this post was submitted on 19 Nov 2023
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Should we remove this Buskill ad? (Got 4 reports against it) (monero.town)
submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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https://monero.town/post/1144305

Bicoin Black Friday: BusKill (Open-Source Hardware Dead Man Switch) Announces 10% Discount

There are 4 reports saying this is spam, and it is indeed cross-posting link spam, and feels slightly excessive but not extremely so (?).

The thing is, Monero.town doesn’t forbid ads, and freedom of speech is important even if what is said is unpleasant for me or for someone else. Thoughts?

Edit: Since someone has appointed me as a mod in !privacy, where https://monero.town/post/1144305 is, I can remove it, except I don’t want to remove anything unless really necessary. The lack of guidelines about ads in monero.town means, the OP didn’t do anything against the rule(s).

I couldn’t remove the new one in !moneromarket https://monero.town/post/1142415 Not sure if @[email protected] thinks it’s bad enough, either. Monero is censorship-resistant, meaning we tend to hate deleting someone else’s speech/expression just because it’s subjectively disagreeable.

Given that Monero is money after all and some for-profit services are useful for its users too, probably commercial posts (ads) should be allowed in general, if not excessive. And BusKill ads are not excessive in terms of frequency, like only once a month.

Perceived link spamming (self-promotion) advertising SimplifiedPrivacy has been also noticed by many including myself, which has been like once or twice a week, and explicitly questioned here ( https://monero.town/post/1085883 ); but many (including myself) think these posts can be useful nevertheless, the poster being knowledgeable.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

Sorry folks, just seeing this. Obviously I do not think I've posted spam.

  1. I only post at most one link per month. I have no idea how one could consider publishing content that infrequently to be spam.
  2. I post once in every relevant community on lemmy. Again, that's not spam; that's the nature of the fediverse. As there's so many "world news" communities, I am pretty annoyed when users don't take the time to post a link to an important news story to all of the "world news" comms.
  3. Obviously many communities found value in my posts, as can be seen by the upvotes.

I make an effort to only post to communities that I think the article is relevant-to. But If someone thinks that an article is not relevant to the community in which it was posted, they can downvote it. That's what the button is for.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I can see your points but see @admin’s comment below: if you massively cross post using your monero.town account repeatedly, Monero.town itself might be blocked by other Lemmy instances. So please don’t over do it. One compliant was that your post was not phone-friendly.

As long as you only post in Monero.town infrequently, that should be fine. As you can see, I didn’t want to delete your posts easily and somehow they’ve been kept. Ultimately, though, admin has the final say.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

Can you elaborate on the phone-friendly point? I spent a long time translating it to markdown so the contents would be lemmy-native and also the source article's website is responsive.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

I’ve already sent you (in PM) everything I got. One report reads, “Reason: spam, unreadable on mobile. seriously guys, do better.” Not clear what they meant by “unreadable on mobile” but perhaps your post was too long or having too many big pictures, movies, etc.

It’s not like I’m personally criticizing you or your post. But the fact remains that several people were unhappy with it and that the admin has the final say, so I suggest you read admin’s comment, which makes sense too.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

A policy like r/monero's makes a lot of sense. It's like the tolerance/intolerance paradox - you can't be so anti-censorship that you let randos flood a space and drown out everyone else's voice (thus censoring everyone else). There's a line between informative and abusive posting frequency.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Right. Idealism doesn’t always work.

In this specific case, though, it feels unfair to suddenly give them a severe punishment, as they didn’t do anything against the rules when posts were made, monero.town had accepted their posts for a few months, @maltfield was never given a warning; some users even found Buskill interesting/fun and posted positive comments at first.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

Current Status 2023-11-19 23:00Z (Any comments would be appreciated)

  1. Some of these posts by our fellow user @[email protected] were removed by mods in several instances (lemmy.ml, lemmy.one, lemmy.world, etc.). Modlogs:

  1. Even in these instances, not all of their posts were removed. For example https://lemmy.ml/post/4403541 from 3 months ago was well accepted, and is still kept. Maybe @maltfield is not a “pure spammer” and we can discuss with them in a civil manner, ask them not to overdo it.

  2. The said user even got (2-month?) bans from certain instances. I wouldn’t like to ban/block a fellow Monero supporter from monero.town. At the same time I don’t want people from other instances to see monero.town as a “bad” place. (Hopefully people are rational enough not to assume @maltfield represents typical Monero users/privacy advocates.)

  3. Some other instances did not (yet?) remove @maltfield’s posts in question. E.g. our friendly instance [email protected] still keeps yesterday’s BusKill post: https://lemmy.one/post/6940197

  4. I PM’ed @maltfield ~8 hours ago, explaining the situation, asking “Speak up now if necessary.”

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

Thanks for PMing me. I've left my comments here

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

...They are selling a magnetic USB cable as a Killswitch?

If that's true... Yeah... Fuck that. That's spam and a shitty company.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Similar posts by the same user @maltfield were accepted in the past: https://monero.town/post/131992 https://monero.town/post/131986 https://monero.town/post/478694

The idea itself could be interesting and thought-provoking. Personally I wouldn’t like to be oppressive, removing posts easily; but this time, https://monero.town/post/1144305 it seems somewhat excessive too. Any advice? I’m new here, though technically a mod. @[email protected] @[email protected]

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Thanks for bringing this to my attention. I'd be in favor of removing it, for what it is worth. A follow-up direct message might be a good idea as well.

We might consider adding a third rule, perhaps? Wonder why we both got assigned as moderators. I think the community creator deleted their account before doing so.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (2 children)

They double-posted a new one https://monero.town/post/1142415 in !moneromarket.

The only applicable rule is “No spamming or off-topic ads.” Maybe we can remove it from !privacy, while keeping it stay in !moneromarket (up to admin/its mods), to which this ad more properly belongs?

  • Positive: This BusKill thing, also sold via ProxyStore, may be legit (it does what it says it does). https://shop.proxysto.re/conf/914 Sketchy but mildly interesting. More or less related to privacy and Monero, it’s not totally off-topic in !privacy; their ads were accepted in !moneromarket a few times already.
  • Negative: Their ads are cross-posted to ~10 communities and repetitive though infrequent; having the nature of spamming.

Thoughts: I’d against the idea of “powerful moderation” where self-righteous mods check every post closely and easily remove ones they don’t like. Also, “reported by 4 users” shouldn’t be a general criterion. If it was, a malicious person having 4 accounts could try to kill any post this way. In this specific case, reports are most probably genuine & really appreciated.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Posting the same thing to 20 different communities is spam imo, even if they aren't all on our instance. Stuff like this can get your entire instance banned from federating with others, i don't think this should be supported and the people here seem to agree. There hasn't been a rule so far but we should probably add something similar to r/monero where you can only advertise every 2 weeks as well as limiting reposts to your own community and a limited amount of others (so cakewallet can post to the cake community and monero for example).

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

Since you’re the admin, you have the final say, obviously. @maltfield is a fellow user of monero.town. Apparently their posts were well received once ( https://monero.town/post/478676 https://monero.town/post/132041 ) then became a bit too repetitive and (perceived as) spammy.

we should probably add something similar to r/monero where you can only advertise every 2 weeks as well as limiting reposts to your own community and a limited amount of others

Sounds reasonable.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

In addition to being vouched-for by ProxyStore, we also have the green check box on Monerica. If you have specific criticisms of our product, please let us know. Mostly we've got "you're a scam because everything blockchain is a scam." -- but I would expect better from the monero community.

Not sure how providing journalists, activists, human rights defenders, crypto traders, etc with open-source hardware kill cords makes us illegitimate..