A couple of years ago, before the AI boom, a guy on Reddit was absolutely convinced (to the point that he started Reddit stalking me over it) that I was a rogue AI. At one point, I even took a photo of myself (censoring my face obviously) holding up a napkin with his username written on it in sharpie. He said it was photoshopped.

My point is that once you make this sort of accusation about someone, the conversation is basically over. They'll never convince you that you're wrong and there's no point in talking to them if you're right.

If you believe that another user is a bot, please report it and our mod team will investigate. Please keep in mind that real people really do have radically different points of view. Not everyone who disagrees with you is a bot or troll. Do not abuse the report system.

What about users who clearly aren't literal bots, but seem clearly to be posting in bad faith? I feel like there's going to be a huge grey area between "this needs mod intervention" and "there's nothing hinky about this user's posting"

I completely get the reason for the rule, as it's not a real productive accusation and there's no way to know. I'm one of the people that talk about the shills a lot, but I actually make a deliberate effort (probably without universal success) to draw a distinction between "there are shills here" versus "I think you are being dishonest in some way, and here is why" versus "you are a shill".

Banning the third sounds pretty sensible. Are the first two statements still allowed? Or are those considered uncivil also?

It is blatantly obvious to me that particular users on Lemmy are being some kind of dishonest about their motives. So like an example: Swearing that you want the Democrats to win the election, and you're bringing up bad things about Biden as constructive criticism / so he can fix it and thus not lose the election, but also publishing objectively false disinformation about the Democrats on a very regular, like absurdly regular basis. There are a lot of users who have that weird type of disconnect or other reasons to specifically think they are propaganda accounts of some description. I think it significantly distorts the discussion here in a way which is very much not a good thing.

I actually don't see it being super common that people jump to the accusation of someone being a shill as soon as there's a disagreement. I do think there's such a clear presence of some kind of shilling effort that it's, more or less, universally accepted that it's happening and distorting the discourse. Are we still allowed to talk about it?

Again, while I completely get the reasons for the rule... I feel like a lot of this stuff is hard for mods to be the ones to make mod-action decisions about because it's impossible for anyone with any level of powers to know which users are being honest about who they are. Upvote bots and things are one thing, but I actually don't see that happening all that much (maybe because the mods are on it any time it happens). Just someone making a real account and posting propaganda 10x per day, though... are we saying the mods are going to let that happen (because it's not a bot account) and we the normal users are not allowed to call out those users as doing anything, if in our opinion they're doing it for purposes of propaganda?

Yeah, I'm not a bot. I wrote a tasteful haiku in response to somebody's comment which literally said "write a poem", and it was deleted and I was accused of simultaneously being a bot and a white supremacist because somebody on a nothing website decided a meme Simpson's joke is for Nazi's now. I write haiku sometimes, how about that.

Good idea to make it official, I'll float the idea of applying it to Politics and World News as well.

thank you. this has been a problem since at least November.