this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2024

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218

A note on Universal Monk: (lemmy.world)

submitted 23 hours ago* (last edited 23 hours ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

138 comments fedilink hide all child comments

So we've seen the complaints and the reports and boy oh boy are there complaints and reports.

I've discussed the account with the other mods and admins multiple times, and while we agree the volume is a lot, it doesn't point to a botfarm or multiple people using the account.

Obsessive? Absolutely, but not technically rule breaking... Until today.

Today they indescriminately posted the same story three times from three different sources apparently solely to flood the channel showing a decided lack of judgement.

It's a valid story from a valid source, the original has been kept here:

https://lemmy.world/post/21098916

The others have been removed as duplicates.

I'm also applying a 15 day temp ban on the account.

"15 days? That's oddly specific! What's in 15... OH!"

top 50 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 hours ago

Another perfect example of the dude being completely a not-troll and just innocently neurodivergent in these comments:

https://lemmy.world/post/21123227

...right @[email protected] ?

They clearly make all these weird communities so they can not answer to any mods and they can control the narrative.

They are making Lemmy worse. They are violating rules 4. The mods can deny it all they want, but if you read this very thread, it's clearly not just me saying it and it's not just their shitty opinion we don't like.

They are looking to stir shit and maybe influence an election, and 99% of the time gotten away with it Scot free. We cannot handwave away the fact that they've spent around 2 hours a day just writing posts. That means something. And it means something that practically everyone hates what they're doing. And the stats I've been posting speak volumes.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago) (1 children)

This is really timely - I am sharing a screenshot that may be important.

UniversalMonk appears to have created an alt last week, UbiquitousMonk. I saw an initial flurry of posts following the UniversalMonk format 12 minutes after it happened, but knew it was a different account and not just a rename because I had to re-add my "propaganda" tag in my Connect app.

I commented just noting the flurry of third-party posts as odd, and they responded with something in Russian. Then everything was deleted, comments and posts.

I don't know if that was meant as satire, if it was the same poster, or - maybe - a mistake and the Russian text is evidence of a misinformation campaign origin. I'm sharing the comment screenshot for mod visibility.

Edit: sorry, I can't embed this image, so here's the link: https://imgur.com/a/9wzgSxR

[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

Pretty sure it was a gag, I banned it as soon as I saw it.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 hours ago

Ah, ok. Yeah, the comment seemed hard to judge but the account was so similar to UM's modus operandi that I wanted to raise it just in case.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

That boii went super saiya-cringe mode.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

[–] [email protected] 16 points 12 hours ago

This is a perfect representation of them.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 13 hours ago

You gotta know they’re absolutely loving this shit right now. An entire post dedicated only to them? Where they are the topic of discussion? That’s probably the biggest badge of honor someone like them could earn here.

I’d wager it’s bookmarked and will be read several times a day for months to come.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 15 hours ago (2 children)

Oh holy fuck it's only 15 days away! Anxiety!

Also having seen the guy, makes sense you can't ban bad takes (or at least, shouldn't) but my sense is he just likes to be infamous. Hell, this is a post about his banning, even! He's probably loving the attention.

Still, I've got my Lemmy heroes

obsessive posting can be used for good, like a certain maneuver named after a certain starship captain.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 hours ago

Yeah you're right. Notice no one is trying to get those folks banned

[–] [email protected] 11 points 11 hours ago

like a certain maneuver named after a certain starship captain.

Ahh, yes! The Janeway Shuffle!

[–] [email protected] 21 points 15 hours ago

"I'll keep posting what I want, when I want, where I want, and respond to people how I want. Whether it is "working" or not. Thank you!" - Monk

This is when I realized it was all in bad faith and I stopped giving him the benefit of the doubt.

[–] [email protected] 72 points 22 hours ago (4 children)

Are you familiar with toxoplasmosis? The disease that mutates into different forms so a bunch of different animals can host it and pass it along.

