I’ve noticed a lot of posts lately that are just spam for slopware, often not even having anything to do with self-hosting. As sad as I am about it, I’m pretty close to unsubscribing to keep spam out of my Lemmy feeds.
Before doing so, though, I wanted to ask if there was any formal policy or rule for the community that could help cut down on thr spam, and if so, what would be most useful for me to do when I see a spam post? That I’d, is the Report button the right tool, is there some other way to let moderators know?
You’re supposed to report posts that break instance or community rules, not whatever you happen to consider to be “bad faith”. You can’t moderate based on intent, only actions, otherwise you’re asking for a thought police where only the popular opinion is permitted to exist.
Besides, even if your instance has disabled downvotes, other instances can still see them.
This isn’t Reddit. Mods aren’t beholden to some set of standards handed down by moneyed interests. They’re real people with (hopefully) common sense and a desire to create something better than Reddit.
That’s my point. If instances like mine can’t see downvotes, it’s excluding people like me, because people can’t be bothered to report. Furthermore, all it is is a popularity contest. “A bunch of people don’t like it” is no guarantee you won’t, nor does it demonstrate that the content is in fact garbage; it just shows a bunch of people don’t like it.
I’d love to know what an actual moderator would think if you imposed your idea on them.
If you mean a mod from this comm, I’d love some clarity on this matter, too.
But as a general application, what would that tell you? Moderators aren’t some special class of people; they’re regular people who volunteer.
The better question is: what would you do if you were a moderator? Would you want to review and remove a post that was potentially AI slop, or would you keep it and let users rely on downvotes and sorting?
For my part, if a particular community’s mods aren’t interested in clamping down on AI slop, then I know where I don’t want to be.