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Banned for voting the wrong way
(lemm.ee)
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this post was submitted on 09 May 2025
29 points (65.6% liked)
Ye Power Trippin' Bastards
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68 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.
- YDM new - You Deserved More: The commenter thinks you got off too lightly.
- 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 9 months ago
MODERATORS
I wrote the script. You opened a post in a community and downvoted every comment. That's what the message is telling you
That means you really don't like the community, fair enough.
I'm gonna jump in here, since there's some info that might be handy.
See, me and jet have had some disagreements regarding the carnivore diet. I even gave them a bit of hell when the carnivore community was new, objecting strongly to certain posts and their content combined with no sourcing or user friendly way to access sources from lemmy.
I'm pretty sure at one point, I got annoying. I know I was rather, ummmm, direct in my phrasing.
But the real story is that I down voted posts, and comments under posts, when they were misleading or contradicted established best practices to a degree I felt warranted a down vote to reduce visibility/support. I did that part with only minimum contributions otherwise, because I didn't really want to piss on anyone's picnic with the frequency I was seeing that kind of thing. Like, I objected to some of the data and conclusions, but the people didn't really need someone critiquing their dietary choices, you dig? All the folks commenting were just minding their own business and not trying to evangelise, so trying to interfere in their choices would be a dick move.
And I never got banned. Ngl, if I had been running the community and seen the pattern of voting with as little contribution as I was engaging in, I might have banned me.
But, neither actively as a mod, nor via bot, did that happen.
I know that's just one anecdote, and anecdotes have little value. But it's why I would have totally called this a YDI if OP hadn't been batshit and ended up banned here as well.
As far as I'm concerned, jet is a fair and even handed moderator. Might want to tweak the bot a little eventually, but for a niche C/, it seems to do the job it's intended to do.
I've seen your interactions in that community as skeptical but polite. You never attacked a user, or insulted anyone. You contributed occasionally.
Would I have preferred your downvotes also have a question/comment with your concerns? Sure
My guiding metric is to make a safe space where others feel comfortable participating in - and your interactions were inline with that.
At least I managed to present myself in the way intended successfully, skeptical but polite/interested.
I did eventually feel weird voting at all without saying something, so I very rarely do any more. It's still a very interesting subject, I just don't have anything useful to say that I haven't already said in one way or another. Pretty much the same as on vegan, vegetarian, or keto communities tbh. I see them all as valid choices for individuals. So as long as there's nothing that's outright false, the most I can do is chime in with existing best practices, and it isn't like people looking for a specialized diet haven't seen that information.
I'm happy for you to ask questions, even questions people would already have seen elsewhere. The conversation is good for everyone.
Plus a question about carnivore, being a subset of keto, gets to birds with one stone!
I really like to dig into the science, what is well researched, what can be demonstrated. Heck, I even spent a bunch of time figuring out why the Rice/Potato/McDougall diet works (its inhibition of the Randell cycle (not a cycle)).
I don't want to give OP the benefit of the doubt here due to their behaviour in this thread, but I'll ask more for my own curiosity:
Is there a possibility of false positives if you happened to downvote everything from a certain community while browsing c/all, or is there a temporal element as well that'd make that sort of false positive very unlikely?
I'm not a great programmer,
This ban message only happens when someone downvotes a post then opens the post and downvotes all the comments.
Is there a bug? Sure, lots! I haven't double checked the logs against this user yet. After work
Notice the one thing this user didnt ask for - to get unbanned so they could contribute to any of those communities
If somebody consistently does that, they are not having a great Lemmy experience and they should block the community
Does it do any good for all the atheists to down vote every catholic post? Nobody is benefiting from that behavior
Has anyone done so since you started doing this? Given the general circumstances here I don't expect many would try (esp. w/silent instance ban), nor do I expect a happy mutual outcome.
No one.
Does it have a comment threshold? I.e. it feels it would be fairly easy to trigger if there's just 1 comment in the thread.
Currently it does not, if someone really dislikes a community enough to down vote a post and then go through the effort to open it and also downvote the only comment, it's a strong signal they are not a good fit for the community
This is only helpful for very small niche communities that get lots of negative attention.
I'm sure it was !carnivore@lemm.ee, the other comms don't draw so much ire. There are 3-5 active posters and commenters in that community, we haven't even reached dozens yet. There are 75 active vegen communities on Lemmy, and 1 carnivore community. So, is it helpful for the 75:1 group to remind the minority group they don't like them very much every post?
When I was tuning in the behavior, anyone who opened posts to downvote comments would repeat the behavior every new post, and many went through the backlog of posts to do the same. So I took that as a very strong signal it's a bad community mismatch. Pruning optimization
So far zero people have asked to have the moderator action reversed so they can contribute, or debate.. the only feedback has been like this one where a angry person is angry they aren't allowed to continue to be angry at a tiny community
My educated opinion as someone writing such automation, is that this is a very flawed approach. All it would take is a post against the community ethos, to ban community regulars who downvoted it. If it has no comment threshold and no validation of the general sentiment of the post in the comm, it can easily lead to false positives.
I strongly suggest you tweak this approach.
My take is someone writing this sort of automation is sick of spending hours each day doing the bans manually
What sort of false positive are you worried about when it only bans people whose only interaction has been negative? Regulars have upvoted stuff if they like the community.
Do you ever visit a community and down vote the first thing you see and intend to return?
Oh I'm sorry, yes, the ban only applies if the account never comments, posts, or upvotes. A strictly negative interaction signal.
I did notice a few accounts upvote something really old before they started to downvote, so my secret sauce has already been guessed
It sounds like a helpful tool, but you might have to use some manual review because I don't think an automated system can easily avoid all the false positives and false negatives.
I was experimenting with similar stuff that counts mass downvotes, and I think it yields some interesting results.
Thanks for the insightful reply!
To me, the potential issue could be if it wasn't a very active community, the user might not even recognise they were doing so from c/all, so you might end up banning someone who didn't know they did anything wrong. But you're also right, it could certainly have adverse effects on the community, so totally I get where you're coming from as well.
They are not doing anything wrong, but helping people disengage from a bad situation is healthy for Lemmy
I would like better vocabulary around it, instead of a ban, we should have a community unsubscribe, or community block vocabulary
I tried to soften the vocabulary in the mod message. This is not the right community for you
what community? I have no fuckin idea what you are talking about. If I downvoted a bunch of comments, it's because I legitimately disagreed with them and considered them not constructive. I have never in my fucking life opened a fucking post to down vote everyone in the comments. madness.
If you made the script, the script is fucking broken. Absolute drivel, and absolutely power tripping bastards.