Moderation conflict involving c/vegan

IDK it seems like pretty clear animal abuse to me

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.

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!

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...

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.

The integrity in this post is off the charts.

Love to see it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I'm sorry, but anyone forcing cats, who are exclusively meateaters to eat vegan food are idiots.

Good news, thanks for the open communication.

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.

A sensible, compassionate, gracious and humble response? I thought this was the internet?

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.

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.

I don't agree with the outcome of THIS situation, but I DO agree with the idea that mods and admins are not gods on the fediverse. I like the concept of checks and balances, even if I disagree with the ruling. The fact that it's not a god complex one person rule is better than what reddit has.

That being said, you can be vegan, but give your cat some chicken! Cats LOVE chicken! Why would you want to deprive your cat of what they love? If they were neighborhood cats, they would instinctually be killing birds ALL THE TIME!!! So it's not YOU killing the chicken. It's your cat. Don't like it? Don't get a cat.

I don't get a dog. Why? Because I'm never home. That would be unfair for a dog to just NEVER get to go for a walk, just because I'm home like 10 hours a day. And even that is mostly sleeping. Wouldn't be fair to the dog. Just like it's not fair to the cat to never have chicken.

All the vegans I meet in real life are normal ass people.

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.

Cats are not vegan lol

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.

@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.

good look

Lunatic vegans on lemmy? No way dude

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.

Appreciate how you handled this, but denying a carnivore an appropriate diet is definitely animal abuse.

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! 😊

Can you people trying to restart the original argument take that shit elsewhere? This is a discussion about how to approach moderation.

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 have a question: what is the FHF? Searching that acronym without context leads to what appears to be unrelated organizations.

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.

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.

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

Why don't they just make their own instance?

The comments were removed for violating our instance rule against animal abuse

The comments have been restored

What... So the rules don't matter if enough people get angry, I see

The mods at the lemmy world vegan community don't see things the same way. From this post:

"Today the lemmy.world admins made a follow up post about the incident where the admin Rooki interfered with moderation of this community in a way which was determined to be against lemmy.world TOS and factually incorrect. Throughout this incident there has been no communication with me, nor to my knowledge any of of the other moderators of this community. Rooki quitely undid his actions and edited his post to admit fault however there was no public acknowledgement of this from him. In fact I wasn’t even told I was reinstated as a mod which is quite funny.

The lemmy.world admins’ response appears more focused on managing their own reputations and justifying similar actions in the future than providing a good environment for vegans, and other similarly maligned groups. Their statements about wanting to handle misinformation and overreach better in the future ring a bit hollow when they won’t take actions to address the anti-vegan circlejerks under their update posts which abound with misinformation and disinformation.

The legalese written basically allows for the same thing to happen, and that if it does the admin decision is to stand while moderators have to quietly resolve the conflict at the admins’ leisure. Presumably with a similarly weak public apology and barely visible record correction after the fact.

Codified anti-vegan bias based on reactionary views? That's unfortunate.

this is a welcome post, i was a little worried what this was going to be like, but you didn't manage to cannibalize yourselves over it so thats good.

Regardless the internet wouldn't be the internet with stupid squabbles like this one.

I was reading through the Section 8 Misinformation, there seems to be a typo:

We always recomend that users

Thanks for the continued work in maintaining a community!

I suppose it's good to take any opportunity to clarify moderation policies but... all this over cat food? Jesus Christ people, have some perspective. Not every topic needs to devolve into a debate about free speech and censorship.

🍿

You mention censorship like it's something that never happens here. Mods delete comments they don't agree with all the time.

Drama time 👏 and vegan drama no less. Always feels really nourishing

good response. love knowing there are adults in the room turning pissing contests in to practical policy.

This is complicated. 🤔

All of that was over people fighting about feeding a carnivore pet plant based pet food? You're f*cking kidding me right?

Speaking of mod power abuse, some days ago one of your mods deleted my (very mildly) snarky comment for "mod harassment", which I didnt even know they were until that point. I suggested they should be a little less petty and argumentative in random comment chains.

I did not report that bs at the time because I honestly dont give two fucks about the guy and have since blocked him, but I'm sure you can find it in the mod logs.

he was convinced that it was scientific consensus that cats cannot survive on a vegan diet

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.

There's a sad, ironic element of humor that vegans are inadvertently advocating for animal abuse. ):)

It feels like Lemmy is growing up. Love to see it.

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.

vegan cat food

wtf???

It's good to have these issues. I still look at Lemmy as v1 of something that will eventually be quite different and the moderation and admin questions are not easily solved.

It seems like there are some good ideas in the comments, but another might be community voting for mods. Its interesting to me how undemocratic these democratic platforms are. Might be something to consider in future versions of Lemmy.

I have cats, and I never would have responded to somebody the way rookie did in that thread. Also sounds like it's less "heat of the moment" When people are coming forward with other stories where he's been very emotionally charged during conversations.

