this post was submitted on 12 Jan 2025
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Ye Power Trippin' Bastards
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80 users here now
This is a community in the spirit of "Am I The Asshole" where people can post their own bans from lemmy or reddit or whatever and get some feedback from others whether the ban was justified or not.
Sometimes one just wants to be able to challenge the arguments some mod made and this could be the place for that.
Rules
- Post only about bans or other sanctions from mod(s).
- Provide the cause of the sanction (e.g. the text of the comment).
- Provide the reason given by the mods for the sanction.
- Don't use private communications to prove your point. We can't verify them and they can be faked easily.
- Don't deobfuscate mod names from the modlog with admin powers.
- Don't harass mods or brigade comms. Don't word your posts in a way that would trigger such harassment and brigades.
- Do not downvote posts if you think they deserved it. Use the comment votes (see below) for that.
- You can post about power trippin' in any social media, not just lemmy. Feel free to post about reddit or a forum etc.
Expect to receive feedback about your posts, they might even be negative.
Make sure you follow this instance's code of conduct. In other words we won't allow bellyaching about being sanctioned for hate speech or bigotry.
Some acronyms you might see.
- PTB - Power-Tripping Bastard: The commenter agrees with you this was a PTB mod.
- YDI - You Deserved It: The commenter thinks you deserved that mod action.
- BPR - Bait-Provoked Reaction: That mod probably overreacted in charged situation, or due to being baited.
- CLM - Clueless mod: The mod probably just doesn't understand how their software works.
Relevant comms
founded 5 months ago
MODERATORS
Tiny one-day bans are barely a slap on the wrist, which some people need to help them cool off. The usual caveats apply like perhaps driver a warning first and all of that, but obviously depending on severity you may not want to wait for that to develop further, at which point a quick ban along with explanation should at least, again, allow them the time they need to cool down.
You'd be surprised how seriously people take even a 1-day ban. There's a lot of ND people in these comms who feel passionately about their position, and you can easily hit someone with RSD or with ASD and get a bad reaction. I try to tread lightly because I know how these peeps can be affected but it cannot always be helped unless people have already internalized you're not trying to power-tip but to maintain civility.
Yeah that's a good counterpoint to consider. I think one of the issues is that the only way to implement such is a "ban", which is kind of a scary word. If it were called a "time-out", to "cool off", it could be taken differently, while to call it a "ban" seems so much more serious.
Perhaps a message delivered to them directly, e.g. as a reply, could allow them to see that first rather than just stumble upon the modlog entry later. But I'm not certain how those work: can the recipient still access the community in read-only mode to see that, and is the button to reply greyed out or could they type a long reply but then not be able to deliver it, thereby generating frustration?
And ultimately it's a juggling act: how to handle the needs of individual new (or old) contributors who want to be free to speak, while also showing consideration for those who may not enjoy what the community becomes whenever the former crowd are allowed free reign to do so.
In Reddit we had similar issues of a community trying to be all things to all people. Post flairs helped a bit, like people could literally filter out those that they did not want (e.g., "yet another Lemmy.ml site-wide ban"). Perhaps you could go the route of offering a megathread, allowing people to post such as comments rather than making full posts? Though it was always an eternal struggle to get people to pay attention to such - like just about every single new post to r/Android was always "which phone should I buy", even despite the two other posts within the last hour asking the identical question (perhaps mods removed those, in which case the problem was even more intense as those were simply the ones that made it through the cracks).
But whatever you do, please make it clear in the sidebar what the desires are for the community so that people are aware prior to posting. Like right now it reads to me as being receptive to all instances of potential power tripping mods, similar to AITAH.
You have a keen mind. I trust you to find a vision for the community that you are comfortable with, that will be compatible with what can be implemented in Lemmy:-).