this post was submitted on 25 Mar 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:
- 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.
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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.
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I would say if you are removing dropsite, the rule is missing the forest through the trees. I get the need to have standards.
I think we can all acknowledge that we live on a shifting plane of mediums and media, and really, we are seeing a resurgence of what I would call "blog-type" news sites. This has coincided with an almost complete collapse of where most of these substackers were formerly employed, eg, digital media companies. Digital media's collapse isn't new news, and many of these substacks came about as a direct response to digital media companies going under. Many of these stubstacks are the journalism one would have found at those companies.
I guess the point I want to make is that being a legacy media site doesn't a valid news source make, nor does a news outlet which is effectively a single/ small group of journalists not valid news it make.
And especially in the context of the near total collapse of digital media over the previous 4 years, by insisting things be from effectively legacy digital media sources, we're really winnowing down the options, from even, a year ago. It would seem like editing and fact checking, and abiding by some set of journalistic standards are more important.
The reason we remove all substack blogs is we aren't going to be drawn into a debate over "Buh, buh, you allowed THEIR link!! Why not miiiiiine!!?!?!?" as I explained in the other PTB thread when this came up.
If it's a legitimate news source, great! Hats off to you. If it's not a legitimate news source, it's getting removed. We don't care who wrote it.
If the story is ONLY available on bullshit sources and you can't find it on a reputable news site, you need to step back and ask why rather than yell at the mods.
I know, I've been there before... super juicy story broken by... checks notes... "New York Post", well fuck me, right? Let's wait a day or so and see if a real paper picks it up.
I get the spirit of the rule and I also agree in the importance of a degree of editorial over site. But like, something like 60-80% of digital media companies that existed 5 years ago are gone. And substack has grown to fill that void.
Its really, really difficult to make the claim that sub-stack isn't news at this point, when its where like, the news is actually happening.
It seems to me that a list of pre-approved substacks which either a) undergo editorial review, or b) demonstrate that they follow a certain level of journalistic standard. That same standard could be used to put news sources that don't meet those requirements could be added to a ban-list.
If its a legacy media enterprise, they are assumed editorial until proven to fail in that regard. If its a substack/ blog, they have to demonstrate they do journalism to a certain level of quality.
So like white list for some blogs/ black list for legacy media.
That sort of whitelisting is going to be beyond what a volunteer team is capable of doing. If there's another source that does something like that on blog pages, we'd be happy to utilize it, but man, look at the grief we continue getting every time we mention "Yeah MBFC marks it as questionable."
A wiki run to list valid news sources and why they should be listed, that can have discussions in the talk page, might be helpful to address many of these issues.
I used to help mod the largest Reddit news community back in the day, and it was easy to use the approach you talk about.
Now, I doubt I could. The news industry has really collapsed or been nerfed. There are small sites never heard about before doing heavy lifting and they need to be validated in a way it’s easy to use those guidelines in moderation.
To not do that is to either become increasingly reactionary to sources or get in fights about what is or is not valid.
Coming back to this a day later because I was just reading an article about the killing of a dropsite contributor on dropsite, and I realized, they have editors.
So returning here:
Dropsite has it's own domain.
It has editors.
But you don't want to allow it because they rely on substack for the underlying publishing technology?
Yep and they've been tripling down on that too.
Seems like a whitelisting/ blacklisting system should be fairly straight foward to implement.
Yes, but like the mbfc fiasco probably just don't want to have to deal with it. Or more likely don't want to have to explain why some are on a particular list.
Maybe I dont understand the context well enough.
Basically Jordan has always been his way or the highway no matter the context when people pointing out flaws in his logic.
Ex, people happy amp links banned, but unhappy because he only did that because it was causing issues with mbfc bot.