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.
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

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Jordan Lund at it again (lemmy.dbzer0.com)

submitted 21 hours ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

103 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Context:

The article in question was well sourced, factually accurate, and written by a well-renowned author and journalist whose work appears elsewhere too, regardless of which outlet published it.

Nonetheless, Jordan Lund is once again blindly trusting a pro-zionist conservative outlet masquerading as a bias and fact checker that nothing from anywhere that criticizes the fascist apartheid regime can be reliable 🤦

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago) (1 children)

Yeah. I'm of two minds about it: I don't like ceding space to the rabble. I think a lot of times, the right response to propaganda is to call it out and be vigorous about making it clear that it doesn't belong. Anything along the lines of "just don't engage, that just gives it fuel" winds up as a de facto surrender where every topic will be filled with... well, with comments along the lines of a lot of the ones you see in this topic. Russia tells the truth sometimes! NATO! The State Department lies! Mint Press is well-sourced, I appreciate alternative points of view even if you don't! Iraq War! It's just a nonstop avalanche of talking points. If you look at the voting, you can kind of see some battle lines in terms of which of them are getting traction over time and which ones are unanimously seen through, and I'm always a little gratified when someone comes in with some bullshit and it gets solidly rejected. I don't think it's harmful to let that happen. I do think it's harmful to let them just run around doing this stuff unmolested. The bullshit asymmetry principle is only an issue if you let the bullshitter dictate the terms of the conversation and keep introducing new stuff -- or if no one challenges the bullshit and the public discourse becomes just a factless free-for-all.

But as far as lemmy.world, it was just too much to salvage any kind of decent space. There was too much synergy between deliberate propaganda, deliberate trolling, godawful moderation, and standard internet cluelessness and gullibility. I suspect that some of the moderation was bad specifically on purpose, actually. Someone pointed out not long ago that except for MBFC, every one of the baffling moderation decisions the lemmy.world moderators undertook was in the direction of providing cover for some kind of propaganda (UM's "advocacy" for third parties being a good example). It's really not normal. Even in spaces that have bad moderation, it's usually just kind of randomly applied, random people being banned and random people not. Lemmy.world's moderation is extremely consistent in the direction of allowing propaganda - except for FlyingSquid for a while, and FlyingSquid got harassed and eventually apparently driven out. And now, Jordan made a decision that's anti-propaganda, and look! People are harassing him and objecting to the decision and spreading bad-faith talking points that Mint Press needs to be allowed, because it's "well-sourced."

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

Yeah, we're basically in agreement on all of it. I do wonder -- what happened to FlyingSquid? All of a sudden they stopped using LW. No comments or posts at all. I hope they are ok.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 hours ago

Yeah, me too. The pattern of people relentlessly dogpiling on FS that he was terrible, in conjunction with the fact that he was active at removing propaganda from his communities, was very sad to me. If his inactivity is connected to the fact that people were constantly insulting and harassing him, that would make perfect sense. And now here is a post which is attacking Jordan, not for any of the various objectively terrible moderation decisions which he's come out at various points to defend, but because he removed some propaganda.

I have seen the end-stage of a gradual community takeover multiple times on reddit, where a group of bad actors (either corporate-friendly or with a particular political goal) eventually manage to take over a subreddit and run it exactly how they want. That kind of pattern is honestly part of why I am so against Jordan's "well the mods set the rules so fuck your opinion" attitude as pertains to moderation, even if I don't really get the read that he is malicious in any way.

I have no idea if this particular instance of pointing some abuse at Jordan because he came out against some propaganda is a piece of a community "takeover" by mods who are quieter and more malicious (or even if the harassment of Squid had anything to do with a pattern like that.) But if it did, that would make good sense. I definitely have noticed one moderator of LW communities who consistently makes pro-propaganda decisions, and they're super quiet about their reasoning and decisions, letting people like Jordan come more to the front to speak to the community about them.