Ahoy me hearties!
To run alongside the discussion on the simplified Golden Rules for the instance, I decided to post a separate proposal for a single rule addition.
The proposed rule is: Off topic comments and downvote trolling to protest the use of genAI images is not permitted in our communities.
Edit2: The community feedback has been strongly positive, thanks for all your feedback. Notably, quite a few folks would like it to be more generic, to cater for future scenarios as well. So taking that into account, and adding the rationale for the change, I came up with:
To protect our communities, community members and mods from abuse: no comment trolling, dogpiling, or downvote trolling is allowed.
I hope that works for most folks, and please feel free to leave more comments if you can suggest an improved wording. I do read them all.
It would only apply to communities where GenAI art is not disallowed by the community rules, so mods can opt in or out.
Since the rule will likely attract some pushback from the anti-GenAI crowd, I wanted to run this proposal as a member vote to confirm we have broad support.
Exhibit 1 - dbzer0 Main Sidebar for context
Be Weird, Download a Car, Generate Art, Screw Copyrights
Communities about Anarchism, Generative AI, Copylefts, Neurodivergence, Filesharing, and Free Software.
Our instance has been associated with genAI art since its inception, because the founding admin, db0, has also spent years developing and maintaining FOSS Projects like AI Horde (a crowdsourced distributed cluster of image generation workers and text generation workers) and Haidra.
We have a number of popular genAI communities on our instance including:
Exhibit 2 - The Problem
This is the recent experience of one of our community mods:
“From the moment I started the [redacted] community here people have been brigading it trying to suppress it, and had I not had the sense to ban the droves of anti-AI trolls who come to downvote it into oblivion. They probably would be continuing to do so in insanely large volume. A lot of the users who come to downvote do so with empty no content accounts, but a lot are also trolls from the [email protected] community. I’ve also received a fair amount of harassment including threats and bad faith accusations from it like people saying I’m a pedophile or saying I’m pretending to be nonbinary over the fact that I like and use genAI. Really awful behavior that has no place on this instance of this community.”
This sort of thing is hateful and should not have to be tolerated by our users. Let’s call it what it is: bullying and harassment.
Exhibit 3 - Escalating Problems
If you take look at this post from today in the lighthearted Lefty Memes community, it’s a total shit show of offtopic comments. I’m not going to re-litigate the whole experience here since there is a YPTB post about it here.
This sort of brigading is completely unwarranted and I regard it as hostile bullying behaviour towards our community members and moderators. It completely derails the comments and goes way off topic for the community. Even after repeatedly asking these users to open a meta post about the issues they clearly wanted to talk about, instead of brigading the comments, I was mostly ignored and eventually pretty much gave up on trying to moderate the post.
Conclusion
In summary, as an admin on this instance I’ve noticed a significant uptick in the amount and volume of trolling in our communities by this group of users. I’d like to make sure we have this rule in place so that we can continue to effectively moderate the instance for the enjoyment of our community members, and to protect our moderators and admins from abuse.
Thank you for your consideration. If you have any suggestions to improve the rule, or thoughts on the topic you wish to share, then please do so in the comments.
Edit: for detailed voting information see this post. But in summary, please upvote if you support the rule addition or downvote if you are opposed.
I agree with this. Been considering switching to the instance, but don’t really like all of the AI stuff. I don’t really care about copyright, more about the effect on humanity in a much broader sense and the environment.
I agree also with both your comments. I didn’t realize what I was signing onto when I read the rules. Im on board with everything it stands for, until we get to AI usage. Im not inherently against it, but we should be allowed go discuss it in a mature and productive way. It was easy to ignore before, as if it’s not for you dont interject. As this topic has reached the center of the instance, it’s now become more difficult to ignore.
Someone told me the other day, it was mitual aide to ban speech that was anti-ai, and that I likely never had anarchist ideals if I was against its use (big wut?) Whereas, I believe mutual aide would be to uplift smaller artists, and not using billionaire technology that actively steals from folks without permission, tracks our data, and harms the environment.
I believe AI can be too easily used by the “upper” classes to disenfranchise the “lower” ones, to that hold power, its not anarchist.
I don’t want to leave this instance as I love everything else it stands for.
Edit: Then of course the first thing I see on YouTube
more perfect union
Like, this isn’t just about being copyleft, this is detrimental to our country’s earth piece. Corporate overlord shit.
I been punk too many decades you to tell me data centers align with human existence and free use.
If you wanna use AI, you are indeed free to do so, I dont think your wrong for doing so, however I suggest and expect you vet the technology you choose to engage with, so that is ethical to your best knowledge.
In a free society, where today we have threat to climate change, now met here, with deregulation, AI falls so far down the list for me. We don’t yet have free society. It’s like, why are we going to space when the planet is dying? There’s so much poverty and pain and power being held over others I want to puke at the idea of data centers leaking horror into the earth, and they’re not the only ones who do so as such. Corporate filth. I used to make the cable filler for wires that ended up with google running lines under the ocean. Extruded plastic, fucking dirty shit.
Thats it. That’s the last I will ever engage on the topic. I am staying here, I don’t know how to change an instance, nor do I care too. I like the learning that I get from all you folks out there. I’ve now said my piece to anyone who care to see.
Thank you for sharing your views!