Moderation conflict involving c/vegan
Intro
We would like to address some of the points that have been raised by some of our users (and by one of our communities here on Lemmy.World) on /c/vegan regarding a recent post concerning vegan diets for cats. We understand that the vegan community here on Lemmy.World is rightfully upset with what has happened. In the following paragraphs we will do our best to respond to the major points that we've gleaned from the threads linked here.
Links
Actions in question
Admin removing comments discussing vegan cat food in a community they did not moderate.
The comments have been restored.
The comments were removed for violating our instance rule against animal abuse (https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/#11-attacks-on-users). Rooki is a cat owner himself and he was convinced that it was scientific consensus that cats cannot survive on a vegan diet. This originally justified the removal.
Even if one of our admins does not agree with what is posted, unless the content violates instance rules it should not be removed. This was the original justification for action.
Removing some moderators of the vegan community
Removed moderators have been reinstated.
This was in the first place a failure of communication. It should have been clearly communicated towards the moderators why a certain action was taken (instance rules) and that the reversal of that action would not be considered (during the original incident).
The correct way forward in this case would have been an appeal to the admin team, which would have been handled by someone other than the admin initially acting on this.
We generally discuss high impact actions among team before acting on them. This should especially be the case when there is no strong urgency on the act performed. Since this was only a moderator removal and not a ban, this should have been discussed among the team prior to action.
Going forward we have agreed, as a team, to discuss such actions first, to help prevent future conflict
Posting their own opposing comment and elevating its visibility
Moderators' and admins' comments are flagged with flare, which is okay and by design on Lemmy. But their comments are not forced above the comments of other users for the purpose of arguing a point.
These comments were not elevated to appear before any other users comments.
In addition, Rooki has since revised his comments to be more subjective and less reactive.
Community Responses
The removed comments presented balanced views on vegan cat food, citing scientific research supporting its feasibility if done properly.
Presenting scientifically backed peer reviewed studies is 100% allowed, and encouraged. While we understand anyone can cherry pick studies, if a individual can find a large amount of evidence for their case, then by all accounts they are (in theory) technically correct.
That being said, using facts to bully others is not in good faith either. For example flooding threads with JSTOR links.
The topic is controversial but not clearly prohibited by site rules.
That is correct, at the time there was no violation of site wide rules.
Rooki's actions appear to prioritize his personal disagreement over following established moderation guidelines.
Please see the above regarding addressing moderator policy.
Conclusions
Regarding moderator actions
We will not be removing Rooki from his position as moderator, as we believe that this is a disproportionate response for a heat-of-the-moment response.
Everybody makes mistakes, and while we do try and hold the site admin staff to a higher standard, calling for folks resignation from volunteer positions over it would not fair to them. Rooki has given up 100's of hours of his free time to help both Lemmy.World, FHF and the Fediverse as a whole grown in far reaching ways. You don't immediately fire your staff when they make a bad judgment call.
While we understand that this may not be good enough for some users, we hope that they can be understanding that everyone, no matter the position, can make mistakes.
We've also added a new by-laws section detailing the course of action users should ideally take, when conflict arises. In the event that a user needs to go above the admin team, we've provided a secure link to the operations team (who the admin's report to, ultimately). See https://legal.lemmy.world/bylaws/#12-site-admin-issues-for-community-moderators for details.
TL;DR In the event of an admin action that is deemed unfair or overstepping, moderators can raise this with our operations team for an appeal/review.
Regarding censorship claims
Regarding the alleged censorship, comments were removed without a proper reason. This was out of line, and we will do our best to make sure that this does not happen again. We have updated our legal policy to reflect the new rules in place that bind both our user AND our moderation staff regarding removing comments and content. We WANT users to hold us accountable to the rules we've ALL agreed to follow, going forward. If members of the community find any of the rules we've set forth unreasonable, we promise to listen and adjust these rules where we can. Our terms of service is very much a living document, as any proper binding governing document should be.
Controversial topics can and should be discussed, as long as they are not causing risk of imminent physical harm. We are firm believers in the hippocratic oath of "do no harm".
We encourage users to also list pros and cons regarding controversial viewpoints to foster better discussion. Listing the cons of your viewpoint does not mean you are wrong or at fault, just that you are able to look at the issue from another perspective and aware of potential points of criticism.
While we want to allow our users to express themselves on our platform, we also do not want users to spread mis-information that risks causing direct physical harm to another individual, origination or property owned by the before mentioned. To echo the previous statement "do no harm".
To this end, we have updated our legal page to make this more clear. We already have provisions for attacking groups, threatening individuals and animal harm, this is a logical extension of this to both protect our users and to protect our staff from legal recourse and make it more clear to everyone. We feel this is a very reasonable compromise, and take these additional very seriously.
Sincerely,
FHF / LemmyWorld Operations Team
EDIT: Added org operations contact info
All I'm getting from this entire saga is that vegans on here are lunatics. From forcing this nonsense on pets, to all of the follow-up, this is a very bad look for the community, from somone looking in from the outside.
This is some cultish behavior...
Vegans are fine, it are those that enforce/demand it from others that are radicals, all radicals are lunatics.
You get that from anywhere with a chamber that echos well enough. There's the folks who don't have kids or want them, and then there's the anti-natalists who call the people who have children breeders and their kids crotchspawn. There's the Christians and the Religious Right. Jews and Zionists. List goes on.
