That part, not realizing the person is a problem, I get. I’m talking about banning the users arguing with them and deleting the requests for them to stop spamming, and leaving in place the spam and the cockeyed defenses of their spam.

A super-charitable reading could maybe say that this is an instance of lemmy.world mods believing that their role is “dictating to the community what’s right and wrong” instead of “getting a read of the community’s judgement of right and wrong, and implementing it.” And then, on top of that wrong interpretation of even why they’re in the role in the first place, they didn’t bother to take even a glance at the claims that were made about this user, just “herp derp it is 100% impossible that they might be spamming, therefore they’re not spamming, therefore this user complaining about spam is trying to break the Fediverse. Ban them! I fixed it now, I made things better.” But that just sounds like an insane conclusion for anyone who’s genuinely trying to help, ever to come to. Maybe I should be more generous to the volunteers but it just sounds really bizarre.

You hit it on the head. We weren’t aware of this user, as we had 0 reports about them until today.

I don’t see why Ghyste should have been punished here. Their comments were critical of the actions of Cat, and encouraged skepticism for their motives. Ghyste had inflammatory wording, but that doesn’t seem enough to warrant action. For the record I don’t think posting a bunch should be something that needs correction even if it does dominate a community 's feed, but complaining about one person driving discussion by themselves is certainly reasonable. If a decent portion of those posts do end up having problems like misleading headlines or bad sources, then maybe action should be taken, but that should be up to mods to judge. I’m more concerned that it sounds like they regularly delete accounts as soon as people start calling them out and pick it back up on a fresh one, since that sounds like ban evasion or legitimate bot activity.

Attacking the user for posting

Nobody was personally attacking the user. They were complaining about behavior. Then, when the user refused to change the behavior, they got understandably annoyed about it, but it still wasn’t really an attack. “The motives of an account with such activity should be questioned” is probably about as bad as it got, and I fully agree with that statement.

Again, they broke no rules

Politics used to have a guideline about the max rate of posting that was considered reasonable. I have no idea if they still do, but a “don’t spam random stories” guideline is pretty reasonable, whether or not it is written in the rules, and by any possible metric that someone would pick, this user is exceeding it.

People elsewhere in the comments have weighed in on the “spirit of the rules” difference between heavy intentional posting like the users you listed do, versus heavy random posting with explicit propaganda sprinkled in.

we received our first complaint about that account today.

You’ve actually removed stories posted by this user and then reported before, although it was for wrongness of headline. They’ve been getting a steady flow of reports for spamming over the last week or so as they’ve ramped it up, although I think this was the first time one hit your specific communities specifically for the offense of spamming. They frequently get reports for propaganda or other defects in their flood of stories.

I don’t think “have we seen reports about this person before” is a good metric. Had you received reports about Ghyste before you banned them? You didn’t seem to have a problem banning them.

There were a lot of people attacking that user, and a lot of reports on the comments attacking that user.

I can only see reports that were filed specifically against me (for the comments you removed). There were two reports on those ones, and they were both from the same person.

There were two reports for spam on this post alone, from two different people, as well as all the comments and votes about how it was a problem. They have enough of a steady flow of reports about them that there are always a few of them hanging out in my mod queue.

Why do the two reports from the same person represent more weight of mod decision than the two reports from different people + comments + votes?

Yes, I moderate, but I have a ton more going on in my life, so I’m not always on Lemmy to see what’s happening, and I do rely heavily on reports to find points of pain in the communities I moderate. I also rely heavily on the rest of the moderation team, as well the great tools that people like @[email protected] make.

Cool beans. Why did you rely more heavily on the reports for “attacking” by complaining about the spam, than you did about the reports for the spam?

You have a very interesting definition of personal attack. The one thing I said that was personal was “touch grass”, and that was in response to a smartass reply. Everything else stated was factual observation of their behavior.

I find it hard to believe that your entire mod team didn’t notice this account’s activity, and as Philip advised there have definitely been other reports. If any of your mods were paying any attention at all the sketchy sources were front and center in the community feed.

It would be daft to turn a blind eye to this and simply block anyone like this account. Hell, according to your own comments even with reports nothing would have been done since on the most technical level according to you no rules were broken. If you can’t read between the lines when accounts exhibit activity like this, Lemmy is going to turn into a propaganda spamverse.

In the end it’s your community/instance so you do you, but such attitude will not foster growth of the fediverse, especially with desirable users.