I fully support the sentiment, but as others have noted, calling out genai specifically is a bit limiting.

I would potentially propose something more to protect our other comms at the same time that might potentially get brigaded; IE: piracy

"Off topic comments and downvote trolling to protest the spirit of our communities for contentious topics will not be permitted."

Just my thoughts. Cover butts here if a change is made anyway since many of the core vibes of db0 are fairly contentious to begin with.

I love dbzer0 because it’s a pro-piracy, leftist instance with great moderation and a sizable userbase. I just sort of try my best to ignore the whole AI thing, not my cup of tea with the whole power consumption and art theft stuff. I’m all for “fuck copyright” when it comes to big corporations but I become a bit of a hypocrite when it comes to independent creators’ works being used to train AI models without their permission. I dunno, all of this has been said before by a thousand other people, you get the gist.

The issue I have is similar to the Nazi bar problem; If you have an AI-friendly community, you have an AI community. You can keep ignoring and blocking AI-posting users as they show up, but it’s easier to generate an image than to assemble one manually, so they keep showing up more and more. It becomes nigh impossible to “just ignore AI posts.” It’s part of why people get so hostile towards them, if people don’t react negatively to AI posts when they see them, people will post more and more of them.

Of course, harassment and bullying is unjustifiable. It’s the internet; some folks are gonna take things too far. Makes me sad to see the effect being separated by screens can produce.

To summarize, I’m all for pro-AI users to have a space to exist (y’know, like, this instance. maybe I should start searching for a different instance? Like, dbzer0 sans AI?), but it is easier said than done to just “ignore AI” without more of it showing up.

I feel that this is already covered by the golden rules- namely "1. Don’t be shitty" and "6. When going to other communities, respect their and our rules" in the recent proposal.

The issue here is that certain comms affiliated with genai are being targeted by downvote brigades and trolls, yeah? I won't pretend to have the technical knowledge to provide a solution, but I would rather see efforts to generally combat that happening on /0, rather than carving out rules for targeted groups each time the issue arises.

To be clear, I'm not saying that genai users don't deserve a space where they can discuss their interest. I just don't think that carving out special protections is an actual solution to the problem.

downvote trolling

I think this needs some clarification about what does and does not warrant mod actions.

Comments are free-form, so are easy to determine as off topic and unlikely to hit bystanders, but downvotes don't communicate intent.

Anecdotally I have come across a post in a sub I like, found it glaringly annoying/ugly/wrong etc. downvoted, then seen another one and actually gone into the sub to see if it is a wider trend and specifically downvoted a bunch of these.
Lemmy is a rating system, I think this behavior is acceptable.

I would draw the line at coming back repeatedly to keep "filtering" in this way, while not otherwise being active in the community and while not being subscribed to it. (Not that being subscribed is even visible)

Is it possible to tell apart a lurker superhumanly good at finding genai really ugly, from the 15 downvote bots of an anti-genai brigadier?

Anti-GenAI users have plenty of platforms to share their views. Derailing discussions and brigading in other communities serves no purpose but to foster an adversarial relationship between communities.

I generally don’t like making a rule banning a viewpoint, but I don’t see what positive contribution that viewpoint adds in this specific context, especially when asserted so aggressively and off-topic.

Harassing a gen AI instance should certainly be blocked, but calling out ai art in a non ai focused instance should be allowed as long as it’s following other rules of not being shitty.

Disagree. Rule is too narrow- make it broader about brigading and not AI specific.

I personally say Aye. I think it's basically fair to have our rules enforced and stop trolls trying to stir the pot.

If people want spaces without AI, that's every other instance. This is a space where it's tolerated. And then get mad we tolerate it.

I'm for it. Outside of

I'm a car guy. I get that there is a fuckcars community and I respect their opinion. But if I modded a car community on an instance that was partially focused on downloading cars, I'd be pretty pissed if those folks started bashing on me and my friends just because I enjoy a hobby. It's pretty shitty behavior and if your goal is to make others feel shitty, you shouldn't be surprised when you feel shitty for receiving a ban.

Treat others how you want to be treated, or whatever.