This is a long article but it's really good, it's worth a read and it predicted a lot of the discourse of the last decade: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage/

The sort of gist of it is this: the more grey area / ambiguity in a topic, the more we pop our own identity into our stance on it. And so if that thing is controversy, we argue about it so much more if there's room to self-insert our identity in that grey area. It spreads and spreads to a bunch of different hosts. It becomes a meme via argument by infecting a bunch of hosts to pass it along.

And that's Monk.

Pretty early on, it was very clear that they had no actual understanding of the topics they were talking about. I tried in their first few weeks to engage with them and so did others. Only to find nothing there. No opinions, and all counter-arguments were clearly copy & pasted off of Wikipedia. Things like "we have X amount of members in Maine".

Please.

Eventually they stopped trying to engage altogether, and instead moved into a deliberate pattern of line-toeing retorts. None in good faith. But, more importantly, never with enough substance to interrupt the ensuing argument, while simultaneously always enough comment traffic to perpetuate the thread.

Monk is a memetic toxoplasmosis source vector. Through pure ineptitude or irony, I think they've accidentally turned more people against third parties than for them, but maybe that isn't their goal.

Even now there's an undercurrent of "I don't think I even disagree with them". Well, how could you? They haven't said anything worth disagreeing with, have they? What have they said, though? Not much. Nothing recognizable as an opinion in defense of the third party articles. Often, just enough to establish a veneer of plausible deniability.

It's a sophisticated form of trolling and it's recognizable to anyone with a long history of community management online. There are some people who never seem to be directly at fault for things, yet every single time you remove them, the temperature goes down.

You don't need to actually build a case against these people to know that the equation is simple: when they're around, everyone is angry. When they aren't, people get along better.

Anyway, my point is this: you can tell who is contributing in good faith and who isn't, because they will attempt to say what's on their mind. It might be the worst take you've ever heard in your life, but it has a concretion to it. Monk has no concrete substance, they simply like to stir the pot.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 14 hours ago

Absolutely agree with this and for this reason, in my opinion, they really should be instance-banned. They contribute nothing that anyone else isn’t already doing. And they’re absolutely doing it in bad faith.

So good riddance to bad rubbish.

[–] [email protected] 43 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 19 hours ago)

Agreed. They are being intentionally passive aggressive and they are trying to create discord in this community. They often say that they expect downvotes.

IMHO, if a user is repeatedly trying to get a rise from other users, then it’s time to go.

It’s like a little bother holding a finger to your face and saying “I’m not touching you.” They’re following the rules and not hitting their sibling, but know they’re being a pest.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 17 hours ago

upvoting for well articulated nuance

[–] [email protected] 19 points 21 hours ago

You've pretty much nailed it.

[–] [email protected] 68 points 22 hours ago (3 children)

HOW do you post here 1.9k times in two months? I have like 7 posts in over a year and I feel somewhat active.

I’m not complaining about any decisions mods have made, I’m legitimately asking cause that seems crazy. 32 posts a day is a LOT.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 18 hours ago

32 posts a day is a LOT.

Honestly, that's not even that impressive... It's only 4 posts per hour over a 8 hour work day, which is completely achievable if Internet trolling is your hobby of choice.

What's really impressive is the number of comments. I won't speculate on Monk's motives (out of fear of running afoul of this community's rules) except to say that they seem extremely motivated to argue with anyone and everyone who posts a disagreeing comment. Their tactic is to bicker with any dissenting voices (without actually engaging with their arguments) to the point of exhaustion so that no one will bother engaging anymore — a very specific strategy I have to imagine is designed to shift the Overton window a particular way.

Fortunately, their efforts seem to have been mostly ineffective given the number of people around here who continue to call out their BS. So keep fighting the good fight, I guess!

[–] [email protected] 9 points 15 hours ago* (last edited 15 hours ago)

Have you not seen that Dot person? They post like 50 news posts a day. The accounts days old and already has about 100 submissions.

[–] [email protected] 39 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

I told them in PMs that, as a mod, I self limit to 3 posts a day for fear of being seen as putting my thumb on the scale and influencing the discourse.

And that's in the groups I mod(!)

