this post was submitted on 04 Mar 2025
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Ye Power Trippin' Bastards
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432 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:
- Which mods/admins were being Power Tripping Bastards?
- What sanction did they impose (e.g. community ban, instance ban, removed comment)?
- Provide a screenshot of the relevant modlog entry (don’t de-obfuscate mod names).
- Provide a screenshot and explanation of the cause of the sanction (e.g. the post/comment that was removed, or got you banned).
- Explain why you think its unfair and how you would like the situation to be remedied.
Rules
- Post only about bans or other sanctions that you have received from a mod or admin.
- 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.
- If you are the accused PTB, while you are welcome to respond, please do so within the relevant post.
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.
- 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
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Yeah, you're not wrong. I read back on it a little bit, and it's some grade-A bullshit. I'm just not sure if it's the type of thing that can get solved with griping about the moderation. I think in my mind, the users who were egging on the harassment of that person are different from the moderators who were applying the policy.
I think a lot of the root source of it has to do with the power of words and mental structures. Once any type of disagreement with the official stance is "transphobia," you'll get genuinely good people who are for-real convinced that anyone who's trying to talk sense into them is being transphobic and denying their right to exist, and they'll get all amped up to fight against that person. If they don't do that, they're being a bad member of the community. It'll tear a big rift in the communication between people. I have some experience with having that kind of structure in your brain and having it distort how you look at things and how you react to things, and it makes it really hard for people to make sense of each other.
I absolutely agree that DraconicNEO harassed the shit out of an actual trans person with some perfectly valid things to say, and is consistently saying "transphobia" is anything they don't agree with and attacking it using some carefully chosen trigger-words. They're also coming into these comments to try their absolute best to restart the argument. None of that is a very LGBTQ-friendly thing to do or a good thing for cooperation between instances. I'm just saying I'm not sure the anger needs to be directed at the moderators here. I think trying to strive for an actually inclusive social contract, where people can be okay with each other, is the goal, and that has to start with the ways people interact with each other separate from when banhammers come into the picture. In this case. Does that make sense? Have I missed some case of the blahaj admins doing that type of harassment or anything? I get that the policy seems over-the-top but I'm not aware of them actually being obnoxious about it, they're just very consistent about applying it. I sort of get why it's that way, even though I disagree with the decision. I just don't think they are where the toxicity is coming from, here.
I suppose since the bans started with Draconic Neo calling down Ada, and then Ada finding that a valid reason for a ban, not just for me, but later, separately, without being called in, also for the trans user in question, that I see it in a very "unstated approval" light. I am also very pissed about the harassment situation, though, so I may be making connections with tunnel vision.
Yeah, I think Ada's just applying the rules. That's fair (or... well, it makes sense why she's doing it I mean.) Like I say, I think the goal should be building a social contract where harassing a user in that fashion is going to be seen as "holy shit what's wrong with that person" as opposed to something normal. Right now, it's normal for some weird reason. But I think that's a separate thing, only tangentially related to the moderation. It just happens that that person is also able to abuse the rules to involve moderators against people who they're having that type of disagreement with.
Would the harassment-victim have stuck around, if not for the moderation? I don't know. Maybe so. But I don't think the moderation is the issue.
Like I said, I see a very "Wink wink" attitude of permissiveness in this, especially considering the second ban was not from Ada being tagged.
Going back to the old forum days comparison, upsetting one of the big users would always get you swarmed, even if the big user didn't deign to publicly involve themselves.
That kind of community culture is cultivated.
Yeah, but this type of post is community cultivation, too. It's defining a whole instance as "the enemy" to some group of people, to some extent, and then for people on that instance, it's defining whole groups of people on "the other side" of the argument as transphobic fascists who don't want to respect people's gender pronouns.
Like I say, you're not wrong. I think a lot of it roots back, too, to mods just not having time to make these Wisdom-of-Solomon decisions about every single interpersonal spat that develops that involves their instance in some way. Maybe Ada should have looked over the conversation with RatInAHat and gotten back to the reporter and said, "You know what? That's clearly not transphobia. I get what you mean but I'm not going to take any action here. Please chill out and stop harassing that person." Maybe she should be carefully weighing whether Dragonfucker really needs their pronouns respected, whether someone who doesn't is really going to impact the community negatively in any way. But then, some exceptions having been carved out, now she's suddenly in charge of making all these little corner-case judgement calls for everybody's little issues. And now some fraction of the community is yelling at her because in their mind she's betrayed them. And, of course, even if she does it perfectly, the trolls will find some new weird little edge case to test the boundaries with, always with a bunch of accounts (some of which are perfectly real people who are just impassioned about the issue for one reason or another) yelling all the time about how she's doing terrible and they need to quit and find a new server. It's too much. It's just nonstop.
I have no idea what the real solution is. I do think having a social contract in place where something like DraconicNEO's combative posts to RatInAHat would be seen as wild and unreasonable by everyone involved would be a good start. I think a lot of it starts with defining good behavior in terms of, well, good behavior, instead of in terms of "I belong to the right grouping so shut up and do what I say." But it's just tough to develop that on Lemmy, honestly. The modern internet, Lemmy included, has adopted some traditional features that are almost tailor-made for producing toxic interactions. I think the only reason why everything isn't like this, is that the vast majority of people really aren't cockheads, and mostly just want to talk about anime or whatever and mostly be nice to each other.