this post was submitted on 22 Feb 2025
72 points (90.9% liked)

Ye Power Trippin' Bastards

855 readers
133 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.

Posting Guidelines

All posts should follow this basic structure:

  1. Which mods/admins were being Power Tripping Bastards?
  2. What sanction did they impose (e.g. community ban, instance ban, removed comment)?
  3. Provide a screenshot of the relevant modlog entry (don’t de-obfuscate mod names).
  4. Provide a screenshot and explanation of the cause of the sanction (e.g. the post/comment that was removed, or got you banned).
  5. Explain why you think its unfair and how you would like the situation to be remedied.

Rules

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.

YTPB matrix channel: For real-time discussions about bastards or to appeal mod actions in YPTB itself.

Some acronyms you might see.

Relevant comms

founded 6 months ago
MODERATORS
db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com
Flatworm7591@lemmy.dbzer0.com
72
Talking to spammy users about not being so spammy anymore? Believe it or not, straight to ban. (ponder.cat)
submitted 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) by PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat to c/yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com
84 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

This one is both upsetting and weird.

So there was a user on ponder.cat who's been spamming posts. Like a lot. 58 per day, on average. Not 58 comments. 58 posts.

I started seeing a little scattering of reports about it, mostly just figured it was the mods' business to deal with, and then finally today I actually really took a look at what they were doing and realized it was way over the top. Pretty much everyone in the comments agreed when someone brought it up.

A 25 day old account with 1,400+ posts? What the actual fuck? My entire goddamn feed is this one account...

Touch grass. Good lord. You're carpet bombing multiple communities with repeats of the same crap.

The user was not receptive.

lol.

I guess people here do not know how to block an account.

:)

Is that a compliment or a rant?

May I introduce you to Lemmy block function.

If you don’t like my posts then block me and you will never see them again. As simple as that.

That's a bunch of bullshit. The voting was about as you would expect. I said to the user:

That's not how it works. If you're interfering with the average Lemmy user's experience, you don't get to claim it doesn't count because each individual person would be able to block each individual problematic account, if they wanted to have a good experience. Honestly, these people have a point. You have been posting an average of 58 posts per day. That's too much. I post a ton, and that's about 10 times more than me, and I've gotten multiple complaints about posting too much in particular communities. The handful of times it's happened, my reaction was "Oh my bad what sounds like an acceptable level" and then to more or less stick to an acceptable level. Getting snarky with people who are asking you to cool it is very bad. Please stop posting so much. Anything about 10-15 posts per day starts to feel really excessive to me. Definitely don't be dismissive about people's complaints to you about it.

They rejected my suggestion, so I sent them a DM that was a little more direct about it: Stop doing this if you want to keep your account on my instance.

Then, for some reason, they deleted their account on their own.

Well, that was weird, but at least it's all resolved and we can all get back to what we were doing. Or wait... what's happening now?

I wasn't expecting "making sure we make a safe space for the spammers by banning people who complain about spam" to be an important moderation duty, but I guess in the bizarro world that is !news@lemmy.world moderation philosophy, it makes perfect sense.

https://lemmy.world/modlog/1347

@Ghyste@sh.itjust.works

top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] nokturne213@sopuli.xyz 31 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I always assumed cat@pondercat was an unmarked bot for your instance.

[–] PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat 12 points 3 days ago

Yeah, I started thinking I should talk with them or ban them or something because they would make me look bad. I actually did send them some DMs recommending that they tone it down, without much result. They solved the problem for me though before I had to decide what to do.

[–] Draconic_NEO@lemmy.dbzer0.com 12 points 3 days ago

PTB, the mods in !news@lemmy.world are really aggressive power-trippers in this current day and age. That's why a hands off approach like what certain servers do where they "choose not to interfere with communities" is not a good approach. Even Reddit has a Moderator CoC. Instance admins can and should hold communities to a certain standard of moderation and ban or reassign moderators which don't or abuse their power.

[–] Ganbat@lemmy.dbzer0.com 20 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

Sounds to me like some moderator wanted those unreliable sources and pieces of propaganda slipped in.

Definitely PTB.

Wow, look at the last removal from that timeframe in the modlog. Someone literally just said they think the other person might be a spam bot and got their post removed for it. There's definitely a mod with an agenda there.

[–] PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat 15 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

Honestly? I think you're right.

With the exception of MBFC bot, every one of these weird disconnects that has arisen between the lemmy.world moderators and the overwhelming majority of the users of lemmy.world, has followed the pattern of "someone is posting propaganda and bullshit, everyone hates it, and the LW moderators are lecturing everyone about how they really need to accept that it's here to stay, because it is allowed, and people who are vocal about having a problem with it are going to get banned." You can see the official mod explanations down below for why this particular (pretty minor TBH) decision was the way it was. The explanations are objectively not true. So what is the actual explanation for the decision?

I've observed on Reddit what happens when clearly bad-faith moderators take over a space to clear the way for it to become a little propaganda home. I think we're observing here the beginnings of that process, where at least some of the mod team is actively working to make a safe space for the propaganda, and they've become ensconced enough to be able to mandate a certain amount of propaganda be part of the space. I actually didn't see Cat's postings as being all that propaganda-y, but there certainly was some amount of it in among the general spam and clutter.

Honestly I think the root of the issue is the whole design where the space is "in the control" of some particular person to do whatever they want with it, and that person has to be a volunteer and so there's always a crushing shortage of people to do it, so it's going to work 100% of the time for someone who wants to put effort into controlling the space to be allowed to have free rein, after a while.

[–] geekwithsoul@lemm.ee 14 points 3 days ago

Reminds me of UniversalMonk - the combative tone, the posting patterns. Not necessarily the same person but definitely following the same playbook.

[–] Mammothmothman@lemmy.ca 13 points 3 days ago (4 children)

Wow lemmy is becoming more like reddit every day.

[–] PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat 15 points 3 days ago

A lot of it seems to be one particular moderator.

Most of the big-name lemmy.world communities have moderation that in my opinion is just kind of clueless, but that might be just a product of having to deal with a neverending flood of hundreds of different issues (not being able to devote any amount of attention to each one of them beyond the most basic possible glance at it.) There is one specific moderator who seems to be consistently at the root of these totally backwards-land decisions though. What the reason for that is, I have no idea.

[–] Maalus@lemmy.world 12 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (2 children)

Lemmy is reddit. Always have been. Including the false superiority complex that somehow comes with both platforms.

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] Rentlar@lemmy.ca 12 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Lemmy.world has always been the most Reddit-like in terms of operation. Most others are reasonable about spam management.

[–] PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat 12 points 3 days ago (3 children)
  • Ban spam: Normal
  • Fail to ban spam: Understandable, maybe not ideal but people get busy
  • Get mad at the people who don't want spam: Okay? Maybe someone's having a bad day
  • Ban the people who don't want spam, delete their comments leaving the spam alone: ???
[–] Ledericas@lemm.ee 3 points 2 days ago

This is what reddit is, report said spam, large subs will ban you in retaliation for " making too many reports or if they feel your reporting is not a reportable offense"

load more comments (2 replies)
load more comments (1 replies)
[–] SatansMaggotyCumFart@lemmy.world 9 points 3 days ago

That sounds just like another pretty infamous user.

load more comments
view more: next ›