15-day ban for reposting removed comments on multiple occasions and even after a 1-day ban. The next one will be permanent.

Thank you.

Public polling is showing that Harris would get a big boost in voter support if she and Biden went for a weapons embargo.

Source?

edit: It’s absolutely amazing to me what y’all will downvote.

The Supreme Court has rejected an emergency appeal from Nevada’s Green Party seeking to include presidential candidate Jill Stein on the ballot in the battleground state.

…you want to use State power to bar a US citizen from running for office because she appeared in a photo, but you’re accusing us of being arbitrary and authoritarian?

The Green party was represented at the Supreme Court by Jay Sekulow, a Trump ally who was part of the president’s legal team during his first impeachment trial.

Yeah sure, it’s the Democrats who are being dubious here…

He’s term limited.

The party doesn’t care about him, specifically. His polling has been under water for months, and anyone who’s not utterly delusional knows he’s about to get thumped by Stein. They’re now worried that if he stays in the race over the next month and a half, he will continue to be a lightning rod for Democratic attacks, especially on abortion, and that’ll continue to dampen Trump’s messaging. Still not convinced NC could go blue, but if it does, Robinson will be hugely responsible for it. He’s a fucking moron who makes Trump look sane and stable.

I heard, “This…motherfu-- former president.”

Removing for editorializing the title, and locked due to multiple violations of Lemmy’s ToS.

Wait, was he the good guy with a gun or the bad guy with a gun?

I argued against the bot for a week. I hated the damn thing, and I pointed to the negative feedback as evidence in my discussions. I also held off on making sweeping assessments or making any rushed decisions because a vote manipulation ring was simultaneously uncovered, and we had no idea how deep the manipulation went. Could the feedback have been manipulated? No idea! Should we go by votes only? No idea!

I took the time to let the team read the feedback and discuss the costs and benefits, and in the end the votes were only part of the picture. Another part is the visceral commitment of a vocal minority to overwhelming the community with commentary (and reports) to such an extent that the people who are calm and supportive get drowned out and downvoted, along with anyone who happens to agree with them. Not entirely sure those folks have committed as much energy to downvoting every critical comment as was the case on the other side though.

The team took 12 days to work through disagreements (there were many) so we could come to a consensus position, and lo and behold, the bot is gone. The fact that the people who want the bot gone feel like they’re being dismissed is flabbergasting to me. It’s gone. Mission accomplished!

Yes it does.

Yeah, we were told they disrupted a downvote ring. I have no fucking idea where those accounts voted, except that we took vote totals with a grain of salt because we were in the dark. I’m frankly used to being bombarded with downvotes every time i comment in this community (edit: One person went out of their way to downvote each of my last 7 comments, for example.). So in my eyes, votes were (and continue to be) compromised, and we were informed about the ring while we were deliberating bot feedback. I tried to connect the dots with incomplete information because I’m not an admin. What else are you looking for here?

Yes, cutting a snippet out of a sentence with broader context is a classic form of bad faith argumentation:

if we’re not allowed to point to votes as a source of valid information, then sorting by “top” is equally invalid.

The “if” conditional is pretty fundamental in that sentence. To cut it out and then paraphrase it to mean something it doesn’t is one of the oldest tricks in the book.

No, in this community. We were told that the admins found a vote manipulation ring in our threads. I don’t have admin level access, so I have no idea where they voted for what.

or that votes on upvoted comments ought to be ignored because of vote manipulation

No one on the mod team said that. If you’re going to appeal that we be honest in our engagement, the least you can do is be honest in yours.

1. Thank you. I don’t have that kind of audit authority and all we were told is that vote manipulation was occurring. We’d love to have you join the team if you’d like to help.

2. We took all of the feedback seriously because the bot is gone. I’m really not sure why people keep pretending like we haven’t already acted on it.

3. That you’d call this “spreading FUD” or"bad faith" is, frankly, insulting. I can only act on the information I have. In the end, I said that manipulation made assessing the situation difficult, but we still followed through accordingly. We are volunteering our time, and you lying about our intentions isn’t helping either.

I only have a few hours per day to devote to this. If you think you can do better, then step up.

Like I explained to you yesterday, none of this feedback has been ignored. We took 12 days to review it, and we acted accordingly.

Maybe. Nothing has been developed yet, so everything is very much up in the air.