the Ozma one is low hanging fruit because the mod who did the ban said in precise language that it was being done in an effort to control the narrative

That's not at all what he said. He said, more or less, that Ozma had indicated that he was deliberately trying to control the narrative. Specifically, he said he was seeking out anti-Biden stories and posting them as a sort of semi-automated process, just as many as he could find, to bring "balance" or something along those lines to the narrative. He wasn't all that concerned with whether the stories were true -- just "which side" of the narrative they supported.

Like I said, I actually don't agree with that being a good reason for banning him, although I do agree he should have been banned. To be honest I think the design of a lot of Lemmy's systems, moderation included, is just fundamentally broken. If someone wants to come in and manipulate the narrative (which again was what ozma specifically said he was trying to do), there's not any good way to prevent them, which is a problem.

Also like I said I think if you study this objectively you will see that mod abuse works the opposite of the way you're thinking that it does. I think the vast majority of mods that are trying to manipulate the narrative are ones most people haven't heard of, that are quietly finding reasons to ban anyone who argues too loudly with return2ozma or whatever. But I'm happy to see the data. Personally, after having looked at the way the systems fit together and how people try to abuse them on both sides of the user/moderator divide, and done a certain amount of your same type of numerical analysis, I think the right thing to do is more or less to just throw a lot of the core concepts away (or, maybe better, layer some better core concepts on top of them and bring moderation back to its role as just keeping the porn / spam away and try to depend on higher-level constructs to keep debates on track.)

But it would be important to getting a complete picture to also look at someones posts and maybe try and look at how that impacts narratives.

IDK if you really need to do this. You're welcome to, but I feel like instead of spending any significant time trying to prove any particular way that the existing systems are broken, just accepting that they (in particular the "mods are gods" model) are broken, and trying to make something better, might be a better way.

I thought today partly because of this conversation about making a politics community which was something along the lines of:

This community works differently to how most politics communities work. It has strict rules designed to facilitate productive discussion. You can be rude, to a point, but you can't participate in bad faith:

• If you claim someone said something they didn't say, that's a temp ban.
• If you make a factual claim but then aren't interested in backing it up, that's a temp ban.
• If you're asked one or two reasonable questions about what you said, and you're still talking but you're pretending the questions didn't happen, that's a temp ban.

The idea is to make the discussion productive. Let's see how it works. Maybe this is a fool's errand but IDK how any set of moderation could be worse than lemmy.world.

Other misc rules:

• Reliable sources only.
• No image / video posts.
• Self posts for discussion are fine.
• No personal insults.
• No racism / transphobia / related bigotry.

In that world, you'd be able to ban return2ozma the first time he posted an article about how Biden did some horrifying thing that he objectively didn't do, and someone asked about it in the comments, and ozma said "IDK I'm just trying to bring balance" and posted 5 more articles. For me, I would vastly prefer that over the current moderation structure where it is sort of arbitrary rules and the comments are mostly a bad faith free-for-all where the mods' actions don't really do all that much beyond keeping obvious death threats and things away.

Can you sense the salt in my overall feelings lol