I think this is showing that about 70% of the people on here are incapable of reconsidering their positions on something.
To me thats upsetting, but then again lemmy.world is the low hanging fruit of the fediverse. Other servers would never have picked this fight to begin with.
It's almost like Lemmy is just another social media site with the same types of people as every other social media site. Regardless of how seemingly a lot of Lemmy users view themselves and Lemmy as a whole.
Yeah...and entirely unsurprising.
IDK it seems like pretty clear animal abuse to me
Cats are obligate carnivores. It is 100% animal abuse.
Can we not restart the argument please.
To me, it's a lot more important in this post to look at the response from mods and admins to a disagreement (and infighting, and mistakes made).
Personally it seems like it was handled well, at least eventually (here). Do you feel one way or the other?
It is relevant though, since the issue of it being animal abuse or not is central to the whole thing.
Is it not animal abuse? Then what has happened in this post is correct.
Is it animal abuse? Then this post shows that the admins will roll over if they get enough push back from a group of users.
The reason given by Rooki for most of the actions was "missinformation", not anything related to animal abuse. One of the two mods was demoted for "endangering pets". At the time of the incident, the only vaguely related rule was 6. Violent Content that talks about visual content depicting dismemberment, murder, suicide, animal abuse, and so on. Though the OP is confusing and at times inaccurate, it still accepts that "at the time there was no violation of site wide rules."
Sometimes I feel like people would like to restart this argument every time it is mentioned, even after 2 threads with hundreds of comments on the topic
Who is arguing? One is factual and the other is willfully ignorant to the point of harming their animal. It's like giving flat earth any credibility, it's objectively against science.
…everyone is arguing? Considering the studies given by both sides, and the constant promotion of that one brand of vegan cat food, it’s hard to give one side a clear objective win (though I do lean toward giving the cat meat).
People like drama.
People like to virtue signal about things they don't know anything about.
Cat drama in particular seems to always hit maximum outrage really fast.
Animal abuse is a touchy subject for many people, yes.
The response of mods and admins is that they removed content that promotes animal abuse and that got people mad enough so they went and restored the content promoting animal abuse.
Whether a pet gets the food it needs isn't something you can even have an opinion about. You can have understandings, misunderstandings, or the scientific understanding itself could change. Anything attempting to hone that is fine.
To frame something like that as a disagreement is fundamentally dishonest. The question is what's nutritionally best for cats. We and our stupid feelings are secondary. I don't even have any familiarity with the subject myself, I only know it's not the realm of opinions. Cats need meat or they don't, in certain amounts, types, at certain intervals, etc.
To be fair, I have a pretty strong opinion on pets getting the food they need. My opinion is that not feeding an animal appropriately is, at best, neglectful.
The great thing is that it's easy to find out what is an appropriate diet for any pet, clever scientists figured it out and wrote up guidelines for us to follow. Here in the UK for example we would follow the European FEDIAF;
https://europeanpetfood.org/self-regulation/safety
So long as you're following the guidelines and giving your pet all the nutrients it needs - regardless of how they're produced (vegan food is fine so long as it replicates the full dietary needs of the animal for example) - you're good 😊👍
I know it's silly to have to point that out, I'm not sure why people argued over it (I didn't see the original discourse). But yes, just to reiterate, it doesn't matter how you prefer to source the food - vegan, halal, whatever fits your beliefs - just so long as it is a nutritionally complete diet for the animal <3
On the subject of admin/moderation, it is wonderful to see the team trying to be thoughtful, transparent, and kind even in the face of high tempers and heated beliefs. I wish we had more of this calibre of person out in the world :-)
Thanks, we're trying to chime in where we can and do hope the post at least helps provide some transparency on what happened. 🙏
Yep. The doublespeak here is wild. "Controversial topics can and should be discussed, as long as they are not causing risk of imminent physical harm. Therefore, we are leaving up comments that cause imminent risk of physical harm."
Forget the particular details of this issue. It feels way, way more strongly like they're trying to duck out of having to take action.
The comments in here are unbelievable. This post was about the systemic moderation issues that lead to the incident, the team's response to it, and how to deal with such a problems in the future.
Half the comments: CATS CAN'T EAT VEGAN
The other half: CATS CAN TOO EAT VEGAN
There are people here who need to go back to fucking reddit.
in defense of those people the previous thread showed up on basically every lemmy instance under the sun, there are memes about it now.
I'm not sure what else you were expecting with a site wide drama such as this tbh.
Yeah, fuck reddit, and fuck u/spez.
Er, am I doing this right?
The question is at the root of which moderator's actions are correct. There's a reactionary bias from tons of Reddit-fugees that came out of vegan bashing and anti-vegan hysteria which we see crop up repeatedly.
It can be difficult to distinguish between people sincere, abet misguided, beliefs and outright trolls. And moderation takes a significant temporal and emotional toll. "Vegans are killing their pets/kids!!!" is a popular panic phrase intended to gin up hostility. Consequentaly, the mods in these communities are playing endless wack-a-mole with trolls who just want to conflate veganism with an esoteric form of cruelty.
Establishing a bright line of appropriate content is important for good moderation. But to know where that line is, you need some degree of objection information.
Which brings us back to the fundamental question of whether safe, reliable vegan cat food exists (spoilers: it's been around for decades). But if you don't accept that premise, you're going to see any mod censorship as some diabolical cat killing agenda.