I'm nota stranger to holding wildly unpopular opinions. I'm an egoist, it's in my nature. Personally, I think genAI is dumb. Harassing and abusing people for liking something is unacceptable behavior, though. I've been noticing most of my comments have been vote brigaded recently, especially my comment shitting on Dessalines.

I vote yea.

Fully support this decision. People who don't like AI should block the communities or the instance. They shouldn't come here complaining about it and they certainly shouldn't harass or attack other users. The brigading is also really bad. I've certainly seen it happen in my communities already. I sort of gave up on one of them because of it. I'd love to see more enforcement against this behavior and less tolerance of it. People need to understand that communities have the right to exist independent of their own opinions.

Personally, as an artist and also in regards to sustainability for example, I'm very AI-sceptic, but I get that this instance is pro AI, so I think it's a fair point. I can disagree but don't need to shove my opinion into dedicated AI communites/instances.

I'm just in for the other topics like foss and copylefts to name a few, if anyone wonders why I'm even here with my account.

I'm not a huge fan of AI art, but seeing how people go out their way to harass (not just spam downvoting, outright DMing and telling people to commit suicide because of it) something needs to be done, i agree.

It should be a more general rule imo. i.e.: if you don't like it, ignore it; type of stuff (excluding fash-shit) if i don't like piracy for example, instead of downvoting each post and commenting "piracy is theft" under each post i'd just fucking block the community.

Anyways, i think GenAI criticism should be allowed, and even healthy; but just saying "Don' like it." and contributing absolutely nothing to the conversation is just useless.

I don't really care about genAI or have any strong opinions but damn, that behavior is not okay at all... I really hope we go through with this change. I wouldn't want to see people like this continuing to behave in such a way here, makes it feel very unsafe or unwelcoming. God forbid I accidentally crosspost an AI meme from Reddit without knowing and get swarmed with hate and anger. That doesn't seem like something that should happen here, or anywhere at all really.

If an opinion from an interested third party that uses db0 communities a good bit is useful, here's mine. If it isn't useful, feel free to delete it, or I'll be glad to do so myself so that it isn't clogging up the mod log.

I'm actually in favor of the inclusion of the expansion of the existing policy of the instance, pretty much because of what you said. It just gums up comment sections with no purpose beyond people screeching at each other (mostly, there are some good conversations mixed in). The imagine instance has always been very tech oriented, and as you said already, it's been inclusive of generative tools from the beginning.

What's being suggested is just a clarification of existing policy, it isn't a new rule, imo.

Fwiw, to hopefully avert any disagreements on the matter here, I don't personally have a strong opinion about the use of generative tools by individuals for the kind of purposes that happen on lemmy. I do in other contexts, but that's off topic.

Again, I don't have an account on db0, mainly because I didn't feel I could always comport myself in line with the general intent of the instance. I just visit the communities there, be it actively or passively as a lurker.

I think, and maybe I'm wrong, but it seems to me that

• there are a lot of anti-genai users grinding axes
• copyright is bad
• liberals tend to support law enforcement (including copyright law)

BUT

• I don't think banning anti-genai discourse is good

I know that's not the proposal. I just think it need to be explicitly stated

Sounds like a good rule. Although maybe also having one or more community where arguing about AI is generally considered on topic, maybe similar idea to r/aiwars, would be good to avoid entirely shutting out that discussion.

I agree with implementing this rule.

I am for the rule change.

Gen AI is a great invention. That doesn't mean i cannot be critical of how it gets shoved into spaces where it doesn't belong, because a shitton of money get injected in it by venture capitalists in their neverending search for the next big thing.

But that's not what's happening here, where people are using (local) models to create images to enjoy and to be creative and not data centers wrongly answering inane questions.

The current models are snapshots of the current human culture, and should belong to all of us. i don't think it's fair to come here and behave like a drunk in a dive bar because they suddendly became friendly with rights holders (who have tried to fuck over single users downloading some shitty pop songs with life destroying lawsuits)

P.S.: I am a big piracy advocate, since i have been strapped for cash for my whole life and i would have been excluded from a lot of society and culture if it weren't for the pirate hat. I therefore understand that current models would have been prohibitively expensive to create when taking every single copyright claim into consideration. I also think that for future models there should be a mechanism to make sure that creators get their fair share and the possibility to opt out if they really do not want to be included.

