this post was submitted on 22 Feb 2025
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Ye Power Trippin' Bastards

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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

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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

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[–] Ghyste@sh.itjust.works 6 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (11 children)

Oh hey, I was wondering if this might show up here.

I will admit that I was aggressive in calling them out, but I'd seriously had enough of scrolling through All and seeing nothing but their name on everything, on top of seeing the same post on 3-5 different communities.

Language aside, I believe my concerns were reasonable enough and clearly stated. Power users of that nature can control what everyone on this platform is exposed to, potentially manipulating opinions and injecting disinformation. Lemmy is still small enough that a handful of people could potentially influence the entire user base. Vigilance is key.

My remaining concerns are 1) There are still other accounts with identical behavior that have not been addressed and 2) I have seen accounts like this one cycle through instances, and I expect we'll see a new account begin the same behavior from somewhere else soon enough.

Quite amusing that Cat deleted their account though. Exactly the sort of behavior you'd expect from someone just innocently posting content, right?

Beyond that, I could see a temp ban for my language. But 15 days? Yeesh. It was actually removed a short time ago so I guess another mod got a look at things.

Here's the ban explanation, basically saying "spammers and suspicious activity is a-okay, and how dare you say anything about it"

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That sounds just like another pretty infamous user.

[–] Mammothmothman@lemmy.ca 10 points 1 day ago (6 children)

Wow lemmy is becoming more like reddit every day.

[–] Rentlar@lemmy.ca 9 points 1 day 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 11 points 1 day 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: ???
[–] catloaf@lemm.ee 5 points 1 day ago

Engagement numbers are like crack for some people I guess

And another paranoia comment. Please lmk if i should stop:

If I was a mod on world and wanted other instances to slowly burn out. That's probably how I would do it. Not saying thats the case. Just finding the most likely if insane explanation.

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[–] rickyrigatoni@lemm.ee 1 points 1 day ago

How much do I have to bribe the devs to make every lemmy instance refuse any signups named gallowboob?

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[–] Nougat@fedia.io 5 points 1 day ago

Wow, and I've been concerned with how my moderation is looked upon in my tiny corner. I don't feel so bad now.

[–] LibertyLizard@slrpnk.net 5 points 1 day ago (22 children)

Why is posting a lot of content considered spam though? Don’t we want more content? Is there something wrong with the content being posted?

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[–] catloaf@lemm.ee 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Here is that discussion for context: https://ponder.cat/post/1728396

I'm not sure I'd characterize their posts as spam; I definitely noticed their posts, and their name showing up often, but it didn't seem detrimental.

LW mods can still be dumb as hell though.

[–] Zagorath@aussie.zone 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Ok but a mod removing an admin's comments is absolutely bizarre. Do the admins have the power to reinstate them?

[–] PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat 6 points 1 day ago

I'm an admin on a different instance. I have no power there.

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