He's over that by a factor of 10+

[–] [email protected] 26 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

I don't know what his deal was but anyone who is that gleefully belligerent when confronted by people who don't like what he's doing isn't really anyone I want around. Coincidently, I blocked him today. I don't think he was doing anything wrong other than sheer volume of one-note posts. But I got tired of all the comment sections being about him. And I think I've absorbed enough of his point of view for a time.

For all I know he was just trying to keep folks riled up enough to vote. But those posts didn't add to the value of the community IMO.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 19 hours ago

For a while I didn't block them b/c I wanted to see what and how much they were posting. The shtick was indeed getting old and after seeing the glut of posts today, I blocked them. Enough is enough and I know what they are about.

Trolling. Trolling and disinformation.

[–] [email protected] 32 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

I’ve handled users like this similarly in some of the communities I head up here. I try not to touch the content unless it is obvious misinformation and that violates instances rules. That said, if their content and or comments are clearly intended to create discord, pester, or pester in a passive aggressive manor, then they get the boot.

I wish we had some sort of sort filter that hid aggressively downvoted content and comments. That way the “knights of the new” could bury problematic content.

People don’t like the idea of mods having to censor users, but they also don’t want their feed full of downvoted posts or infighting.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 15 hours ago (2 children)

It would be a nice Lemmy feature if posts and comments under, say, -20 were auto-collapsed. That would allow people to still see unpopular content without everyone having to wade through it.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 15 hours ago

That's totally doable by clients. Not sure why they don't all include that feature. It's so basic.

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[–] [email protected] 67 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 22 hours ago) (42 children)

Good they have been trolling us for a while. Also, thank you for your efforts and you are appreciated.

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[–] [email protected] 56 points 22 hours ago (13 children)

Firstly, thank you for that ban. Did you notice the duplicate section in my comment? Low effort comments, dismissiveness, refusing to engage in good faith even when someone treats him very respectively, and copy-pasting the same responses many times is only one of several signs this is a troll. This behavior breaks rule 4.

No memes, trolling, or low-effort comments. Reposts, misinformation, off-topic, trolling, or offensive.

I do not understand how anyone could possibly look at the evidence I provided and say "nah, not a troll".

For your convenience:

Top 10 duplicate (total 617 exact and 318 fuzzy, 70% or more similar) submissions from [email protected] found.

spoiler 'Thank you!' x 27

'Yep!' x 24

spoiler 'k' x 23

'Agreed!' x 21

spoiler 'I don't know what you mean.' x 20

'I don't have to explain anything to you. Thanks!' x 14

spoiler 'Right?' x 13

'Every vote for Harris is stealing a vote from thir...' x 12

spoiler 'Exactly!' x 11

'To cut through the nonsense and save everyone time...' x 10

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

How did you generate this report?

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

It's a script I wrote. I'm planning to open source it soon. Should I send you a link when it goes up?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 hours ago

Yes please!

[–] [email protected] 45 points 22 hours ago (7 children)

I want to second this. I understand the mods prefer a case-by-case approach, but I think that leaves a very specific pathway for bad actors to exploit. Monk was posting a purely insane amount of comments along with a very high but not as insane number of posts, and almost all of it was low-value, and often copy-pasted from a previous comment.

Do the mods even have easy access to the kind of data your script was pulling? I think that may be part of the issue is that the mod tools with Lemmy are lacking/limited.

[–] [email protected] 35 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

He had a standard copypasta for people accusing him of being a troll. If that’s not trolling I don’t know what is

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

The number of comments/posts makes me think they're getting paid per comment or post (or maybe per reply?)

In any case, I still find it funny that in one of their earlier posts I called Stein a Russian stooge and they took personal offense to that. (for a moment, I wondered if maybe they were stein.)

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[–] [email protected] 39 points 23 hours ago (14 children)

I think the bigger issue here is the indiscriminate obvious trolling.

The fact that it took "bad judgment" and not the reading between the lines for their sealioning and bad faith arguments and faux "friend" comments points towards the need for strengthening our community standards.

Allowing people to come in and troll under the guise of "I'm following the rules lolololol" makes the mods look like rubes.

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