this post was submitted on 22 Feb 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 7 months ago
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Talking to spammy users about not being so spammy anymore? Believe it or not, straight to ban. (ponder.cat)
submitted 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
14 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

This one is both upsetting and weird.

So there was a user on ponder.cat who's been spamming posts. Like a lot. 58 per day, on average. Not 58 comments. 58 posts.

I started seeing a little scattering of reports about it, mostly just figured it was the mods' business to deal with, and then finally today I actually really took a look at what they were doing and realized it was way over the top. Pretty much everyone in the comments agreed when someone brought it up.

A 25 day old account with 1,400+ posts? What the actual fuck? My entire goddamn feed is this one account...

Touch grass. Good lord. You're carpet bombing multiple communities with repeats of the same crap.

The user was not receptive.

lol.

I guess people here do not know how to block an account.

:)

Is that a compliment or a rant?

May I introduce you to Lemmy block function.

If you don’t like my posts then block me and you will never see them again. As simple as that.

That's a bunch of bullshit. The voting was about as you would expect. I said to the user:

That's not how it works. If you're interfering with the average Lemmy user's experience, you don't get to claim it doesn't count because each individual person would be able to block each individual problematic account, if they wanted to have a good experience. Honestly, these people have a point. You have been posting an average of 58 posts per day. That's too much. I post a ton, and that's about 10 times more than me, and I've gotten multiple complaints about posting too much in particular communities. The handful of times it's happened, my reaction was "Oh my bad what sounds like an acceptable level" and then to more or less stick to an acceptable level. Getting snarky with people who are asking you to cool it is very bad. Please stop posting so much. Anything about 10-15 posts per day starts to feel really excessive to me. Definitely don't be dismissive about people's complaints to you about it.

They rejected my suggestion, so I sent them a DM that was a little more direct about it: Stop doing this if you want to keep your account on my instance.

Then, for some reason, they deleted their account on their own.

Well, that was weird, but at least it's all resolved and we can all get back to what we were doing. Or wait... what's happening now?

I wasn't expecting "making sure we make a safe space for the spammers by banning people who complain about spam" to be an important moderation duty, but I guess in the bizarro world that is [email protected] moderation philosophy, it makes perfect sense.

https://lemmy.world/modlog/1347

@[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago)

Sounds to me like some moderator wanted those unreliable sources and pieces of propaganda slipped in.

Definitely PTB.

Wow, look at the last removal from that timeframe in the modlog. Someone literally just said they think the other person might be a spam bot and got their post removed for it. There's definitely a mod with an agenda there.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

Wow lemmy is becoming more like reddit every day.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago)

Lemmy is reddit. Always have been. Including the false superiority complex that somehow comes with both platforms.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

I slept 3 hours last night so I haven't processed everything in this post yet but I do have one thought. Your complaint was that they post a lot and should "touch grass". Sidenote, I don't think that it was necessarily the best foot to put forward by just openly throwing shade like that in the first message as an admin... Again, Idk where the hell I stand on any of this at the moment because I can't remember how to circulate my own blood.

But.

If you have that issue with their posting habits I am genuinely wondering what you think about people like myself or Picard Maneuver then. Not meant to be snide or sarcastic. I am genuinely curious with no emotion attached to it other than curiosity itself.

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

I didn’t tell them to touch grass, that was one of the users that was sort of arguing with them in the comments. My first involvement was the long and serious comment that I quoted last. I’ve been trying to be less of an asshole online, and that message keeping the sarcasm out of it and just being straight with them about what was going on, was a good example.

It wasn’t just that they post a lot, it’s a very spammy collection of articles including some from open propaganda sources like RT.com. My main concern with them was the volume but also the low quality of the posts, but I left it alone as not my business until there was widespread complaining from users coupled with total disregard on their part for what the users were saying about it.

You and The_Picard_Maneuver are completely fine. Usually I like when people post a lot. The only exception is what it’s all low quality or just-to-full-space stuff, which certainly isn’t you.

To give a frame of reference, you and The_Picard_Maneuver both make about 5 posts a day it looks like. This person made over 10 times that many (58 per day average) and people were actively asking them to cool it, and they were sort of snarking back at the people who were making the request. Y’all are fine.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago) (1 children)

Oh hey, I was wondering if this might show up here.

I will admit that I was aggressive in calling them out, but I'd seriously had enough of scrolling through All and seeing nothing but their name on everything, on top of seeing the same post on 3-5 different communities.

Language aside, I believe my concerns were reasonable enough and clearly stated. Power users of that nature can control what everyone on this platform is exposed to, potentially manipulating opinions and injecting disinformation. Lemmy is still small enough that a handful of people could potentially influence the entire user base. Vigilance is key.

