Quadruple moderation is killing Lemmy. It’s a gift to Reddit
There’s a rule about online communities I want people here to understand: the 90-9-1 rule.
Roughly 90% lurk, 9% comment, and 1% create.
Additionally - lemmy monthly active users is stangant at about 35k monthly active and not improving:
https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/stats
When I first got to Lemmy, I had trouble finding enough content I was interested in even commenting on. So I figured: why complain about the lack of content when one can start posting it myself?
That’s why I post so much.
If people don’t post, most Lemmy communities simply don’t have enough creators to sustain themselves. You need posts before lurkers can lurk, commenters can comment, and some of those people eventually become creators themselves.
I’m not posting just to flood Lemmy. I’m trying to help solve one of Lemmy’s biggest problems: not enough content creators.
And frankly, doing that has been a nightmare.
Lemmy has a quadruple-moderation problem
Every active content creator has to survive four layers:
- Community moderators can remove your posts or ban you from the community.
- Your home-instance admins can ban your entire account.
- Receiving-instance admins can block/ban you for everyone on their instance, even though you don’t belong to it.
- Public moderation history means those decisions follow you. One moderator’s decision can influence another and snowball into more moderation.
For prolific content creators, that’s brutal.
I’ve had multiple accounts banned over one or two posts that somebody didn’t like. Months of posting, comments, engagement and contributions can effectively disappear from a community because of a couple of moderation decisions.
And the more you contribute, the worse the odds become. If you make hundreds or thousands of posts, eventually you’re going to post something that one moderator somewhere doesn’t like.
You don’t need one moderation team to tolerate you. You need multiple independent moderators and admins, across multiple servers, to remain aligned indefinitely.
There’s almost no cost to deleting a creator
This is another major difference from Reddit.
There is generally no financial investment in a Lemmy community’s content. A volunteer moderator can ban someone who contributed months of posts and comments and lose all of that person’s past and future contributions without losing revenue, salary or investment. Did you know all creator posts are wiped out from lemmy after account banned?
The creator paid the cost in time.
The community loses the content.
The users lose something to read and discuss.
And the moderator who pushed the button may personally lose essentially nothing.
So who benefits from making prolific content creation this difficult?
Because it certainly isn’t Lemmy.
And this creates an enormous attack surface
I genuinely have trouble believing that everyone complaining about prolific posters simply doesn’t understand this dynamic. At some point I have to question whether some of it is deliberate.
If I were Reddit and wanted to undermine a federated competitor, this is exactly where I’d attack it: its content creators.
You don’t need to hack Lemmy. You don’t need to DDoS instances. You don’t need to take anything offline.
Lemmy already provides the mechanism.
Report prolific contributors. Call their posting “spam.” accuse them of being bots. Point moderators toward their public moderation histories. Get one account banned somewhere, then let that decision influence moderators elsewhere.
Eventually the creator gets tired of fighting and leaves.
I’m not claiming I have proof Reddit is doing this. I’m saying Lemmy’s architecture makes this kind of subversion ridiculously easy, and Reddit would be an obvious beneficiary.
Reddit doesn’t have this same federated quadruple-jeopardy problem. You’re primarily dealing with the moderation of the subreddit you’re contributing to.
Lemmy desperately needs more people creating content, yet its moderation structure makes life progressively harder for the people who create the most of it.
At some point we should be asking:
Who actually benefits from that?
A plea to admins: protect your creators ban reddit agents instead
Before banning someone, look at who is contributing and who is reporting.
If an account with zero posts in years reports someone who has contributed hundreds of posts, don’t treat those two users as equally valuable to the health of the community.
That doesn’t put creators above the rules. Remove bad posts. Warn people. Moderate proportionally.
But stop throwing away months of content and future contributions over one or two posts someone disliked.
Creating content takes time. Reporting takes seconds.
Protect the people actually building your communities.
edit: I am reposting from reddit - there is no rules against that. its actually great thing for majority of lemmy users!
This reposting tool is open source - i’ve never been hiding the fact im reposting from reddit.
people get only high quality pre-dozed, pre-moderated content.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/lemmy-deep-lighthouse/
I think more people should be using similar tools and populate lemmy with content. - htis is the only way to move that 35k mau number and creat conditions for more OC on lemmy
edit 2 " but we dont want content" argument.
The fuck you dont. who the fuck is we?
And this is why I don’t buy the argument that the people still here represent what users want.
Look at the numbers.
- Fediverse: ~14 million registered, ~1.17 million MAU.
- Lemmy: ~756,000 registered, ~35,000 MAU.
Lemmy has had three quarters of a million accounts created and only about 4.6% of that number is active monthly.
Obviously that doesn’t mean 95% were all regular users who quit. But it does tell us something important: the people currently active are a tiny, self-selected fraction of everyone who has tried this platform.
So when 30 existing users say “WE don’t want more content,” you’re hearing from the people the current system successfully retained. You’re not hearing from the enormous number of people who tried Lemmy and aren’t here anymore.