Cats are obligate carnivores. It's trivial to stroll into any store and get food that will make your cat healthy but its not clear how easy it is to get vegan food that will do the same. Seems like if you don't believe in eating meat you should just not have a little carnivore in your home. For instance rabbits can be trained to live inside, cuddle with you, and poop in a box.
It's not just a diet thing, it's a matter of animal abuse.
I don't doubt that there are options out there for people that want to feed their pets a vegan-friendly diet, but given that cats primarily eat meat the idea of promoting a vegan diet that isn't heavily monitored and noted by their vet is an awful look for the vegan community and Lemmy. You absolutely cannot expect people to just treat this as a moderation issue, because at its most fundamental level it's about whether lemmy.world supports content that is harmful to animals.
I said it elsewhere here, and since people don't like it being raised I'll say it again: shit like this wouldn't fly on Reddit. Lemmy has a poor reputation on the Fediverse for housing extreme opinions, and this debacle really won't help its reputation as a fed-friendly alternative to Reddit. Saying "go back to Reddit" just highlights the problem more, and is probably why there are plenty of posts on the Fediverse asking why Lemmy is so hostile, or why it's nowhere near as friendly as many communities on Mastodon.
Here's an idea, why don't you save your argument for one of the myriad posts that have popped up discussing this very subject of whether or not cats can eat vegan or not and whether or not that is abuse.
But here and now within this post is a discussion over whether or not mods acted recklessly and whether or not there is a need for better guidelines on what is and isn't allowed. Which were discussed in the post that you apparently didn't read.
At no point did the author of this post open up the floor to discuss whether or not veganism is good, bad, or ugly for cats.
Difficulty level of Reddit is too high, since people would actually need to, you know, read stuff, in order to have "read it."
Animal abuse isn't an opinion. It's evil. And malice by ignorance that could be corrected is malice.
Stop apologizing for doing your jobs. We all have opinions and raise them loudly in the Fediverse so I understand your natural reaction and want to communicate well. But IMHO this is troll feeding. If they posted in favor of human genocide, you'd close a ticket, and move on, not write an apology for taking it down.
All the vegans I meet in real life are normal ass people.
You might get the impression that we are lol
Because those are normal people. "Lifestyle" communities on the internet invariably devolve into groupthink cesspits of the most unhinged followers of that lifestyle.
Veganism is the worst. It's like the terminally online crazies can telepathically detect anyone discussing veganism and descend en-mass.
Not that I think Rooki was wrong with what they did. But it doesn’t take a genius to figure out how fast such stuff can get out of control.
Thing happened. Admins reflected on thing. Came up with solution. Communicated solution with community in an understandable and transparent manner. Perfect.
If that lazy fucks over at Reddit would have been half as good as you with theirs jobs, we probably wouldn’t be here to begin with.
Mods aside, the Reddit app is still garbage
You’re beating a dead horse here. The most common association with that app is “barfing a little bit before deleting it”.
😂👍
I am not a vegan, but I do try to make food choices that are as ethical and healthy as I can... or at least as far as I can afford.
Cats are carnivores. Fact. This is not debatable. But I think you could also meet or exceed a cats nutritional needs from other sources. Whether those sources are readily available and whether a person is sufficiently meeting those needs... that's another can of worms.
Generally, I'd argue that if you are hell-bent on a vegan diet, then you should not own carnivorous pets. No matter how well meaning you are, there is a significant chance that you will inflict harm on your pet, and that is unacceptable.
You're forgetting some people are idiots, especially those "better than others" who do crap like this.
You might be surprised at how much corn, grains, and other non-meat stuff there is in cat food. Particularly in cheap dry kibble that nobody typically bats an eye at someone feeding to their cat.
This conversation just seems so weird to me. The number of people who feed their cats anything similar to what they’d be eating in the wild is minuscule.
Meat isn’t some magic substance, biological chemical reactions turns grass into cows. That you think you can’t take those nutrients and make them bioavailable to an obligate carnivore is absurd. Ever seen an impossible burger?
And if you think the cruelty stems from the idea that cats wouldn’t like it, I gotta say. I have my cat on an expensive grain free meat heavy diet. And I know for a fact that he goes crazy for the cheap shitty corn based purina kibble. He has busted into other people’s homes to steal kibble from their cats.
So is it cruel for me to feed him a more nature based diet when it’s clear he prefers corn based trash?
I don’t see any reason why a functional vegan cat food couldn’t exist.
@lwadmin For full disclosure I agree with rooki on this topic.
I may have missed it in the write up but I think the vegan mods needlessly escalated the situation by trying to ban and remove comments from an admin.
I am not saying I always agree with rooki but I respect his job as an admin.
The mods of vegan treated him disrespectfully in his capacity as an admin by deleting and banning him.
You should cover this in your terms of service.
To be totally honest you have nothing to apologize for. Dogs and cats are metabolically different to humans and cannot survive on a vegan diet unlike us. Forcing obligate carnivore pets on vegan diets is certainly animal abuse.
I remember when there was a growing campaign to ban r/nonewnormal on Reddit due to it being a hub of medical disinformation and conspiracy theories surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic, and that this led to a blackout much like the later API protests.
Rather than read the room and introduce a new rule banning medical disinformation, Reddit's Tintin-looking moron of a CEO instead threw out tonnes of BS statistics on brigading likely plucked out of his own sphincter, and banned the subreddit because their activity exceeded this arbitrary percentage he made up.
