This post was approved by the administration and is posted collectively under our name
Lemmygrad becomes what you make of it. We strive to be a disciplined Marxist-Leninist space, not a second Reddit.
For some time, we have noticed a lack of discipline taking hold on Lemmygrad. This isn’t a space to get a quick quip in before dipping out, or to admonish someone for not sharing your opinions. This is a space to grow. To discuss things you can’t discuss elsewhere, ask thoughtful questions, and submit your ideas for comradely consideration, with the understanding that others will engage with them in the same spirit.
Clarifying what “be respectful” means in practice
Our sitewide rule 3 states: “Be respectful. This is a safe space where all comrades should feel welcome; this includes a warning against uncritical sectarianism.”
We need to clarify what “respect” means here, in the context of a disciplined political space. It’s not just politeness; rule 3 extends to disciplinary failures in engagement, including:
- Making undisciplined, low-effort comments, especially in tense or theory conversations.
- Entrenching oneself to prove a point rather than to discuss an idea.
- Insulting or disparaging comrades.
- Trolling or acting in bad faith.
- Refusing to budge on one’s held beliefs and lashing out as a consequence.
From now on, we will enforce this rule more heavily. This is also a moment of self-criticism: in wanting to be hands-off and promote self-moderation, we have let things slide that we shouldn’t have. To address this, we are recruiting more community mods and discussing adding new admins alongside making this post.
The core principle: struggle against ideas, not individuals
This is the foundation of comradely struggle. If you can’t make a comment without resorting to pettiness, strawmanning, or attacking the individual instead of pointing out the flaws in their ideas, we urge you to step back. Not everything needs an immediate reaction.
Conversely, you are expected to start discussions in good faith so that you receive the same treatment.
Why draw this distinction? Debates struggle against individuals, using underhanded tactics to “win” in front of an audience. Our method is to struggle against incorrect ideas, with the goal of helping each other grow and develop our place in the struggle.
A concrete historical example
During the Long March, Bo Gu was removed from command of the Red Army at the Zunyi Conference. Mao and others argued that Bo had rigidly applied USSR Red Army tactics, leading to excessive, avoidable losses against the KMT.
The decision wasn’t about the committee liking Mao more. It was a recognition that the tactics were incompatible with reality and needed to change. Crucially, was Bo Gu solely to blame? No. He had been put in command by the Politburo, which shared responsibility for believing those tactics would work. This wasn’t primarily an individual moral failing, but a collective responsibility for a flawed line that needed correction. Notably, Bo Gu continued to work alongside Mao and Zhou afterwards.
This is our model. We critique the line, the strategy and the idea – not the comrade’s worth. Leave the ego at the door. We work for the community, we don’t commandeer it.
New policy in moderation
Guided by this principle, our moderation will change.
We will now more readily delete comments that break rule 3, and we will use short, temporary bans (1-2 days) more often as a “cooling-off” period. These bans may be local to a specific community or instance-wide at our discretion.
We know nobody likes bans, but experience shows these short breaks effectively defuse tense situations. We also count on mods to use this tool within their communities. If a dispute spills outside of the original comment chain, we will consider it harassment and issue longer bans.
We also want to add a word in regards to serial downvoting. Downvotes can be used as harassment, and we urge you to consider before issuing a downvote on a post or comment. Ask yourself: is it helpful to downvote? Is it productive? What does it communicate?
These standards also apply to users from other instances. We expect you to apply them when you post on Lemmygrad.
Your responsibility and how to report effectively
We appreciate your cooperation if a temp ban is issued to your account. If it happens, the best thing you can do is reflect on it privately (or with comrades if you feel so inclined) and then move on from it. Making a post to complain about a ban after it’s passed has shown through experience that it’s rarely productive - this is not us telling you not to appeal to be clear, just that the best thing you can do is to simply carry on after a ban. So thank you for cooperating with the admin team and the community on this.
Moderation is a partnership. When you report something, we see only the specific content, your username, and your reason in the report. Understanding the full context requires significant labor. Therefore, your role is critical:
- Your first tool should be disengagement. Step away from unproductive conversations. You do not need to have the last word.
- When reporting, provide context. Explain why in the reason box. What happened, and why exactly are you making a report? Reports used as a “super-downvote” or for revenge don’t help.
- Understand that we see this from an outside perspective. We can’t know how you feel in the moment of a heated conversation, and through experience we find that usually both parties have some blame by the time we get the report. This is why we ask you to step away and report instead of participating in a conversation that is spiraling out of control.
tl;dr: commenting and posting on Lemmygrad ought to be thoughtful, principled, good faith and Marxist in nature. Diamat means that both parties should abide by these principles with the other to make a new dialectic emerge.
