this post was submitted on 25 Mar 2025
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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.
- 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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There are different links that have his last article.
https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/hossam-shabat-journalist-killed-gaza-last-article
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/hossam-shabat-s-last-article/ar-AA1BDeXT
https://www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/article/outrage-as-israel-kills-another-truthteller/
Dropsite is another Substack blog and would be removed.
MSN might be tricky because they basically steal content with a link forwarder. Looks like, in this case, they're ripping off ZNetwork:
https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/hossam-shabats-last-article/
Znetwork is solid, MSN? Eh, I'd treat it as a link forwarder and remove it.
Jewish Voice For Labor looks good though!
I would say if you are removing dropsite, the rule is missing the forest through the trees. I get the need to have standards.
I think we can all acknowledge that we live on a shifting plane of mediums and media, and really, we are seeing a resurgence of what I would call "blog-type" news sites. This has coincided with an almost complete collapse of where most of these substackers were formerly employed, eg, digital media companies. Digital media's collapse isn't new news, and many of these substacks came about as a direct response to digital media companies going under. Many of these stubstacks are the journalism one would have found at those companies.
I guess the point I want to make is that being a legacy media site doesn't a valid news source make, nor does a news outlet which is effectively a single/ small group of journalists not valid news it make.
And especially in the context of the near total collapse of digital media over the previous 4 years, by insisting things be from effectively legacy digital media sources, we're really winnowing down the options, from even, a year ago. It would seem like editing and fact checking, and abiding by some set of journalistic standards are more important.
The reason we remove all substack blogs is we aren't going to be drawn into a debate over "Buh, buh, you allowed THEIR link!! Why not miiiiiine!!?!?!?" as I explained in the other PTB thread when this came up.
If it's a legitimate news source, great! Hats off to you. If it's not a legitimate news source, it's getting removed. We don't care who wrote it.
If the story is ONLY available on bullshit sources and you can't find it on a reputable news site, you need to step back and ask why rather than yell at the mods.
I know, I've been there before... super juicy story broken by... checks notes... "New York Post", well fuck me, right? Let's wait a day or so and see if a real paper picks it up.
I get the spirit of the rule and I also agree in the importance of a degree of editorial over site. But like, something like 60-80% of digital media companies that existed 5 years ago are gone. And substack has grown to fill that void.
Its really, really difficult to make the claim that sub-stack isn't news at this point, when its where like, the news is actually happening.
It seems to me that a list of pre-approved substacks which either a) undergo editorial review, or b) demonstrate that they follow a certain level of journalistic standard. That same standard could be used to put news sources that don't meet those requirements could be added to a ban-list.
If its a legacy media enterprise, they are assumed editorial until proven to fail in that regard. If its a substack/ blog, they have to demonstrate they do journalism to a certain level of quality.
So like white list for some blogs/ black list for legacy media.
That sort of whitelisting is going to be beyond what a volunteer team is capable of doing. If there's another source that does something like that on blog pages, we'd be happy to utilize it, but man, look at the grief we continue getting every time we mention "Yeah MBFC marks it as questionable."
A wiki run to list valid news sources and why they should be listed, that can have discussions in the talk page, might be helpful to address many of these issues.
I used to help mod the largest Reddit news community back in the day, and it was easy to use the approach you talk about.
Now, I doubt I could. The news industry has really collapsed or been nerfed. There are small sites never heard about before doing heavy lifting and they need to be validated in a way it’s easy to use those guidelines in moderation.
To not do that is to either become increasingly reactionary to sources or get in fights about what is or is not valid.
Coming back to this a day later because I was just reading an article about the killing of a dropsite contributor on dropsite, and I realized, they have editors.
So returning here:
Dropsite has it's own domain.
It has editors.
But you don't want to allow it because they rely on substack for the underlying publishing technology?
Yep and they've been tripling down on that too.
Seems like a whitelisting/ blacklisting system should be fairly straight foward to implement.
Yes, but like the mbfc fiasco probably just don't want to have to deal with it. Or more likely don't want to have to explain why some are on a particular list.
Maybe I dont understand the context well enough.
Basically Jordan has always been his way or the highway no matter the context when people pointing out flaws in his logic.
Ex, people happy amp links banned, but unhappy because he only did that because it was causing issues with mbfc bot.
The rule should be about where it is posted if that is the important part.
The rule is explicit: News Articles Only.
Blogs aren't news articles.
This is an article, by a news org. Highly trusted. With editors, with their own hosting.. But they use the tech stack that other blogs use? What if I told you many reputable news sources uses blog tech stacks?
Then it shouldn't be on a blog site. ;)
But how is it on a blog site? I still don't understand the last leap of logic in your chain of thought. When confronted, you reiterate that it is a blog, even though you know it is an article from a reputable news organisation, then you say but it's on a blog site, when it is not, then you loop back. It's not a blog, not on a blog site, it's domain is not a blog domain. What makes it a blog exactly?
A blog site is a host of personal opinion. It's an online diary. Some of it is interesting and useful, most of it is not, none of it is journalism or news.
If a journalist is sharing space with blogs, we aren't going to allow any of it, because we aren't going through every fucking author going "is this one valid? What about this guy talking about how their dog just took a dump? How about this guy convinced robots are stealing his luggage?"
Same reason we don't allow bullshit social media like Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, etc.
There's too much content to say what's valid for the community and what's not.
Does the New York Times have a Twitter account? Sure. Do we allow it? No, because fuck you Twitter. Does the Washington Post have a Facebook account? Sure. Do we allow it? No, because fucking Facebook.
The same goes for Substack, Blogger, Blogsite, etc. We don't care who is doing the writing. It's not a valid source.
Yeah, I get that point and agree totally. But the question is that this one, that is validated. That has been gone through. That you obviously have now the choice and loop back again. Why in his case do you loop back to "it is a blog" when you know now it isn't? Then when asked swap back to argument 1?
Because, as stated now for the zillionth time, we are't going to go through each account hosted on a blog site picking winners and losers.
I just had this discussion in PMs... AGAIN... over a removed Twitter post.
"But, but... MY link is legitimate!"
Yeah, don't care. We don't allow Twitter links, find a DIFFERENT link or GTFO.
I get it, I really do. I'm personally embroiled in the whole Myanmar earthquake thing, I've been sent a bunch of heartbreaking content from people I know over there.
I'm not posting it because the sources are all Facebook (which is HUGE over there), YouTube, and individual images sent to me by people on the ground, people I know personally (family of my daughter in law.)
It's FINE to put in a comment, we don't allow it as a top level post.
Photos from Naypyidaw:
❤️
Thanks! So far, everyone in her family is safe. One of her brothers was in Bangkok when it happened and nobody could reach him for a day, and that was scary, but he's fine and back home.
Their family home was damaged, as was her dad's office, but they were all incredibly lucky!
All the other sites copied it from drop site news; personally I’m ok with a mirror as long as the content is not altered