And before you tell me this guy's figures were legit, aren't we forgetting that he pathologically lied about his interactions with the Sync developer? Spez is a snake.
Humans can survive on a vegan diet because it's 2024 and we have scientific research and guidelines/help. I don't think it would have been possible for most humans throughout history
Dogs are omnivores like us and can do fine on a plant based diet. Sometimes even recommended for health reasons for dogs with anal gland issues.
Cats are a bit more complex but require taurine. Modern mass produced cat food is supplemented with synthetic taurine anyway so there isn’t much difference.
Feeding a carnivore a vegan diet indeed is animal abuse. Cats can survive, but survival and healthy are not the same. Cats on a vegan diet get sick much faster and die younger, statistically according to vets. I'm a vegan, I have cats, I feed them meat. If you don't like feeding your pets meat, get a herbivore pet instead.
The way things were handled may have been wrong, but animal abuse should be banned from Lemmy imo.
I think what people generally want is not reddit. The mods in reddit have almost no accountability from admin.
Oftentimes comments are removed just because a mod doesn't agree or like the content.
I was banned from r/Ukraine simply for saying we shouldn't demonize the entire population of Russia for the actions of their government. I later argued with the mod through their "arbitration process" and he would not unban me. (What really hurt is that I'm Ukrainian. It was an improvement sub for me)
No one wants that! Please don't let that happen here!
I was banned from /r/grindr for suggesting it's ok for trans people to use it. It's legitimately one of the most blatantly, unapologetically terrible mods I've ever seen, and it's just him.
I'm personally of the opinion that if a community is poorly moderated, you should just make a new community that is better aligned to the level of moderation users actually want and not to rely on a centralized admin team. They should really just be preventing serious abuse, like grooming, and provide support and advice to mods.
Ultimately its not sustainable and gives Admins too much centralized power to determine to that level what is and isn't appropriate mod behavior. I get that what you experienced is generally dickish behavior, but that can easily spin out of control when it relies on admin judgement calls like that.
In reality, even admins don't hold the ultimate power. This is a federated platform and there are lots of other instances. It's an extension of the sentiment you express - if people don't like how things are done on one instance, they can move the community, or even start a new instance.
By the beard of Zeus, what a horrible day to be literate and morbidly curious.
These comments feel like a basketball game, except there's a wall in the middle and teams are just scoring points on their own hoop. Also every two comments someone throws a shovelful of shit over the wall.
This is one of those topics where everyone involved has strong convictions
Yea I just randomly went to go look at all posts I stead of my subscribed feed for a change and saw this, I have no prior clu of what the hell happened but I'm morbidly curious too lol
I'm reminded of an article talking about an outage at Yahoo! back when they were huge. It turned out the whole outage came down to one person messing up. The manager was asked how they let the person go and they said "Whatever the cost of that outage we just spent it on training, that person will never make that mistake again, nor will they allow someone else to make it".
If you have mods trying to manage things and they make a mistake you don't axe them, you discuss the situation and work in good policy for going forward. This one case is costly to the community, but nowhere near as costly as losing someone with this experience.
As for the vegan diet for cats issue, in general people who do vegan diets for kids and animals run a high risk of causing harm. Is it possible to do correctly? Maybe. Is it likely that an individual who is not trained in that field will manage it? No. But should it be investigated? Sure, but o my with experiments that actually do teach us something, no wasted studies of 3 weeks on a diet and checking blood tests, or comparing vegan kibble to omnivore kibble. Still, the same issues plague human dietetics and we don't have the answers there either, so yeah, maybe we should all chill a little and work together rather than identifying with one side of the argument and vilifying the other.
Never fire someone for an accident unless the accident was a symptom of willful negligence. Fire them for being unqualified or incompetent, sure, but not for an honest mistake. Training someone to avoid that mistake in the future will be far less expensive than replacing them, and they're going to be far less likely to make mistakes like it ever again.
Mistakes create opportunities for growth ❤️
The idea that it's dangerous to raise children on a vegan diet is unequivocally false, and misinformation. Every major health authority has made statements affirming that a properly implemented plant-based diet is entirely nutritionally adequate for all stages of life. Literally the only supplement that's strictly necessary in the majority of cases is b12 - which is something that everyone should be supplementing with anyway. Aside from that it's easier to get adequate nutrition from plant-based diets than it is on the Standard American Diet.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27886704/
https://bitesizevegan.org/the-crime-of-raising-vegan-kids-when-diet-is-deadly/
The question is not about what is possible, it is about what is common. Also, I am not saying the SAD is good or even better than vegan. Anyone trying to eat well is likely to make some of the same good choices, such as reducing refined sugars, dropping a portion of their ultra processed foods, and monitoring and meeting their protein needs. Being unable to hit your protein needs on a vegan diet is something an incautious person may experience, but supplementing protein or increasing protein components in your meals is manageable.
That all said, it takes extra work. Most people don't have the spare effort to cook at home for every meal, people are time and money poor and stressed beyond all reasonable limits, so we need to try to make some sort of plan that can actually be followed, not just some ideal. Is vegan possible? With effort and education it seems that some people can manage it, so at least some portion of people could do that. On the flip side if someone eats fish and chicken as their meat rather than beef have they not made progress from a bunch of ways? Definitely fewer carbon emissions. I don't claim to know the answer for what we should do but saying "do this perfect thing" seems counterproductive.
