this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2025
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Ye Power Trippin' Bastards
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200 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
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"If there is anyone else in the world who might be able to keep me in check if I do something unreasonable, I can't handle that. I need to be the ultimate authority over the little hapless users in my domain, period, end of story."
(Edit: ~~Jesus Christ man. I know nothing about this guy other than downvotegate, but he sounds like a nimrod.~~ IDK, I take it back, he seems fine. I talked with him and he just has strong feelings about this one issue and he's making a point. I still think the way he's trying to make the point is going to have trouble getting received, in the way he's doing it, but whatever, he seems well intentioned, I don't think he is any sort of bad way about it having heard him out on it.)
I keep saying: The whole moderation model where it is moderators setting up a mandatory override over content within "their place," and any users who don't like it are forced to beg for change or complain about the unfairness to others, is simply inferior to the model where it is users deciding which moderators they want to allow to override their content.
Nice edit
It's a hard pill as a mod but you have to swallow it. People are going to do things you don't like and say things you don't like. You have to be okay with that. You will not get an echochamber of people who agree with you 100%. The choice is you can either become okay with that and apply some rules that are reasonable - or you can remove everything you disagree with pushing people away.
Look at me. I run a few communities here (and a few elsewhere), but one of them here is !taylorswift@poptalk.scrubbles.tech . I personally am a swiftie and there are dozens of us here on the fediverse. That being said, if I banned anyone for simply downvoting a post or saying something negative about her then I'd have to defederate every instance there is. Instead, I can let my own users do that for me and let people get downvoted to hell in the community, and sometimes out of those bad comments comes some real good discussion. If anything actually comes out that is against the rules, like true hate or bigotry or personal attacks then sure thing I'll swoop in and remove it, but even for a Swiftie community in the least likely space, that happens extremely infrequently.
Subbed!! I'm a swiftie too!
Happy to have you! There are dozens plus one now!
To be honest I feel like in your case it would be acce to ban systematic downvoters
I do, I have some math that determines how much they downvote vs upvote. I allow downvotes, but if you don't provide anything positive to the community then I ban them from it.
Do users come in and downvote stuff there because its about Taylor Swift?
It's mostly All browsers who see her and immediately hit the downvote button.
Y’know, I think this might be a symptom of a problem in Lemmy more than a problem of people.
I’ve noticed that sometimes the feed gives me a sudden influx with dozens of post for the same community, and so after the 30th post about the same thing it’s pretty easy to go “tired of this, don’t care!”
I know for sure I got banned from some AI slop communities more-or-less that way. So that’s a blessing.
I think it would be reasonable if you did ban prolific repeat offenders personally. Obviously not sending DMs, but they're clearly not interested - you would be helping them curate their own feeds.
That's actually exactly what I do. I score each one based on their upvote/downvote ratio and from that I can tell if I should ban them. It's a very forgiving ratio, I don't want to discourage down voting, but if you do all or mostly down voting then you aren't contributing. On top of that I agree, if you don't like it then you should welcome a ban.
What model would you be calling for? How would this work in practice?
Bluesky does it by letting people (or automated systems) publish lists of content and users that that publisher is recommending that people block, and then part of your user config is enabling which of those sources you want to apply to your own feed.
I don't really know how you could apply that to Lemmy since the model is just different. Mostly I am just talking philosophy and stuff that irritates me about Lemmy's model. A simplistic approach though could be just to have each user settings include a "mod ignore" list or something alongside the blocks and etc, the list of moderators whose comment deletion and user ban settings you don't want to respect. So you can still see and interact with content that comes from any users those specific mods have attempted to block.
It would be a little bit messy, it might be better to take a step back and reengineer things to be more user-centric instead of that, but that would be compatible with existing stuff, just easy harm reduction when specific mods are widely recognized by the community to be bums. I also think just the threat of it (and the corresponding loss of credibility and control for the mod) would be a useful check on people who currently feel that lack of credibility in the community means literally nothing to them, and don't bother to try to maintain it.
(Hey @jordanlund@lemmy.world -- remember a week ago when people were talking about your moderation on LW and asked you this and this, and then you just fell silent and still like a frozen bunny waiting for the predator to leave, instead of addressing those reasonable questions?)
Just focusing on one thing specifically here: Your grievance here (and others grievances with him) aren't really with Jordan at this point, but with the inability or unwillingness of lemmy.world to act. Jordan's behaviour and positions are well known. Him against the world. He won't budge. It really is up to lemmy.world now.
In theory, lemmy/piefed etc systems are far better for mod accountability on this score because instance owners and admins are far closer to the community than reddit admins. I can tell you also that atomicpoet, for instance, making this decision didn't come out of a vacuum on this point.
Who haven't done anything about it.
Yeah, true that. If I had to engage in rampant speculation, I would say there are two possibilities:
Either or both might be true. Like people said in the original Jordan complainfest thread, they've known about this for literally years at this point, so I agree it seems a little unlikely that things would change now. Kaplan tried to say that new information has come to light now which is leading them to re-evaluate, but that's honestly not really all that credible to me. I don't really know, but if I had to guess I would guess that they'll keep him on just because whatever structural issues led to them keeping him on in the past just haven't changed that I am aware of.
Clearly lol. If anything it is a strong point in piefed.social's favor, is that they're willing to exercise common sense and take action about dumb behavior by their moderators.
And also, if this becomes a big enough issue - there should be a groundswell effort to dethrone the communities that Jordan moderates and supplant them, This can happen here.
I generally fuck with !politics@beehaw.org and !world@quokk.au, they seem a lot more sensible and enjoyable than the lemmy.world equivalents. Honestly every time I enter into the big-world-event communities on lemmy.world I wind up quickly regretting it just because they are so full of hostile objectionable people who are shouting bad opinions (which of course Jordan does nothing about in the course of his relentless quest to stop people changing headlines or being mean to trolls.)
!politics@sh.itjust.works seems a better fit, Beehaw isn't federated with LW or SJW
!politics@sh.itjust.works is mod posting only though, last I checked. Also the mod seems like they might have some kind of strict opinions about what's allowed (there is a post on YPTB about them right now, I haven't really looked to see if there is anything valid to it but I do remember posting stories there way back when and the mod having requests about my posting that seemed somewhat arbitrary to me. Not really anything wrong or PTB, it was just kind of annoying and eventually I went somewhere else.)
To me I think refusing to federate with lemmy.world is a positive, not a negative. I haven't really noticed anything lacking because of the LW users not being involved in the comments aside from a whole bunch of noise and hostility.