this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2025
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Ye Power Trippin' Bastards
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50 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 11 months ago
MODERATORS
Private voting will open the door to massive astroturfing
I care about that far less than I care about not having every vote I cast recorded forever by anyone subscribed to the fediverse feed. I care about that far less than power tripping mods and admins being terminally online and using that vote for censorship purposes.
At the end of the day, brigading is mostly an ego thing anyway. If you just stop caring about votes then they can't hurt you.
Having votes be public doesn't actually fix the astroturfing problem anyway since it's still possible to just create sockpuppet accounts anyway. To a bad actors, it doesn't matter if that sockpuppet is voting from the plaintext user string, or an agent pseudonym. Someone who wants to bot farm the fediverse will still make it happen.
If anything, public votes will make the inevitable enshitification of the fediverse worse, because it will give the viral marketing and political sockpuppet accounts more engagement to parse.
Well I think there's a good argument that account vote history should disappear after X months anyway, as after that long it becomes worthless anyway. Which is how Piefed currently works by the way.
It's not though. Brigading or just a small number of committed chronic downvoters can throttle the spread of a post. Downvote trolls can be a problem for small communities trying to build up as they can successfully bury threads. I managed to discover the serial downvoters on my old lemm.ee community and when I banned them (about 5 of them?) it had a huge impact. They didn’t all downvote /everything/ but they downvoted a lot of things, and they had no contribution to their names. Some of the accounts in question literally had no posting history. These accounts just existed to downvote.
Which are all visible publicly and can get banned, and in this case, get instance banned - not just community banned. It doesn't stop it from ever happening, but it's more likely you will get banned for that behaviour.
I noticed same thing. I'm actually shocked that so many on Lemmy are still surprised at how many serial downvoters we have.