find ways to fuck with people. You might not believe it, but I do have better things to do.

    Moderating is a lot like pruning in that respect. In another week or so it's time to go out and brutally hack down my roses so they can grow back in the spring, my wife hates seeing the de-nuded rose stumps and yells at me EVERY YEAR, but it's necessary.

    Next comment:

    • Why the fuck does a moderator need to fight?

      • That is actually a GREAT question... I haven't fully gone through this whole thread yet, but as a sample, welcome to YPTB!

        "I never expected a genuine answer from him."

        "a racist, zionist, liar, who uses his power tools to silence dissent."

        "Jordy is fucking cunt."

        "Zionist, removes people who call him out, hates black people, and trans people."

        "Your behavior in these comments throughout this thread have honestly been just as bad, if not worse, than the entire post"

        "You behave like a petulant child who is incapable of admitting fault."

        "You will lie about things that are directly linked either in an attempt to gaslight other users into buying your story or because you've genuinely deluded yourself."

        "You're an embarrassment and one so low on the totem pole that I'm kinda done leaning down to speak to."

        "but this just stinks of racism."

        "You are a liar. If you are lying about things we can openly prove then the assumption naturally would be that you're lying about everything else as well."

        "I eagerly await your next lie."

        "If you ever feel pointless, remember that you're not JordanLund."

    • Do not mistake refusing to back down from a fight with seeking out a fight. It doesn’t take an @ to bring me here. More often than not someone sends me a PM along the lines of “You seeing this shit?” and honestly, I don’t unless someone links me to it as was the case with this post.

      So to you, you are a fighter instead of the referee. If the referee started punching Mike Tyson, the game is suddenly over as we need a new ref who won't start shit.

      Mask off moment, you're not a moderator, you're a fighter who banishes those he can't beat.

    • Do not mistake refusing to back down from a fight with seeking out a fight.

      You are a moderator. Your job is not to fight but to be above it and the referee. You are proving yourself, over and over again, as utterly unqualified for this position and a disgrace to Lemmy as a whole.

      TPTB has this idea that mods in general (and me specifically) are no lifers just looking for excuses to fuck with people.

      My idea is that you repeatedly harass users, go to multiple threads to start shit and are actively antagonistic. Something you literally just admitted to.

      But I’m not stalking communities or users looking for people saying shit about me, or trying to find ways to fuck with people. You might not believe it, but I do have better things to do.

      You're right. I don't believe it.

      Waiting for the next comment.

      • I'm not a mod in YPTB and yes, I treat a hostile audience with open hostility. I don't expect anything else here. It's the nature of this audience.

        Just from reading down the thread so far, most of these are you, so much for an unbiased take:

        "I never expected a genuine answer from him."

        "a racist, zionist, liar, who uses his power tools to silence dissent."

        "Jordy is fucking cunt."

        "Zionist, removes people who call him out, hates black people, and trans people."

        "Your behavior in these comments throughout this thread have honestly been just as bad, if not worse, than the entire post"

        "You behave like a petulant child who is incapable of admitting fault."

        "You will lie about things that are directly linked either in an attempt to gaslight other users into buying your story or because you've genuinely deluded yourself."

        "You're an embarrassment and one so low on the totem pole that I'm kinda done leaning down to speak to."

        "but this just stinks of racism."

        "You are a liar. If you are lying about things we can openly prove then the assumption naturally would be that you're lying about everything else as well."

        "I eagerly await your next lie."

        "If you ever feel pointless, remember that you're not JordanLund."

  • But let us take a look at some of the actions he has taken, shall we?

    A few months ago a Canadian used a Canadian term in referencing Canadian politics and a Canadian Government. Jordan Lund, an American, misunderstood what was being said. Instead of asking for clarification, the post was instantly removed with the logic of "Misinformation".

    Jesus, this thing AGAIN. What this involved was someone being overly pedantic about the definition of "Member of Government" was.

    They, innacurately, were claiming that an elected official, who is a member of the Canadian Parliament, didn't count as a "Member of Government".

    I attempted to talk them down, explained that, as a matter of fact that person IS an elected official, is able to cast votes, and that does, in fact make them a "Member of Government".

    They doubled down, with the idea that even though they are elected and can vote, they don't count as a member of government because they aren't part of the ruling party.

    Which is utter and complete nonsense. They are getting a government paycheck, they are a "member of government."

    To use an American example, the Democrats are completely and utterly castrated. They can't do anything, they can't present anything, and they don't have the numbers to actually stop anything, but they're still all members of government, with official positions, official staff, official offices, and very official paychecks.

    So, yeah, I removed comments claiming an elected official was not a member of government as misinformation.

    Next comment:

    • They, innacurately, were claiming that an elected official, who is a member of the Canadian Parliament, didn’t count as a “Member of Government”.

