this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2026
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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.
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- Post only about bans or other sanctions that you have received from a mod or admin.
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- You can post about power trippin’ in any social media, not just lemmy. Feel free to post about reddit or a forum etc.
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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.
YPTB 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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You are right, I did not make the right call on this one.
I have been neglecting the instance very aggressively due to being busy this summer. I was scanning through the report backlog and this post was reported for 'transphobia'. I skimmed through, clicked on a whitehouse link that said "RESTORING BIOLOGICAL TRUTH TO THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT" in big letters, and instead of doing more due-diligence I applied a rule that I rarely apply as the discriminant to process it quickly. The rule being, as you mentioned, that the 'Science' community is meant to be for discussing science itself. It is a meta-community.
In practice, I stopped enforcing this rule for the most part, which means that in this case it was an excuse I used to process the report quickly without needing to validate whether I personally think it is 'transphobia' or not.
Sorry
Some things:
I'm glad to hear it was a simple mistake.
If I could make a suggestion restoring the post, and banning users such as 'hoohoohoot@fedinsfw.app' who had commented, an account with prior history of multiple actual transphobic comments in their history, might be a good start to move forward.
Also if you don't mind, could you please DM me with the information for who made the 'transphobia' report? I've noticed some other issues with false reports on some of @TRAHR@quokk.au's posts and I would like to further keep an eye on what accounts are doing this to Quokk.au's users as it may be part of more targeted harassment.
Oh.
I checked the reports, and what I see is a sequence of 6 reports reporting hoohoohoot's comments. I do not have a vivid memory of the moment as I was just processing the back-log, but what must have happened is that In haste I interpreted this as 6 independent reports of the post, not noticing that the reports were of the comments, and so when I opened the post I was operating on what I mistakenly thought was a very high signal. I still did not want to claim 'transphobia' in my reason without verifying that, so, as I explained, I used the loophole as an excuse.
Usually, if this would really have been 6 independent reports of the same post, removing it would have been very likely the correct move. This contributed to why I was careless.
Here are 4 of them, I removed the names because these are not false reports:
That's fair, thanks for clearing that up :)
Yeah, I'm sorry. I usually try to not be this careless and it is very unlikely to happen again (at least this specific form of mistake. I am open to making new kinds of mistakes in the future).