The integrity in this post is off the charts.
Love to see it.
Thanks, we're always trying to do better and learn from our mistakes.
Absolutely agree. This is an issue where it could have easily been covered up, but the leadership opted for total transparency.
They admitted the mistake, showed how it happened, and worked out an agreement with the community to avoid the problem in the future.
Forget comparison to corporate media (it's not even close), I've seen issues in the Fediverse handled 100x worse than this.
What... So the rules don't matter if enough people get angry, I see
It's a confusing post. Rooki justified the actions by citing "missinformation", though the ToS had no such rule at the time. I think they're trying to rewrite history now by bringing up animal abuse, but MrKaplan's explanation in the comments is that if there were no healthy implementation of vegan cat food, then they treat it as animal abuse. From having looked at the research, even Rooki weakly admitted that "it's not unhealthy", hence the reversal.
Lunatic vegans on lemmy? No way dude
I'm glad you're sticking to your guns on this. At the end of the day, it should NOT be up to the admin team who are not subject matter experts to determine what is and is not considered "truth" especially in cases where there is still active research on the topic.
I also can totally see how this topic can elicit a knee jerk reaction, because people have been known to put animals on vegan diets irresponsibly, but we don't block people from posting "chonkers" or obese cats which is literally the same thing where people will often intentionally overfeed their cats for this aesthetic which is also clearly abuse in the exact same vein.
I also think its a good thing you reinstated the admin after some reflection and a well thought out response and statement. It doesn't seem like they are on some crazy power trip either.
+1 to everything here and also that a mod can make mistakes and not be immediately shit-canned. We may not all agree on everything, but I think we all want a healthy and lively federation.
Mistakes can be made and as long as we own up to them and try improve, we're in great shape.
❤️
Thanks! We do our best to learn and grow when conflicts arise.
Rooki has never been removed from the position or paused activity. You're probably thinking of the !vegan mods first demoted, then reinstated by Rooki after my post asking for his removal as a moderator.
By the way, instance moderator MrKaplan said that it would be considered animal abuse if vegan cat food were inherently unhealthy, so by that logic, the overfed cat posts would also need to be removed, but I don't see that happening. The Lemmy.World mods are very selective about applying and interpreting the rules.
Why don't they just make their own instance?
I’m not involved with the original drama - nor do I want to entertain it to begin with - but good on you guys for being transparent
Thanks. TBH most of us are here because we want to see more transparency with the internet.
We're not perfect, but we try to do the best we can, even if we make mistakes.
It's hard as heck to consider all the different angles on big issues, which is why it can take us a few days to a week when big issues pop off.
Wow. I have no involvement in the original issue and I'm definitely not as familiar with the circumstances and details as others. There may be a lot missing here.
But this feels like a very mature, logical, empathetic, well-intentioned response and the kind of thing I like to see.
We're just trying to do the best we can to consider everyone involved and what we can do better going forward. We're all just volunteers trying to keep things positive and stable. 🙏 ❤️
Thanks!
Thank you for your measured, reasonable, and frankly reassuring response. I appreciate that moderation is a very difficult task and I want to thank all of you, both for your work and for how you've acted when faced with a difficult situation. This is exactly how I would've hoped this response would be. I do hope that your resolution to discuss these things beforehand can help avoid similar issues in the future.
Thanks for understanding. It took the whole team a lot of work to get to this point 🙏
I have a bunch of cats I feed vegan diets to, but to anyone concerned that I'm doing animal abuse, don't worry - occasionally, I wring one of their necks and chop it up to feed to the others, so clearly I'm not abusing them.
Seriously though, I do not understand how non-vegans are all getting on their high horse about "animal abuse" when their preferred course of action is just abusing different animals. Cats do not hold a higher moral standing than other animals just because they look cute. You know they feed cows literal shit? Do you think that's part of their "natural diet?"
I don't have any cats or other pets, but even if the worst claims are true, the people doing it would be no worse than what carnists do every day. It's simply that abuse against certain categories of sentient beings is so normalized that people don't even recognize it as abuse, no matter how bad it is.
Bravo. Well said.
Thats canibalism if you would do that. And already reading that gives me some worries how you would treat your cats.
Huh didnt you beginn the whole comment by telling you "have bunch of cats"?
And this comment is just a "Not my opinion = Bad" vibe. I think you are just here to rant about how bad other (non-vegan) people are and make everyone feel like they are lower than you.
you missed the point entirely
Missed the joke lol.
Then I can't imagine what kind of worries reading Jonathan Swift would give you.
Woosh.
"Not my opinion = bad"? As opposed to the vegan bad circle jerks you spawned with two separate stickied posts due to your emotional outbursts that the entire admin team has allowed to fester? You're right, vegans are definitely the problem.
Good news, thanks for the open communication.
You're welcome!✌️❤️ We try and be easy to get a hold of as well.
The mods at the lemmy world vegan community don't see things the same way. From this post:
Codified anti-vegan bias based on reactionary views? That's unfortunate. Glad I'm not on that instance.
Thanks for the continued work in maintaining a community!
❤️✌️
There could be a technical fix for this. Lemmy could use a system that requires certain moderator and/or admin actions to require a 2-person authorization, and temporarily put the action in an “under review” state for a set amount of time.
For instance, an admin removing content would replace it with a placeholder for up to 2 days. If another admin accepts the change then the comment is removed. If no other admin responds then the content is put back.
This is pretty much Change Management.