But, all that aside, why is a backend programmer for lemmy an admin/mod at all?

I'm guessing someone on /c/vegan took umbrage with the fact that cats are obligate carnivores and didn't want to hear anything else.

Edit: I find my upvote/downvote ratio unbelievable for this comment. Astounding how controversial facts are.

Can someone link to the post on !vegan@lemmy.world? I wanna see this shit show 😅

Good Job!

The comments were removed for violating our instance rule against animal abuse (https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/#11-attacks-on-users).

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.

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.

That's also untrue. Rooki specifically distinguished that comment (the shield icon) in addition to having the [A] (admin) icon next to their name.

We will not be removing Rooki from his position as moderator

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

Just get a tortoise ffs.

You're allowing animal abuse on your instance by leaving the comments up.

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.

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.

Permanently Deleted

Agree or disagree the problem here is an admin that feels he can moderate any community on his instance based on only emotional response.

When shit blows up in his face he quickly undoes his little mistake and someone else apologizes.

Permanently Deleted

Fucking vegan cat killer assholes

Censorship is when Kitty cat get no meat :(

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 thought the whole point of lemmy is you cash be as crazy as you want and they will leave you alone unlike reddit

I propose to conduct following experiment: we close a cat with juicy beef steak and juicy lettuce. We remove the owner and all people from that room: we only watch that cat with cameras. Guess what will be eaten :-)?

LOLOL

HaHaHa! Well done #threadiverse. The system mostly works. As a vegan and dog father, I watched this play out and found it both funny and instructive. Hell hath no fury like a cat owner on the moral high ground.

I understand that nothing is forcing me to remain on this instance, so I require no reminder, but every single new pinned "all" post that I see at the top of my feed makes me dislike this instance more and more.

I haven't encountered a single admin here that I don't dislike. Every feature that is added is pointless. (Most recently, the "media bias" bot or whatever you call it.) Just waiting for ads now. There shouldn't need to be a "misinformation" section in the handbook. If someone doesn't like that being vegan the right way is good for you, they can block the community they think is offending them.

Pointless.

Vegans causing controversy. This is my complete lack of surprise.

Good to know admins wont ever face any consequences

Will your next statement address the existence of a bot that lets community moderators site-ban and IP blacklist accounts without any appeal process?

Between the MediaBiasFactCheck and this bot how much power does Rooki have over the instance?

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.

As soon as someone in a position of power shows their willingness to use that power to further their own agenda in any way, rather than for the benefit of the community, they should immediately and unequivocally have that power withdrawn.

Rooki has showed us all who he is, and what he is willing to do with power. He has not felt any consequences. In future, he’ll just be more cautious with how he abuses his power.

Using the Hippocratic oath as a guide is stupid. It only applies to medical personnel that take the oath, and medical personnel haven't taken that oath since at least the 60s because it actually has a lot of unethical shit incompatible with modern morality. For example, the original Hippocratic oath is against abortion. Does that mean that Lemmy is anti-abortion now? It also forbids surgery for kidney stones, are the admins certified to make this kind of medical decisions.

Just write or choose a good ethical framework that is actually relevant for the management of online communities. There's better, more modern shit out there that also includes the principle of do no harm. Lemmy.World is handled by amateurs.

So, because removal is too much punishment there'll be no punishment at all, even now in the second draft of damage control.

They could remove the moderator's ability to post for a period of six months. But, they've not chosen it.

Seems it's time to go.

Tl:dr "Just trust us. We'll totally come to a consensus at some point eventually, pinky sware. In this case, despite the admin being a pompous sack of duck vaginas, we're not going to do anything about their censorship. We're probably going to continue censoring things we don't like in the future, but only when we agree on it with 0 public comment."

Yw

Wtf? An essay on cat’s diet? Is this becoming reddit? Please tell me no

The reactionary vegan hate is real.

The comments were removed for violating our instance rule against animal abuse

I really don't get this point. With the same logic, you can remove any person giving meat to their cat, or more generally, eating meat themselves. No matter how much most people try to ignore it and not think about it, the absolute overwhelming majority of meat is produced in absolutely cruel and gruesome circumstances, which every pet owner would consider torture.

(Edit: And for the record, I'm not even vegan myself (and also don't own a cat), just calling out the hypocrisy.)

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.

There's a very simple solution to all of this. Just require the user upload a form showing that their dog or cat consented to being converted to veganism in defiance of their very nature 👍

lol Lemmy turning into reddit with its "amazing" moderators and ban hammers. not surprised.

we investigated ourselves and found no wrong doing

There are so many ignorant comments of people not realizing that you can feed cats a plant-based diet with taurine.

so this is an endorsement of animal abuse from the admins?

Funny seeing carnivors arguing over whats animal abuse an whats not.

Like you would have fucking clue ?

Tldr: we will do more internal talks, was right just needed to tell mods why they were removed, just talk to admins if happens again so we can quietly handle it.

This is what you came up with after all that time?