My remaining concerns are 1) There are still other accounts with identical behavior that have not been addressed and 2) I have seen accounts like this one cycle through instances, and I expect we'll see a new account begin the same behavior from somewhere else soon enough.

Quite amusing that Cat deleted their account though. Exactly the sort of behavior you'd expect from someone just innocently posting content, right?

Beyond that, I could see a temp ban for my language. But 15 days? Yeesh. It was actually removed a short time ago so I guess another mod got a look at things.

Here's the ban explanation, basically saying "spammers and suspicious activity is a-okay, and how dare you say anything about it"

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 weeks ago

You're 100% correct that a 15-day ban was too much. For some reason I had thought that wasn't your first ban in news. Vegan and news have similar icons (based on colors and a quick glance). I apologize for that, and unbanned you a day ago.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

Why is posting a lot of content considered spam though? Don’t we want more content? Is there something wrong with the content being posted?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

The sheer volume of it (again, 58 posts per day) and the sort of indiscriminate nature. I could make a bot that would repost random stuff out of the RSS feeds into other people's communities, that doesn't mean that it's "more content" and good for those communities.

There were also some propaganda sources in there, RT.com among them.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

Yep. That user is formerly:

And probably more. I was only paying attention since Dot, but I recognized the pattern retroactively for the two "101" accounts.

They post a LOT of stuff back to back, mostly "offbrand" news and blogs pretending to be news. They also start slipping in the propaganda news as well (as you pointed out). When they get called out, they delete their account with content removal set to true.

Now that you've called them out, expect them to nuke their account and all content soon. That's their standard play. They'll be back in a day or two with a brand new account on a different instance and starting the pattern all over.

FWIW, I locally banned their current alt (Cat) as soon as it popped up after they deleted their 000 one and started back with the same pattern. They leave a lot of abandoned comments in their wake which turns into database clutter and inaccessible conversations.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 weeks ago (2 children)

Makes perfect sense. Yeah, some people told me about them and I kind of left it alone, for overly long I guess in retrospect. They weren't as bad the last time I had looked at them.

The more interesting question is, why are the lemmy.world mods coming out swinging for this user?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago) (1 children)

Can't answer that, but it's possible they're simply not aware of their alt history. There's a similarly active user, Microwave, but they're legit; they always post quality stuff with no agenda. Perhaps they're giving "Cat" the benefit of doubt? They also give several other controversial posters a lot of leeway (won't mention them, but you probably already know the handful I'm referring to). Not suggesting any kind of agenda with the LW mods; just seems like they're trying a bit too hard to be "fair and balanced".

This user nukes their accounts, so unless one is familiar with the patterns of their previous accounts, it's difficult to correlate them with no history available. If they're on your instance and you have concerns about them (and they haven't self-destructed yet), you might be ahead to just ban them ahead of time (w/o content removal) so there's record for later comparison.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 weeks ago

You hit it on the head. We weren't aware of this user, as we had 0 reports about them until today.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 weeks ago

By the time we received complaints about your comments, the user in question (cat) had already deleted their account.

I don't have time to track down every post of theirs to check for sources. We tend to do that when people report posts.

The post that was reported that was submitted by cat was this one:

https://a.lemmy.world/lemmy.world/post/25907073

Nothing wrong with that post. The reason given in the report:

WTF is this power user stuff? That's a lot of freaking posts in less than a month

Again, prolific posting isn't against any rule. The post didn't break any rule. Why would I remove that?

Now, on to the reason I gave a temp ban.

Comment:


What the actual fuck? My entire goddamn feed is this one account…

Attacking the user for posting? You may not like them, but again, we only received one report on that user. Apparently their content, while aggressive, broke no rules, and upset nobody until today, according to my reports and mod logs.

Next:

Touch grass. Good lord. You’re carpet bombing multiple communities with repeats of the same crap.

Another personal attack against the user.

Next:

I’m not blocking an account that could easily pivot and start blasting multiple communities spanning multiple instances with subversive information.

Much better to bring awareness to such ridiculousness. The motives of an account with such activity should be questioned. ESPECIALLY since all posts are in news and politics communities.

Another person attacking them for posting. Do we attack Flying Squid, Admiral Picard, MicroWave, or others for contributing more than other users? Again, they broke no rules, and we received our first complaint about that account today.

There were a lot of people attacking that user, and a lot of reports on the comments attacking that user. Those are just a few examples.

Yes, I moderate, but I have a ton more going on in my life, so I'm not always on Lemmy to see what's happening, and I do rely heavily on reports to find points of pain in the communities I moderate. I also rely heavily on the rest of the moderation team, as well the great tools that people like @[email protected] make.

If you go through the posts in this community, you'll see tons of places where I personally have worked with other users who had complaints. We try to be fair, but attacking users is a violation of our community rules.