Would be fine as an option that could be enabled, especially for larger communities, but an instance run by a single person wouldn't be able to host communities if it was a built in requirement for all communities.
You can't fix people problems with technical solutions. I know tech folk like to think they can, but it really doesn't work. Sometimes you simple needs some rules, guides, and a good book to slap someone with.
Maybe not fix, but some things can certainly help.
Solid idea. One consequence of this would be the possible delay in removing material that really should be removed as fast as possible, though.
In theory a good idea, but there is lots of content that needs to be gone serverside asap - either because it's CP, otherwise illegal, spam that clogs down the Fediverse/can even be used to DoS a server,etc.
Illegal things probably need to be retained as evidence. It’s many times illegal to remove evidence if you think it’s possibly relevant.
I’m not a lawyer, but I’d consult one about this.
It depends very much on the legislation - in many legislations it is absolutely illegal to retain it.
Anyway, there are more than enough non-evidence class materials that need to be removed asap.
To be clear, while the idea that discussion is welcome is good the moderators of c/vegan do not tolerate discussion. Any opinion that goes against the orthodoxy of the echo bunker leads to a permanent ban. If you express any opinion other that, "It's fully acceptable to force your extremist philosophy on an obligate carnivore by feeding it an unnatural vegan diet" you will be banned. It's an incredibly closed minded and intolerant community.
Forgive me for being suspicious of your comment. There is a huge anti-vegan bias in society, and many argue against veganism, not in good faith. Can you provide any examples of the mods doing this?
I appreciate you guys owning up to this, especially since a lot of people here seemed determined to ignore the actual issue and just start a redditesque circle jerk about vegans.
Thanks! When we fall down, we get back up and try to learn from our mistakes to do better next time ✌️
A sensible, compassionate, gracious and humble response? I thought this was the internet?
Yeah, I was as taken by surprise as you. I guess thats one of the reasons I keep using Lemmy after ditching reddit
Thanks! Yeah, a lot of the team (and users) came from Reddit, so feel ya on that.
Try to be as transparent as we can and keep things as healthy as we can for the community.
So... just to check my understanding, what you're saying is that whether or not cats can survive on a vegan diet, it doesn't matter? Right? You're saying that you decided the admins overstepped and you regret approaching ambiguity the way you did? I suppose that seems reasonable. There's plenty of misinfo all over Lemmy as is, and as such there's gotta be various ways we can handle it - from top-down bans to trusting the readers.
As for the diet stuff, what, are they using lab-grown meat? Is that the TLDR here?
EDIT: Guys I am just checking my understanding - maybe check your own if you think such a comment does not contribute to the discussion.
I love the compassionate intervention that allows @Rooki@lemmy.world the opportunity to learn and correct his behaviors and models that level of compassion. Thank you very much! 😊
10/10 vets understand the science behind the consensus.
But anyway, let's hear what the accountant and physicist think, since that's going to be relevant.
That's not true at all. The reason given by Rooki for the actions at the time was "missinformation" [sic]. The ToS had no rules on misinformation at the time.
That's also untrue. Rooki specifically distinguished that comment (the shield icon) in addition to having the [A] (admin) icon next to their name.
In your post, you accept that the vegan comments were valid, thus Rooki was in the wrong. Why does an instance moderator get to interfere (and impact what the readers see for days) with absolute impunity and new rules created to back their talking points? Rooki was not even asked to pause their activity while you looked into the conduct. There was no punishment to discourage those acts at all. Where in the world does one side admit to being at fault but the remedy still favors that side only?
Edit: post->comment
it still had rules about animal abuse, which this misinformation, had it actually been misinformation, would have lead to. while the removal reason could have been more clear, the justification was still covered by our ToS.
the additional rules provided more clarification on what we intend to achieve with them, but they would not be required. based on what we know today the removal was neither justified by the original ToS nor by the updated ones.
An instance moderator repeatedly cited a rule that was not in the ToS, then undid the damage a few days later also on the basis of "not missinformation". To me, that's a clear indication of what was on Rooki's mind at the moment.
Can you explain how "animal abuse" comes into the picture? Are you saying that if an instance moderator does something for a made-up reason that is not covered in the rules, the rest of the moderators still attempt to find a reason in the rules that sticks? Understood if so, but then which animal abuse rule are you talking about? Is it the one about the visual depiction of violent content, in the same paragraph as gore, dismemberment, and so on? How does that relate to cat food even remotely? I described it as a huge stretch in my "asking for removal" post and I still see it as a huge stretch. It's hard to understand why you would need to go for that unless trying to justify Rooki's actions which were completely unjustifiable from any angle.
The animal abuse alleged at the time was that there was supposedly no healthy vegan cat food.
While the section of the rules was the same (violent content), animal abuse was a separate sentence, not the one about visual depictions:
This is the exact same paragraph we have today and we had before these changes.
If there was no healthy vegan cat food then this would be considered content enabling animal abuse.
Still misleading, because that's not the reason given by Rooki in the moment or days later. You also can't chalk it up to poor communication, since there's absolutely no logical connection between "misinformation" and "animal abuse".
As for the violent content rule, taking just one sentence from it and ignoring the rest is also as good as moderator misconduct, because by that same wild logic, one could take any other sentence from the rules, ignore the context, and use it to justify anything. It's like saying that because the ToS contain "It offers something of value to our users.", anything of value is okay. You will say "but that's under Advertising", so that's exactly what I'm saying too: the part on animal abuse is under Violent Content, in the context of visual depictions or descriptions of violence, not on its own, so it must be examined within its context only.