I'm in favor of this change. This crowd of people are obviously entitled to their own opinions are objective fact and attack others who don't agree, or try to attack and suppress spaces which don't hold their beliefs. Hence the brigading. So I do believe we as an instance should take a stance against anti-AI trolling and the Anti-AI trolls that crawl Lemmy as aggressively as they do.

I vote to implement this change.

I agree with this rule. People who disagree with the usage of GenAI can do that, but they need to stop brigading and harassing unrelated content and communities. It’s also often seen on other websites, where Anti-AI posts (often very loosely related to the actual topic) get moved to the top of the community. I don’t accuse people of intentionally organizing and brigading, but websites with algorithms are just more likely to show these posts to anti-ai people if they interact with that type of content, even if the community is unrelated and they have literally never posted in it before.

We don’t need that here.

Aye

Thanks for making the post! I know that this is something that would've been best if acted on fast, but I appreciate that you're trying to involve the community.

Yesterday I was very anti-this, but then I saw the brigade happen, and I realized I was wrong. I've changed my opinion. The fuck ai community on here is pretty big, regularly hits all, and there's nothing antis love quite like finding the people they feel morally superior to, and 'punishing' them. Combine that with liberals loving virtue signalling instead of actually helping people who need it, and it's a shitstorm.

For anybody reading this who believes, as I do, that censorship is the evil, please keep in mind that it isn't censorship to protect marginalized groups, and on lemmy, people who admit to using or supporting gen ai are very much the minority. They deserve a space to be able to talk about it without getting hammered by people looking to start a fight over it.

I would prefer that rule apply to all communities about any topic-- trolling and screeching about something you disagree with that happens to be the subject of the community should not be tolerated. The subscribers of that community should not have to put up with it. Regardless of community.

I would agree to that.

Edit: clarifying that communities and topics don't break instance rules

I say yeah, it's the most sanity-inducing option to have both communities coexist.

I recommend a moderation bot for controversial communities that

• bans accounts who only downvote in the community after some number of downvotes if that account is active
• bans accounts immediately on downvote if they have zero post or comment activity over some window of time
• bans accounts immediately if they downvote posts and all comments in the posts. That's a strong signal they really don't like the community

I think this is an issue with the all feed. Controversial communities would be more peaceful if there was a tick box for "show posts on all feed"

Let me start by saying that I am in favour of the rule. Going into topics-centered community and voicing against that topic is kind of stupid, and everybody should be able to feel safe in their own spaces. All my concerns (generality of the rule, downvote trolling and automating moderation) were already voiced by others and addressed one by one. Also, as a practical suggestion, maybe we can have sticky posts in each community where the rule will be applied? Not forever, but for a set period of time.

I waited longer to give my answer, as I am very skeptical about AI in general but in favour of many other instance topics, and I wanted to form my own opinion on the topic at hand before commenting. I am really happy at the level of the discussion here and how the feedback was received by OP. I didn't agree with some comments on other posts leading to this one, but I am happy to see that the discussion was kept objective and on-point, so a huge thank to OP and everyone who participated for showing me how the instance governance and discussion works (I'm relatively new here).

In the end, while I don't go specifically go searching for AI content and barely see it in my feed, I am happy that stuff like AI-horde exist, and I really think it's a good way of doing things. And in general, the governance experiment here and the way this instance is managed is way more important for me than my own opinions on AI.

How are we defining downvote trolling? This is starting to sound like the rule changes at Reddit.

had I not had the sense to ban the droves of anti-AI trolls who come to downvote it into oblivion. They probably would be continuing to do so in insanely large volume.

Moderators have to deal with brigaders, trolls and other ne'er-do-wells on all sorts of communities, particularly communities dedicated to controversial subjects. If the moderators are banning these accounts, then the only remaining issue is downvotes. Downvotes are not your "score" in the game of social media. It's just a number. Why should admins be stepping in to try and dictate the meaningless numbers next to comments and submissions? This is an issue that should remain in the hands of the moderators.

If people don't support reddit warning people for upvoting Luigi posts, why should they support policing downvotes on this instance?