      Hi. I'm Canadian. You're wrong. People have been telling you have been wrong this entire time. You refuse to accept this reality. You are now doubling down AGAIN. Your ignorance over Canadian parliamentary terms is not a reflection of reality.

      A Member of Parliament and a Member of Government are two different terms. They are not the same. Your definition is wrong. They are a member of government, true. They are not a Member of Government. We are not being pedantic in using terms about the Canadian government in reference to the Canadian Govenment. You are being an arrogant American and insisting that your lack of information on the matter was reality. It is not. You are an ignorant American. You know nothing about our government and you are provably wrong in this case. That is why this "again". To you it is eye rolling because you keep screaming that you are right when you just aren't.

      This will not go away until you admit fault because you are wrong.

      You are incapable of being impartial, accepting fault and accepting new information. This is disqualifying you as a moderator.

      Waiting for next comment.

      Edit: Just saw the comment of a LW admin saying they spoke to you about this Canadian thing and told you it was unacceptable. But you're still doubling down?

      You must be removed immediately. You are lying in the exact same thread as an admin who is proving you wrong. Your behavior is fucking repugnant.

      Edit 2: Sidenote but I hate you with a passion that is impossible to accurate describe right now. You are telling multiple Canadians we are wrong about our government. You aren't much different than a Fox News host at this point. You are arrogant and ignorant. You know absolutely nothing and watching you lose everything on here will bring me joy that I also will be unable to describe.

      • So if I understand correctly, a "Member of Government" is a special term you use that means the ruling party?

      • I just quoted a LW admin contradicting that position in another comment. This is really something.

  • The job of a moderator is to apply the rules in an unbiased fashion. To read the rules, interpret them if needed and then carry them out. Personal influence is not supposed to be a part of it. You're supposed to treat it like a position of authority and respect, to respect the position and not abuse it.

    Agreed, and I would add one more thing that is my own personal take. Moderation should be done publicly. One of the things that chapped my ass about Reddit was the silent moderation. Locked threads, shadow bans, etc. etc. etc.

    I knew going in that putting a public face on moderation was going to make me a target. I'm OK with that, and I'd rather be a target than have people come into a thread full of:

    deleted

    deleted
    deleted
    deleted

    Don't get me wrong, the modlog is GREAT. But someone encountering a deleted thread or a locked post or what have you shouldn't HAVE to go to the modlog to get that information.

    Jordan has not had this realization despite numerous people pointing this out to him. Instead he will say stuff like... (cites removed they won't quote well here)

    I always consider the audience, and, unfortunately, when it comes to YPTB my default position is "dismissed with a subtle jerking off motion."

    Am I overly flippant here? Absolutely. Most complaints about me here come from users with incredibly vile content in their modlogs and I give them all the respect they are due which is to say "none whatsoever".

    Someone is saying mean things about me and their modlog reveals calls for violence, "kill yourself", racism, homophobia, etc. etc. etc.? No, I'm not spending time debating them or defending myself against them, they can fuck right off.

    That being said, when people ask me directly either in public or in PMs "Hey, why did you do what you did?" I give them honest answers. They may not LIKE those answers, but they get them.

    Now, let's temporarily ignore the fact that he went into YPTP to actively antagonize and harass multiple users

    I don't seek out YPTP, I got namechecked, small difference. Same with this post, someone pointed me to it so here I am. For the most part, I don't pay attention to what happens here.

    He's saying that if you don't antagonize him then he won't antagonize you. That it is "fair fucking game" to increase harassment of a user if one harasses him. This is a repugnant and troll-like mindset at the best of times but in the hands of a moderator it is genuinely dangerous.

    I refuse to stand by and be bullied. Just because I'm a mod does not give anyone free reign to attack me, and certainly not to attack me for doing an unpaid gig that's cleaning crap out of communities.

    The best negative comment I see frequently is "you're a fucking janitor!" and I'm like "Yeah, that's fair." But you honest to god don't want to see what happens if the janitors aren't doing the job.

    I'm not going to respond to vile and hateful comments with "Oh, please sir, you aren't being very nice. Please don't try to hurt my feelings." You deal with bullies directly and with force, it's the only thing they understand.

    Next comment:

    • I’m not going to respond to vile and hateful comments with “Oh, please sir, you aren’t being very nice. Please don’t try to hurt my feelings.” You deal with bullies directly and with force, it’s the only thing they understand.

      No. You act like an adult, ignore them and move on. You engaging with the bullies and actively trolling them on another community has proven you incapable of being the mature one in the situation. You engage and drag it on further. That one line alone proves that you aren't capable of handling the job as a moderator. The rest of this comment is just deflection or excuses.