Moreover, what you're arguing is like saying that if you had the same sentence read "No content depicting, promoting or enabling abuse", it would be abusive and against the rules to tell people that, for example, junk food is fine ("because there is no healthy junk food").
It's weird to me that you are indicating the only way to address someone making a mistake or not doing the best thing is "punishment".
I think they addressed what they're changing and the thoughts behind what you're talking about very specifically and clearly.
Unless i'm mistaken, the comment you're saying is "untrue" is specifically about ordering it over others; as one would see based on up/downvotes. You seem to be talking about something else.
For one, I'd question that being a mistake (or using the "cat owner" excuse to justify it), as Rooki has repeatedly expressed the same kind of views even outside the context of cats and after the incident. That and the extent of Rooki's actions on !vegan, as well as Rooki's response to my "asking for removal" post shows it's a strongly held belief influencing the mod behavior rather than an emotional one-time response in the heat of the moment.
There has been no indication on Rooki's part that the actions were wrong and contrary to the rules, and that their behavior will be different going forward. The quiet comment edit from ten days ago that followed my post is a "sorry not sorry", as it continues to fuel the fire with a milder argument on vegan cat food rather than discussing Rooki's misconduct and the appropriate path forward.
The new ToS additions introducing a section on misinformation and specifically having to spell out "Unhealthy diets, e.g. due to insufficient nutrients)" fully echoing Rooki's original points suggests that either Rooki or someone on their behalf had argued strongly for that point in the private staff discussions, again suggesting that there is no change of perspective in sight.
Given those circumstances, yes, it's a talk about punishment.
Cats are not vegan lol
so this is an endorsement of animal abuse from the admins?
I've seen many comments on Lemmy glorifying hunting and fishing and nobody gets angry when they don't get removed. Someone makes a comment about the theoretical possiblity of vegan cat food and people freak out when they reinstate it.
This looks to be more an endorsement of moderation principles and rules, not determining truth of comments.
For the difficulties in determining what's true, see the kerfuffle about Media Bias Fact Check.
It is an endorsement of allowing discussion of a controversial topic that didn't break the posted rules.
Feeding a cat a vegan diet is animal abuse because it requires a workaround for their biology as an obligate carnivore instead of just feeding them what they have evolved to need. If a vegan can't properly feed a particular pet, they shouldn't have the pet.
But we should be able to discuss it unless the rules for the community are changed to prohibit that kind of discussion.
we do not consider feeding a cat vegan food as animal abuse, provided there are no health issues arising from this.
most of the research i've looked at seems to point out that there are various pitfalls, e.g. just feeding a cat vegetables will result in malnutrition. having synthetic additives for this can be one way to address that problem. just because something is sold as vegan cat food that doesn't necessarily imply that it's healthy for the cat, as some of the articles were pointing out that some of the cheaper ones were lacking the right ingredients.
as an example, "my cat now only gets potatoes and apples and nothing else" would be considered animal abuse.
additionally, if moderators were to remove arguments pointing out the risks of e.g. missing nutrients in a civil discussion and leaving the other side that just argues "vegan cat food works" without any arguments as is then we would also consider this animal abuse.
in this specific incident the conversation was certainly not civil, which is unfortunate, as this situation would likely have gone a very different way if it was.
Docking tails, snipping ears, and a bunch of stuff we do to dogs is abuse even if they don't have health issues down the road.
One issue with feeding cats a vegan diet is that cats hide their pain, so if the diet is causing pain due to a lack of nutrients that don't have obvious external signs like death, they could be suffering for their entire lives. We don't have long term studies about other health impacts from a lack of meat, and the primary focus has been keeping them from dying. It should be assumed that there are other negstive side effects we cannot see when at least one missing enzyme kills the cat.
Plus the only possible outcome is that some vegan is able to avoid feeding an obligate carnivore they voluntarily adopted the wrong diet.
I never said that it only requires harm down the road.
Cutting body parts off or even just cutting them without good medical reason (e.g. risk of death without amputation) is of course also animal abuse.
For hiding pain, you're attacking a strawman, because I already addressed that in my previous comment.
But banning users for calling out obvious trolls is ok. This is bullshit really. The mods have been going so hard on here it makes this place less and less appealing.
Move to a different instance. Honestly, .world is too big and has too much influence. I get most people just wanna join the biggest instance but tons of other instances federate with .world so you can still have the content without the majority convening on one instance and giving them most of the power.
What would happen if .world went down? Tons of accounts and communities would be lost, people need to spread out to different instances instead of trying to make .world reddit 2.0.
Edit: just saw you're not on .world, that's my bad. But my point still stands.
I have a question: what is the FHF? Searching that acronym without context leads to what appears to be unrelated organizations.
FediHosting Foundation, it's our parent non profit.
I know this is the internet, so my expectations should be pretty low, but I'm honestly really disheartened and taken aback by all of the comment sections on the posts related to this one. Everyone just spewing opinions, no facts, no research, just hearsay. We are a very disappointing group of people I'd say and we should try and do better.
I'm also really disheartened by the actions that took place in /c/vegan that this post is describing that caused policy changes. Another example for me on why anarchy and removing power structures is needed. Honestly, why should /c/vegan or any non-mainstream community want to remain associated with this instance? I am vegan, and didn't know that community existed, but seeing how hostile non-vegans are in there... Forget about it.
