this post was submitted on 09 Jul 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:

  1. Which mods/admins were being Power Tripping Bastards?
  2. What sanction did they impose (e.g. community ban, instance ban, removed comment)?
  3. Provide a screenshot of the relevant modlog entry (don’t de-obfuscate mod names).
  4. Provide a screenshot and explanation of the cause of the sanction (e.g. the post/comment that was removed, or got you banned).
  5. Explain why you think its unfair and how you would like the situation to be remedied.

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.

YTPB matrix channel: For real-time discussions about bastards or to appeal mod actions in YPTB itself.


Some acronyms you might see.


Relevant comms

founded 11 months ago
MODERATORS
 

Was recently banned from a whole bunch of DB0 communities for, as best as I can gather, downvoting once when I viewed by All (potentially accidentally while scrolling).

Important notes:

  1. I don't use scripts.
  2. I don't mass-downvote Communities. If I see a post I generally don't like when browsing All, I may downvote one post, block the Community and move on.
  3. Some of the communities I was banned from don't have any posts in them so I wouldn't have been able to downvote anything.
  4. Of all of these Communities, in my history I downvoted one post in one of them. Voting in this manner is not vote manipulation. It's quite literally a feature of the platform and as a mod of another Community, I would consider it pretty good etiquette.
  5. One of my bans reads "Appeal Granted, not a brigading member" but I'm still banned.
  6. I don't troll.

WTF is going on here?

EDIT - Updated Info from the conversation below: In the initial image, you can see two "ban waves."

The 10 bans three months ago stem from a single downvote in one Community. It was @[email protected] See here: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/34853477

I was called out by name for a single downvote and culled from a score of Communities I did not participate in by them.

The other bans from two months ago are from four total downvotes over a 10-month timeframe in one Community.

I have also stated in this thread that I don't have issues with AI-gen images, but there are shoddy ones and well-done ones.

EDIT 2: Now unbanned from the ten Communities listed as "3 months ago" in my initial image, but have been banned from three more because of this thread with the reason given being "self-proclaimed anti-AI brigader" which are two things I didn't claim to be. God dammit Lemmy...

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Honestly. Doing this when someone makes dozens of downvotes is ridiculous and stupid. Doing this with a single downvote is… I can't even begin to fathom how unimaginably stupid and ridiculous that is.

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

You mean "dozens of downvotes" specifically directed at a single community?

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I don't even have downvotes on my instance but would that really be unusual? I often see a lot of people on a thread making the same wrong statements. I could see how that kind of thing would lead to a lot of downvotes in the same community and I was never very heavy handed with my downvoting.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago (2 children)

In this case I'm referring to the hypothetical of a single account, consistently downvoting almost every post on a community with zero interaction history. And they keep doing it.

I can't speak for whatever you've done or been accused of, but those accounts do exist and it's completely justifiable that some community owners ban them.

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

I don't think votes should be an actionable metric in any circumstance. Bots should be banned, but real people should be allowed to vote as much as they want on whatever they want. Otherwise you're just cultivating an echo chamber.

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

Disagree. If I run a metal music community, and someone who doesn't like metal continually goes in there and downvotes everything because, well, they don't like metal music. What use are they to it? Why wouldn't I ban them? All they're doing is hurting the visibility of the community. This is the context in which I would ban downvoters from my community. Serial mass downvoting by people who never otherwise engage with the community, don't like the topic of the community, and in some cases - the accounts have zero comment history and purely exist to downvote.

I think this is quite different to just 'wanting an echo-chamber'.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Ok, I guess that it was just "dozens" threw me off. That isn't that much.

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

Depends on the time between the downvotes. Believe it or not there are accounts that exist that exist purely to downvote. They do nothing else.

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

12 downvotes in 5 minutes is normal. 50+ in a day is not.

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

Only deliberately antagonistic types of posts collect that amount of downvotes that quickly on lemmy in my experience tbh.

That is not normal for innocuous posting

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

Seems pretty normal to me. People have opinions about everything and there are clearly more than a dozen people here so a dozen downvotes doesn't mean 100% of people are disagreeing.

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

I post a lot on a pretty busy community for lemmy standards and have never seen 12 downvotes in such a short time. Or any number close.

Also I am not sure how 50 downvotes over a day is more sus to you than 12 in 5 minutes.

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

12 in 5 minutes means you have an opinion on a specific topic. More than 50 is a lot of opinons on many topics which we could be closer to bot behavior but I would still verify if they were human and move on with my day.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

But there's also a large difference between 5 minutes and 24 hours time-wise.

12 downvotes in 5 minutes on ostensibly 'neutral' or non-controversial topics are way dodgier to me than 50 in 24 hours. I have never seen downvoting at such a rate anyway.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Obviously you've seen 12 upvotes in 5 minutes so I'm not sure why would think it's impossible. We clearly have different opinions on what a downvote is used for except I'm not trying to restrict something that exists.

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

No, I said I haven't seen 12 downvotes in 5 minutes. I accept for extreme cases it might happen, but for ordinary topical posting in the relevant communities? Never seen it.

Also, I didn't say anything about restricting it.