this post was submitted on 15 Dec 2024
54 points (81.4% liked)

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.

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.


Some acronyms you might see.


Relevant comms

founded 4 months ago
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This guy is clearly snooping the downvoters as an instance admin and retaliating against them. Wouldn't even have noticed if I didn't stumble onto the modlog in Voyager by accident.

I might be of course wrong in my assumption. But I don't remember ever interacting with anyone from that instance, I'm not subscribed to those communities and the dates correlate.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Same. I wrote a comment "my bro unironically replied to 'they're ethically cleansing the muslims' with 'oh no, anyways'" on a discussion abou uyghurs on lemmy.ml and got banned from all lemmy.ml imstances

Signal, privacy, fairphone, fdroid etc etc

Since a lot of these communities don't have another fediverse alternative I'm actually thinking of moving back to reddit.

This kind of power-tripping and censorship imo is nothing more than a sabotage of the fediverse itself. If even I, who uses Linux and GrapheneOS, has to return to reddit over it, there's no chance for it to survive

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago

privacy

fdroid

Linux

Reddit might still be a better information source, let's be honest, but people are aware of .ml mods power tripping and try to get the alternative communities rolling

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 days ago

Piefed uses voting agents for this reason. It's not perfect, but it's better than this shit.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Apparently this total fucking loser got me too lol!

I wasn’t even subscribed to most of those and pretty sure never even visited them

Don’t come to fediverse if you don’t wanna talk to anyone

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 days ago

I can understand wanting to get rid of bad actors by any metric, including downvoting/upvoting patterns, which can sometimes be the only metric to identify trolls and bad actors who otherwise keep their mouths shut. Though here it seems a bit excessive.

The biggest issue is that downvotes or upvotes don't say anything about the intent, so while I can accept someone using them as a metric to find a troll, you need to find other information or a pattern of abuse, such as someone downvoting everything in the community, downvoting with multiple accounts (persistently, sometimes mistakes happen), or repeated voting of specific topics.

It's a lot more work to find out if someone is actually bad-faith downvoting and in most cases it's just not worth it, and will come with a lot of false positives. Best to only do it for people repeatedly downvoting a user, or mass downvoting a whole community.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 3 days ago (3 children)

I can kind of appreciate the attempt to create a more positive online space through strict moderation. But on the other hand if you are going to ban tons of people for downvoting, wouldn't it be easier to just disable downvotes? I believe that is an option in instance configuration.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Yeah if they wanted to do that they just should've disabled downvotes

Edit: forgot that that feature is admin only. Maybe a feature that enables disabling downvotes depending on community would be an idea?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 days ago

Probably, but maybe they like it that way so they can deal with the users who do it.

Downvotes still federate even with downvotes disabled, so disabling them on your instance is more a visual thing for your own users, since they still get relayed to other instances even from local posts and local comments.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 3 days ago (1 children)

The conversation was not taking place on their personal instance.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

OK I was wondering that, thank you for clarifying. That is extra silly.

However, disabling downvotes on your instance also applies to remote communities when viewed from your instance. So it would still apply here.

[–] southsamurai 18 points 3 days ago (2 children)

See, this one is an edge case.

While the instance's policies are absurd, and I have no idea why they think it's sustainable; but the policies are clearly listed and described, so I can't say it's power tripping to enforce those policies.

It's one of those things like beehaw being extra insular. It's on the dumb side to use a federated base like lemmy if you want to exclude the possibility of outsiders doing things you don't like when your instance's posts federate. Like, don't federate at all, or use different base, something.

But is it power tripping? To me, power tripping is about overreach. Like being an admin and interfering in C/'s workings without warning per communication. Or for mods, making decisions that aren't covered by existing rules for the C.

So, in this case, it's less power tripping and more just a shitty instance doing shitty things, if you see the distinction I'm making.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 days ago

I don't think we can compare this situation to Beehaw, since Beehaw disables downvotes and they also don't follow people around on external instances to ban them. This is very much a different situation than Beehaw being Beehaw. It's not exactly power-tripping but it's bordering on the realm of Power tripping.

[–] AwesomeLowlander 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Are you saying their policies prohibit anybody from downvoting the admin's opinions? If so, I don't see how that's not power tripping no matter how you frame it

[–] southsamurai -2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Huh? I'm not sure what you mean.

The policies specify that they intend to be proactive about down vote "brigading".

They aren't saying you can't down vote reasonably, just that they apply a threshold beyond which, you get banned preemptively.

It isn't like "power tripping" has a precise definition that's universal, so it comes down to individual usages of the term. For me, it's like I already explained. That's my criteria, what's yours?