Please feel free to ask questions in the comments.
Very valid questions and while I hope my co-admins will chime in (I promise it was submitted for review and the half that is active on the matrix approved of it lol) I can offer a first response.
In the first phase we hope that this post will do enough as a reminder to cut down on this behavior that we’ve noticed and we won’t have to step in too much. We trust in the community to self-moderate but there have been excesses that we have let slide that we shouldn’t have.
In general we want this to be a principled ML space where people put effort in, so unhelpful or low-effort comments will likely be moderated more heavily in the described situations. Don’t forget the dialectic: to be antagonistic means to have broken rule 3 first, which is why dialectically both parties ought to remain disciplined in exactly what they are attacking and disagreeing with, and therefore put some effort and thought in what they decide to post. This, if successful, should work out by itself. We won’t do ‘zero tolerance’ e.g. someone replying to an insult with an insult would receive the same reprimand.
I can’t give specifics on this but we are aware of what goes on on the website so if this sort of situation happens I feel confident saying that we’ll figure them out.
This is a good idea and I wish Lemmy had more moderation tools, we could really use them. On our end unfortunately we depend on what is merged in the Lemmy codebase and don’t want to fork away from it. So more programmers will have to join the project on github and help build out these tools. We only have the tools we have and can only make the best we can with them, but I would definitely appreciate more moderation tools especially as Lemmy is growing. If bans are given out,
Thanks for the reassurances.
That’s fair. I do trust that you keep an eye out in general. I think for me, it’s mostly past experiences causing me to want to pre-emptively bring it up.
The limitations of the tools you have on hand is real. And uh, I’m not sure quite how to put this, but I have to remember that the character of a tool in the hands of principled MLs is not necessarily the same as the character of a tool in the hands of the bourgeoisie, i.e. to use this temp ban thing as an example, a temp ban in other contexts might be intended as a punishment, but you seem to be (can correct me if this misrepresents the intention in any way) wanting to use it as a means of helping with regulating emotional collisions. So in other contexts, a person might be inclined to view it as saying “you did bad” or even “you’re bad” when in this context, there are times it may be intended as simply “hey, cool it, come back when you’re feeling calmer.”
Which is one of those things where existing connotation can get in the way of intention. But it should help that you’re being very clear about the intention going forward. I don’t know if that makes sense, but I think what I’m trying to get at it is the distinction of policing in an ML context vs. otherwise and how important it is for people who are used to policing in a non-ML context to remember that there is a difference.
I like the example you (whoever all put it together) gave BTW, with Bo Gu.
In particular:
This is something I think about now and then, but I don’t always know how to put it into words. The shared responsibility of things, which normally gets neglected under the individualist framework.
There are many many specifics, and I understand (being a user too) that there are questions about what is allowed to say or not and if they’ll suddenly get a ban out of nowhere for making a comment they thought was good, but the admins disagreed (and have the power to enforce that disagrement).
I think most of us [even admins] are trained to see administration on websites or in life as adversarial, only there to put up barriers and admonish us. But this is not how a party should work - lemmygrad is not a party, but we should treat it more like one. It’s not admins vs users, it’s working for the health of Lemmygrad together. You’re right that in some instances it’s good to hash things out, but we also want to prevent having to hash it out. Dialectically these situations spill for a reason, and if we can target the root cause we will overall improve site health.
In the totality, the idea is to redress Lemmygrad culture and show what we are capable of. This requires the userbase as a whole (including the admins, including newcomers who just made an account, including out-of-instance users, etc) to play along and be more mindful of when they might get into - because there have definitely been instances of harassment that, even if the offending user did not feel was harassment, we should have stepped in. So part of the clarification in this post is also to explain how much rule 3 extends and to keep it in mind when posting, because the rule itself can be nebulous to interpret.
This is totally something users can participate in too, this is part of the cooperation angle I mentioned. As part of our ‘life training’ in liberal society we come to believe some things are our responsibility and others are not. all of Lemmygrad is our shared responsibility, and users are completely allowed to step into heated conversations and urge calm or help resolve the issue. Likewise users who step in only to fan the flames and make things worse could legitimately be considered to be wrecking (poisoning the situation instead of helping solve it), even if they don’t realize it. This is why there’s a huge personal aspect to it - how we carry ourselves in a party is not how we carry ourselves in liberal society.
I like that, will try to keep this in mind for myself and for the culture as a whole. Thanks for taking the time to go through it.