Just terrible all around. What a calamity of a community we're creating.
If you’re comfortable pivoting to ml, there’s a good vegan community on hexbear. World preemptively defederated from that instance though, so you’d need to make an alt or change servers.
I don't fully understand how to pick an instance to be honest.
Are the main things: operations, moderation, and federated instances?
Alright, I chose one! Thanks to those that helped.
I've heard evidence that it was a fairly toxic community there anyway.
We should be careful to avoid creating communities that are echo chambers. Ie, it should be a community discussing veganism, not a vegan safe space where people abuse you if you disagree
Otherwise, in 5 years time you end to with scenarios similar to reddit or on beehaw
I left beehaw because I half agreed with the community, someone in a "safe space" abused me, and a beehaw admin overlooked that abuse and instead insisted I was starting a flight (simply because I didn't 100% agree with the community it seemed)
We also risk scenarios where vaping or drug communities could grow and become toxic in the same way. We also should be as scientific as possible and avoid becoming Facebook.
I'm not sure about the cat thing, but to me, it seems like it could at least be used as animal abuse
I'm afraid that ship is already sailed, foundered, and is well on the way to the bottom in a lot of communities.
When it comes to spicy topics, many communities on Lemmy feel incredibly close-minded and hostile to opposing views.
From what I see we are already echo chambers on the most pressing topics.
Interesting, first time I hear this about Beehaw
It's not a common scenario probably.
But I felt at least one admin was so focused on protecting at least 1 minority, that they were willing to overlook bad behavior by some of them. Or maybe they knew that if they told them to act better that the community would see them as a threat
In fact, the person who exclaimed that I "wanted to kill the entire minority" simply because I didn't 100% agree with one thing also I realized colored my opinion early of the rest of Lemmy on another thread by calling it a cesspool
It's actually the opposite. People are free to discuss on other servers, and I realize that lots of the thing that person was saying, was actually bad for discussions except in a way that benefits them directly (even disregarding other people in their minority).
The crazy part is I have plenty of friends who are part of that minority lol
They were a mod too, so over time, some of these communities will only develop stronger and stronger opinions which are self reinforcing and rise to the top in these safe spaces and basically become another femaledatingstrategy like environment
And yet do I see correctly, that nothing at all was done about the mods that removed posts stating with proof, that the AKC agrees that cats are oblate carnivores and should not eat vegan cat food.
This whole thing reads like an apology to those who were wrong to begin with.
Can you people trying to restart the original argument take that shit elsewhere? This is a discussion about how to approach moderation.
They are heavily linked. If moderation is lax enough to allow what many perceive to be animal cruelty then it endangers one of the largest mediums in the fediverse. Lemmy already has a poor reputation on Mastodon, and the debate on this really doesn't help shine a good light on lemmy.world.
Just get a tortoise ffs.
The reactionary vegan hate is real.
Can someone link to the post on !vegan@lemmy.world? I wanna see this shit show 😅
Here you go
Seems like a reasonable conclusion to me. Thank you for communicating as well as for your time and effort spent handling this in a careful and mature way.
Thanks, when thing gets out of hand, we try and take a step back as a team and evaluate how to do our best to fix things for both our site and the community as a whole.
What's crazy is all the admins had to do was look at that subs modlog prior to the controversy to see this was all most likely a troll:
https://lemmy.world/modlog/1309?page=3&actionType=ModRemoveComment
That mod team doesn't give two shits about "free speech".
Let them migrate to their own instance, changing all of lemmy.world's rules and making all those sticky threads is about as much as you could feed a troll.
Wow that modlog is pretty eye opening, big echo chamber vibes.
I’m asking this purely out of naivety, not trying to make a point: are you saying that because there are removed comments there that seem balanced and pretty thoughtful but have been removed regardless?
This is honestly my very first time looking at a modlog so I’m trying to got understand how to read it.
Yeah. I know why I blocked them a long time ago. There is nothing of value in that community.
Vegans causing controversy. This is my complete lack of surprise.
Vegans have their rights to opinions just as you and me. This is not about t vegans vs us, but about how to handle disagreements We never learn if we just sensor everyone we disagree with
So do anti-vax people get their rights to options?
What about religious fundamentalist homeschoolers?
Parents who refuse their children any medical treatment because prayer is enough if you have faith?
Racists?
Where do you draw the line if it's not animal abuse? Especially presented in a way that someone might fall for the misinformation and not know they're harming their pet?
Right.. where do you draw the line? You are straw-maning a lot here, as the person sensored wasnt an anti vaxer, religious fundamentalist, opponent of medicine, racist or even promoting denying cats meat without careful consideration
But ye, you',d probably sensor me too, as Im against racism. Im pro choice. Im against capitalism. Im post colonialist. Im pro trans rights. I'm an intersectional feminost.I think every person no matter skin colour, gender, identity or background should have access to free public health care. Hell, I don't even want people who got rich parents to get access to superior health care as we as a society should give everyone proper health care
So keep on straw manning, as you probably want to sensor me too
It feels like Lemmy is growing up. Love to see it.
There's a sad, ironic element of humor that vegans are inadvertently advocating for animal abuse. ):)
I was reading through the Section 8 Misinformation, there seems to be a typo:
Fixed!
Thanks! We fixed it in the next update we push.