[–] AwesomeLowlander 4 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

The admin was downvoted 3 times, across one discussion. In a community not on their server, and not their post. Calling that 'brigading' is ridiculous. From other comments in this post, it's happened to others too. Somebody mentioned getting banned for 5 downvotes spread across several weeks. It sounds like any criticism of the admin would merit a ban. Regardless of where your individual borders lie for defining power tripping, I don't see how this would fail to qualify.

[–] southsamurai -5 points 2 days ago

I mean, great, you can rant about it if you want. Feel free, it doesn't hurt anything.

I already gave my criteria in the first comment. Feel free to use your own in making a top level comment too. Heck, make a post about, it if you like.

But, I gotta say, that if you're just looking to argue about it, you're wasting your time. I gave my opinion, stated the grounds for that opinion, and see no reason to change it to satisfy some internet rando that can't be bothered to answer a direct and clear question.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

Isn't dubvee a personal instance? The admin is probably using bans as blocks

Hm, apparently it has 43 users. Still

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 days ago (1 children)

43 users is still a friends and family instance, maybe colleagues too. Look at his registration application criteria:

In the field below, say you’re from WV without saying you’re from WV.

While it might seem broad enough to include anyone who isn't his friends or family it is vague enough that the intention is clear that he only wants friends, family, or colleagues to signup there.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago (3 children)
[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 days ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

Mountain Mama

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago

Just West of Virginia

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago

I don't even know, this is why I would say it's a personal instance you have to either read his mind or know him already to be able to join.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Dubyakay isn't in your example conversation. They seem unrelated

[–] [email protected] 11 points 3 days ago (3 children)
[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

https://dubvee.org/modlog?other_person_id=908319

Extremism - Implicit variety. Pattern of downvoting content that denounces targeted violence / vigilante justice, upvoting content in support of.

https://dubvee.org/site/dubvee.org

As an instance, we're pretty heavily moderated in order to maintain a welcoming atmosphere that fosters civil discussion. We don't "tone police" everything, but we do expect users, local and remote, to behave themselves and act in a rational, civilized manner. Those who cannot, local or federated, are quickly shown the door.

Absolutely No Extremism

Implicit Extremism:

  • Patterns of upvoting or boosting posts/comments that explicitly praise, endorse, or advocate for violence (or any of the 'explicit' items above)
  • Patterns of downvoting posts/comments that denounce violence or those that advocate for lawful/peaceful solutions.
[–] [email protected] 18 points 3 days ago

I've downvoted them because their comment chain has implied that glorifying the CEO killer will cause the US to head where Mexico is. Except the cause of cartel violence IS the US foreign policy and domestic drug laws already. Remove the racism against Latinos and decriminalize drugs and you don't have an incentive for the cartels to dominate illegal trade with violence towards elected officials.

They've made a false equivalence.

Thanks for the log, Voyager doesn't highlight the details.

[–] Cheradenine 6 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Well they are saying there is no proof in your example. Which you yourself say.

The same thing happened to me though, and I too found it by accidentally tapping the Modlog button. I'm banned from 7 different communities on that instance. Except for a 3 day ban in one of the .ml communities I have never been banned anywhere. I am only guessing at why I was banned since the modlog seems to reference something that isn't in the modlog as the reason. I messaged them twice and never got a reply.

ptb

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago

I think it's a big problem that Lemmy doesn't notify when moderation actions are taken against you, and the modlog doesn't even have an RSS feed so it's not like you can subscribe to it either to get the notifications that way from your feed reader. You just kind of have to stumble across it, which is how I found out I was banned from the news community for "sock puppet account" for 3 days because the mod thought my accounts were sockpuppets, was an honest mistake sure, but still, I should've found out when it happened, not days after the fact.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

You were downvoting everything they posted, sounds like you wouldn't have enjoyed participating on dubvee anyway

[–] [email protected] 26 points 3 days ago* (last edited 10 hours ago) (1 children)

Banning for downvotes is just unhinged. "You wouldn't enjoy it there" - I got a perma ban from that instance for a total of about 5 downvotes over the course of weeks. I don't know how "bad" OP was being, but the admin there is extra trigger happy for the slightest possible "issue" and shouldn't be defended for it.

*Bruh. I just decided to look into it more and this wasn't even on the banned instance. The admin banned OP for "misbehaving" on an entirely different instance. What a fucking tool.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 days ago

PTB, but also confined to their personal instance, so nothing of value was lost. Let them power trip in their little sandbox, it doesn't affect the rest of the world.