What do people think about advertising like this on lemmy? Should it be allowed? Could it be stopped? - eviltoast

This is the second advertising post I’ve seen on lemmy and they were both today. I’m wondering how other people feel about it or if they’ve even seen posts like this?

Personally I’m livid and hate seeing it here. One of the things that attracts me to lemmy is the donation based, volunteer run, distributed, open access nature of it. I don’t want it to become profit driven and I really don’t want to see companies in what I belive should be a purely social endeavour. I really think making it profit driven will ruin it, if that means it stays smaller then I’m okay with that.

Now I know I can block them and move on which is what I’ve done. I’m also pleased to say that both posts I saw were heavily downvoted and I did my part too.

I’m curious if other people agree with me and don’t want advertising like this on lemmy? Also, what do people think we can actually do about it if we don’t want it around? Petition instance admins to ban advertising accounts? Then how do we define one? Can anything actually be done or do I just have to block and move on from a possibly ever increasing flow of advertising until I get bored and move on?

Sorry for the long rambling post and thanks if you read this far.

    • 312@lemm.eeEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      Sure, it’s manageable now, but it quickly won’t be if Lemmy continues to grow the way it currently is. “Add mods in the future” is kind of a hand-wave of the problem, which is that you need mods who are:

      • fair and responsible
      • willing to dedicate (potentially large) amounts of time and energy to moderating
      • willing to moderate for free

      That disqualifies a large swath of people from moderation.

      Now of course, it’s possible and it’s happened before, Reddit has a huge number of dedicated unpaid mods and it’s because of them Reddit was able to grow to the platform it was.

      But it’s a little more complex than “throw more people at the problem” when you need people who are incentivized by something other than payment.

      The unfortunate problem is that once you remove money from the equation, power is the closest great incentivizer. And power hungry mods are bad mods.