Maybe instead of assuming the remaining users have figured out what Lemmy should be, we should be asking why so many people tried it and didn’t stick around.
Because you’re assuming more users necessarily means lower-quality content, and I don’t accept that premise.
What does Lemmy gain from millions of users? More commenters, more communities, more developers, more donations, more instance operators, and most importantly, more people eventually creating genuinely native Lemmy content.
You can’t demand a thriving organic content ecosystem while simultaneously being hostile to the growth required to create one.
And Reddit content isn’t automatically “low quality” because it appeared on Reddit. Reddit contains garbage and excellent content. The entire point of curation is separating the two.
we can have both -reddit content and best organic lemmy content, but we have to grow lemmy first
btw u have 0 posts. why are you not posting?
I don’t start threads because I prefer to engage in conversations that are already happening. Writing a thoughtful, contextual reply takes infinitely more human effort than running a script that copy-pastes a Reddit headline.
We don’t need millions of users spamming Reddit leftovers to attract ‘native content’. If new users show up and find out that 80% of their feed is Reddit reposts, they won’t see it as a good place to stay, they will see it as a sort of RSS feed to Reddit. And if they want to engage with Reddit’s original content, they will go back to Reddit and discuss it there.
You say Reddit has excellent content and we just need to curate it, but your actions show the exact opposite… You clearly don’t ask yourself (and neither does your automation script) if what you’re about to repost is relevant to that specific community, or if it will add any value. And when the community admins stop you from spamming useless or valueless ‘content’, actually curating stuff, you get frustrated.
And no, I never said more users means lower quality content. I’m saying more activity is not the same as higher quality. These are two completely different statements. And no one is saying they don’t want more content either (as you mentioned in quotation marks in your edit to OP). What I (and many others here) am saying is that we don’t necessarily want more content, we want good content. Why is that so hard for you to understand?
I understand the distinction. We disagree on what counts as “good content.”
You’re assuming that because something came from Reddit and was submitted automatically, it’s inherently lower value. I’m not.
And again, this isn’t a copy-paste script blindly mirroring Reddit. There are multiple layers of curation: score thresholds, freshness limits, duplicate detection, community-specific rules, content filtering, and AI evaluation. Relevance to the specific community is literally one of the things being evaluated.
Could that filtering make mistakes? Absolutely. So can a human moderator or someone manually choosing posts. If particular posts are bad, downvote them, remove them, or tell me the filtering needs adjustment. That’s useful feedback.
But there’s also a chicken-and-egg problem with “I prefer conversations that are already happening.” Someone has to start those conversations. If most users prefer commenting rather than submitting, where are all those conversations supposed to come from?
That’s the 90-9-1 problem I’ve been talking about. Most people consume, fewer comment, and very few actually submit content.
And the results matter. Lemmy has hundreds of thousands of registered accounts, yet only tens of thousands are monthly active, and many communities remain nearly empty. We can’t simultaneously say “people prefer joining existing conversations” and then treat supplying things for them to discuss as inherently harmful.
I’m completely open to arguing about quality, volume, thresholds, or relevance. Those can all be improved.
What I reject is the idea that automated = spam and manually submitted = good. Quality should be judged by the content, not by how many mouse clicks it took to submit it.
I think the main problem here, after all, is your ego. Despite your accounts and “your” “content” being deleted by different administrators of different Lemmy communities, and despite the community itself, in this very thread, telling you’re wrong, you still act as if we all are a vocal minority of machiavellian Reddit secret agents working to destroy Lemmy.
It’s not an honest debate if you’re not ready to actually listen to criticism and do some self reflection. If all you do is to repeat these same severely flawed arguments over and over, then talking to you is like beating our head against a brick wall… it will do no good.
But I have listened to criticism. I’ve said volume is fair criticism, filtering can make mistakes, thresholds can be adjusted, and when someone pointed out the OC-label issue, I immediately agreed and said I’d fix it.
Listening doesn’t mean I have to agree with you afterward.
And this thread isn’t a representative survey of Lemmy users. It’s a self-selected group of people with strong opinions, while hundreds of thousands of people created Lemmy accounts and aren’t active anymore. We don’t get to hear why most of them left.
You can call that ego. I call it disagreeing with you.
And I’ve never said everyone criticizing me is a Reddit agent. Reddit absolutely has employees, contractors, PR people, marketers, automated systems, and other people acting in its interests. Whether any particular account here is connected to Reddit is another question entirely.
Maybe it’s Reddit. Maybe Twitter/X. Maybe Facebook. Or, gasp, Russian and Chinese influence operations. The internet isn’t exactly famous for being free of coordinated manipulation.
My point is that Lemmy’s structure makes this kind of manipulation incredibly easy. Public moderation histories, reports, fragmented moderation, and a tiny creator base give anyone trying to sow division plenty of leverage.
That doesn’t mean everyone disagreeing with me is an agent. It means pretending coordinated influence operations don’t exist on social media would be incredibly naive.
Removed by mod
you dont have a standing. contribute then you can say something
Removed by mod
jerkface 0 posts, user for 3 years