this post was submitted on 25 Mar 2025
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Ye Power Trippin' Bastards
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154 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
founded 7 months ago
MODERATORS
Substack is not a blogging platform. You can host a blog using Substack, but not every site built using Substack is a blog.
Dropsitenews is clearly not a blog. That should be immediately evident if you open the website. The about-page also clearly explains how they are an independent news organization with reputable journalists working for it. Even MBFC classifies them as a news organization.
If your argument is "it's a substack website so it's a blog, but a completely identical-looking website that's not built using substack isn't a blog, so it's allowed", then you're not arguing along the lines of rule 1, you're arguing along the lines of an unwritten rule that is supposed to help reinforce rule 1. If so, it should be explained in the sidebar. The post as-is does not violate rule 1 in any reasonable interpretation. If you have a different argumentation as to why Dropsitenews is a blog, you should provide it so that people know what to expect from the mod team.
If it's hosted on a blog hosting site, by definition, it's a blog. It doesn't matter if it's substack, blogger, medium, wordpress, what have you. We don't send traffic to blogs.
And, again, we don't differentiate because we aren't going to be drawn into the argument of "but what about this one, but what about that one..."
NO BLOGS!
Try again. Substack themselves say they're a newsletter site. It can host blogs but it is not a blog hosting site.
You're also not addressing the fact that Dropsitenews is not a blog by any definition of the word "blog".
Then they're welcome to pony up for a domain registration and detach themselves from a host that also has un-vetted material.
Look, it's really simple:
There are legit journalists on Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube too... we don't allow links to those sites EITHER.
This is NO DIFFERENT. We aren't going through an entire platform, account by account, picking and choosing.
https://www.dropsitenews.com/ is their domain that they've registered through Squarespace?? Hello?
False equivalence. Substack is more similar to Wordpress than it is to Twitter or Medium.
But it is different, you've just elected to plug your ears regarding any and all evidence to the contrary. You don't have to "pick and choose accounts", they have their own domain and no other "accounts" on Substack are accessible through it. It's completely isolated.
This entire charade could easily be solved using a simple domain whitelist/blacklist method, yet you've decided that using that simple solution is too difficult, despite plenty of mod teams using this method due to its transparancy and ease of moderation.
Your argumentation so far has been completely detached from the reality here. You are presenting things as facts that are easily refuted by taking a 1-minute look at the website. If you can't even manage that, then I can't help you here.
Again, see bottom of page:
Yes congratulations, you've discovered they're using Substack. This was already addressed and not in dispute? . It doesn't support your argument, because:
Substack is not a blogging platform. It's more like Wordpress in that it can host blogs, but doesn't exclusively do so, and this website is clearly not a blog.
This is the only reference to Substack on the entire website. And this footer isn't what makes a website a "blog". I'd wager that if you'd have blocked this footer using uBlock or something you wouldn't be able to really tell it's built on Substack.
The links listed don't lead to other accounts, instead they lead to static pages about Substack's about page or their privacy policy.
Dropsitenews is operating through their own domain via Squarespace.
Dropsitenews has several independent journalists and editors working for them, and is a news organisation, not a random blog. Their own about page explains this pretty clearly, and other websites (including MBFC) agree with that.
Their website does not look functionally different from a news website not built on Substack. The only "functional difference" (and I'm really stretching the definition of the word 'functional' here) is the footer you've linked that mentions Substack.
I have to reiterate here: nobody is asking you to pick-and-choose what Substack "accounts" to allow or not. I actually fully agree with you that doing that would be a bit of an undue burden, similar to not choosing which Twitter accounts to allow. But that's just simply not how Dropsitenews or Substack work.
Listen, I'm trying to help you here to either clarify the rules or apply them more consistently. You're getting a lot of flak now because you're not applying the rule as written, but through an publicly unknown interpretation where anything built using Substack is (frankly inexplicably) also banned. If that's how you want to moderate, fine, but clarify it in the rules.
Still, I have to recommend the tried and tested method of white/blacklisting (or allow/denylisting as it's often called these days). If someone puts up a new post, check the list with Ctrl-F for the domain of the post. If it's in the allowlist, allow the post, if it's in the denylist, remove it. Dead simple, takes seconds to do. If it's not listed, open the website and make a determination if it should be allowed. If so, add to the allowlist, otherwise add to the denylist and list the reason for denial. Takes a minute or so, maybe a couple minutes at worst. Put all this in a publicly viewable Google doc/sheet/whatever and link it in the sidebar. Total transparancy, dead simple to execute and basically impossible to argue against. If you want to put in even less effort, have posters submit why a domain should be allowlisted (you can put specific requirements there like a link to the MBFC rating or whatever) so you can just review the reasons and either allowlist or denylist the domain.
This still lets you blanket-ban Twitter/Facebook/Medium etc... for the stated reason, but helps avoid these issues where you are inconsistently applying the rules and banning a legitimate news organisation.
Lol, doesn't address what they said at all
You bitched that they didn't register their own domain, the other guy pointed out they did, and you just went back to going "but it's substack!!!!" When they've already destroyed your piss ass argument against the platform
Why would you say that, and then when they have a host, swap back to the argument of what code they used to host it, if you are not blocking this only because of its content?
And that's exactly why you can fuck off.
You know how newspapers let random people write in and share their stories and perspectives, thats kinda like a blog huh?
Yes, those are called "Opinions / Editorials / Letters to the Editor" et al. Both News and WorldNews have rules against opinion articles as well.
Thats good that you can distinguish between opinion and news, so why do we need to ban substack because there might be an opinion on it?