In Runescape, if you abuse the report function to try and punish a player that isn’t breaking any rules, you’re the one who’s punished instead.
It’s a great system that causes people to think before they hit report.
Most other services don’t do this, and it results in ‘dogpiling’ reports. This means that people will report someone because they disagree or don’t like them, and if enough people do that then the mods will ban that person “just because.”
Are there any lemmy communities that try to combat this nonsense by penalizing those who abuse the report system?
I’d love to see the scumbags who try to use censorship to support their own agenda get a taste of their own medicine.
Back when I was actively moderating one of the larger subreddits, erroneous or malicious reports were basically blips. They happened, but no one mod had to deal with a deluge of them so it was pretty easy to just dismiss the report and move on.
It was on the smaller, more political sub that I saw the report system abused as a super-downvote. But again, easy enough to reapprove the targeted comment and move on. Since reports were anonymous on reddit, there was rarely a chance to chide the offenders, unless they bragged about it.
This is just not the issue you think it is.