this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2024
425 points (89.0% liked)
Ye Power Trippin' Bastards
480 readers
8 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 4 months ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I can't really discuss the actual topic here intelligibly bc I always block [email protected] as one of if not the very first action for every new account I make anywhere across the Fediverse (I simply prefer the alternatives like [email protected] and [email protected]), nor have I looked into the modlog as you have. But may I make a tangential observation, if it's not too annoying for it to be off-topic like this?
Have you seen the actual - albeit dog whistled - calls for violence, naming actual names and showing actual faces? I just saw one in Shitpost (https://lemmy.world/post/22802422), another in Memes, and there are additional cross-posts as well. Similar content or others that likewise extoll the virtues of violence include Comic Strips (https://mander.xyz/post/21552536) showing up in communities all across Lemmy, like here's one that's not the post itself but rather the comment section in Not The Onion (https://midwest.social/post/20083880).
I thought that such calls for violence - as Admiral Patrick calls it somewhere here in the comments of this post, a "lynch mob mentality" - would die down quickly after the election, but it seems quite the opposite instead. So it's a very emotionally charged issue right now. And I even get it, though aside from rightness or wrongness, people each have their preferences as to what they can stomach, and e.g. someone with lived experience through such (like a school shooting event) may not be able to handle all of this.
Anyway I'm glad that you are sharing alternatives, bc no matter what, we need to not be dependent upon a single instance. But I do see where - again, setting aside right vs. wrong - there's a real split across Lemmy right now about how such matters "should" be handled. At which point I agree with you in spirit that there NEEDS to be transparency in the moderation practices (even if, as others have suggested elsewhere here, this particular situation seems to be the result of a single moderator who may have acted overzealously to protect people from the rhetoric). Perhaps you can write a post to the mods or even admins of that instance asking for such, though it would probably be better to wait a week for this all to die down - perhaps the mod in question will apologize, or even be removed, though what you may want instead (but don't let me put words into your mouth) is a clarification to be made to the wording of the community or instance rules. We really can affect the changes that we'd like to see, much of the time. And if/when not, then at least you know that you did your absolute best to try:-).
Edit: even a few hours later, the process has already begun, see e.g. the apology from the mod at https://lemmy.world/comment/13815531.
https://lemmy.world/post/22802422 has been deleted.
https://mander.xyz/post/21552536 is hard to interpret as praising violence IMO - no explanation is given why the pigeon (a typically passive animal) is burning the house.
https://midwest.social/post/20083880) is mostly people cheering on the current events. It does praise violence, but at the same time it acknowledges that CEO as a source of suffering for people.
I do think that mob mentality plays a role, but I don't think that it's the main factor here. People (not just you all in USA, but everywhere) are getting pissed; the ones in power always babbling that things will get better, and yet we don't see it.
I think that the issue is mostly on an admin level, not on a mod level. And based on previous interactions with one of those admins... seriously, I'll pass - at least that one was a bit too eager to distort things to their convenience.
Plus you know, I'm awful at writing this sort of thing down - I write a full wall of text for what would need two lines.
They have their moderation style, you would do differently, and regardless of right or wrong the goal is to match moderation activities to the community desires. But that probably will require additional volunteers to really get off the ground, so that's perhaps something that you could do? Ofc I cannot speak to your condition wrt your life status right now, I just hoped to point to whatever I could to help you realize that you are not powerless nor alone in wanting a sense of justice to be enacted - the trick being whose justice, especially when dealing with global cross-cultural values.
Wherever we go forward from here, it will require effort. And making that list is a good start:-).
I think that it's less about different styles (like being laxer/stricter, sticking more/less to the letter of the rules, etc.) and more about bringing bad habits from Reddit. In Reddit neither your typical non-mod user nor your typical mod gives a damn about the rules - one expects to be able to go rogue unpunished and then punished for something random, while another wants a bullshit reason to get that feeling of power over the others. (Note that I'm talking on typical grounds. There were plenty decent = exceptional mods there, too.)
And, when I say that one of the admins was too eager to distort things to their convenience, I wasn't even referring to my interactions with them as an admin, but just as another user. From Canvas 2025 times [I can give you further context if you want.]
I do know that it'll require effort and a collective one, and I think that we [users in general] should work in that direction. I just think that I'm the wrong person for this specific job, I'm probably better at gathering info - like the lists.
I am trying to break things down into their component parts.
First, your lists are absolutely helpful, for many reasons even those unrelated to this incident, but for helping the Fediverse become less decentralized overall - so thank you for them:-).
Second, I have mostly avoided thinking about the actual admins yet bc I haven't heard anything from them directly yet - though indirectly from the mod in question I did hear that the admins plan to modify the ToS to increase its transparency in relation to such things. It does valid to me that they need to worry about the police 🚨 knocking on their door 🚓, hence panicked a bit when they all that stuff. It's also hard to figure some of that stuff out bc even if Lemmy.World is in - I don't even know where, Germany? UK? France? somewhere in the EU I would suppose - if the USA feds were to ask them to remove it or else face some troubles, what kind of pressure would that place upon them?
Third, the actions of the actual mod in question have given me strong hope for the livelihood of the Fediverse in general - she apologized immediately, rescinded the bans, offered an explanation, and also her reasoning besides, and explained what she should have done and promised will do in the future instead.
I offered more depth on these matters in a recent reply to this comment from Blaze.