      Waiting for the next one.

  • Right, OK, one 12 hour day later, let's do this.

    Here's my plan, I don't want to write a novel, and that would make commenting tough because all y'all would be tripping all over yourselves as a single thread bounces from topic to topic.

    So I'm taking Stamets post one piece at a time and making top level comments for each piece.

    If I seem to go radio silent, it's because I'm reading, writing, formatting, etc. I likely won't reply individually until I'm done going through the whole thing. Stamets put a lot of work into this and it deserves a decent reply. If I stop to reply as comments come in, I'll never finish the thing.

    NGL, I might sneak in a dinner break too.

  • Just speaking personally here.

    First, I don't have time to review all of this right now. It might take me a full day or more. Not that I'm a huge authority in the scope of LW, but I do want to say a bit early.

    I've had some issues with the way Jordan has handled things, absolutely. I've talked to him privately about those, and I'm still not particularly happy about those.

    But setting that aside for now, some of this post goes too far. Not liking protests that block traffic in Portland doesn't make you racist. That article you linked doesn't make him racist.

    If that one claim in this wall of text is wrong, it certainly shades the rest of it. Some is wrong and some is right. Parsing that out is going to take some effort and time. I'd encourage people to not take too much of this at face value. It's going to take a lot of consideration, and a more thoughtful response is going to take some time.

    • The article maybe but I thought his defense of it was pretty ignorant. Maybe not racist in the “black people inherently have less worth than white people” sense but in the “I don’t understand the problems you face and therefore I dismiss them” sense, absolutely.

      That said, I’m not sure I agree someone’s personal political views should be disqualifying from being a mod. The vast majority of people, maybe even everyone, has bad takes on some issues. If this is disqualifying then everyone is disqualified.

      The real question is do these views unduly influence your moderation? Are you able to mod in a relatively impartial manner despite your views? The behavior that speaks to that question is what matters. I didn’t see any mod actions suggesting anti-black racism listed here, but maybe with respect to Israel?

      I think the post would be better to stick to mod actions specifically, and address JL’s behavior and views only where it connects to that. This isn’t a place to put someone on trial for wrongthink, it’s a place to address abuses of power.

      • The article maybe but I thought his defense of it was pretty ignorant. Maybe not racist in the “black people inherently have less worth than white people” sense but in the “I don’t understand the problems you face and therefore I dismiss them” sense, absolutely.

        This

        I think the post would be better to stick to mod actions specifically, and address JL’s behavior and views only where it connects to that. This isn’t a place to put someone on trial for wrongthink, it’s a place to address abuses of power.

        This is a fair and valid point. The reason why I added it last was because it was in addition to everything else. Mostly as an informing factor towards other moderation behavior that may be addressed elsewhere. Like I said, I didn't add every offense to this post. I'd have been here for days. But demonstration of a consistent pattern is important to locking in an actual problem. Moreover, by acting on his own as a user in certain cases and not as a moderator he lost that umbrella of protection.

        I wasn't just addressing him as a moderator but him as a user as well which is why I referenced stuff like him being banned or removed from other communities for being transphobic. Technically no moderator action that I could see from him was actively transphobic. However I do feel like having a transphobic user as the face of moderation is going to make trans people feel really shitty. By the same token, I feel that it's going to make people who aren't white feel really shitty to have a racist moderator as the face of the community.

        Personally I agree overall. However in this case the two were intertwined on deeper levels.

    • If that one claim in this wall of text is wrong

      But it isn't. That's the problem. As LibertyLizard said, and as I said above, racism is not just loud. It's also quiet and subtle.

      Also... not sure how I feel about someone openly admitting they haven't read/reviewed all of the information and then instantly forming "issues" with it. Like... maybe don't do that?

  • This is going to require a more thoughtful response than I can give rignt now as it's coming right at the start of my actual paying work day, but I'll have something to say on it later today.

    I will say now the complaints of zionism are absolutely horse shit.

    The problem in World is there is a LOT of infringing content that happens to be pro-Palestinian. It's not removed because it's pro-Palestinian, it's removed for being hate speech, calls to violence, etc. etc.

    It's the nature of the World audience to be anti-Israel (and rightly so!) so when those comments go off the rails calling for Jewish executions and what not, yeah, I'm going to remove them and I'm not going to feel bad about removing them.

    Here's a good example just from today:

    https://lemmy.world/post/36003575

    If there were a significant number of pro-Israel posts calling for genocide, those would be removed too, but they just don't happen that often. If I were to pull a number out of my ass I'd say 20:1? 30:1? Pro-Palestinian vs. Pro-Israel?

    There are actually more actionable items being Pro-Russia in Ukraine or Pro-China with the Uyghur genocide than there are Pro-Israel.

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