this post was submitted on 03 Apr 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.
- 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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But yeah, fuck the r/privacy mods. I heard from another comment they moderate fosstodon too, is that true?
Yep, Carrotcypher is in the mod list.
https://hub.fosstodon.org/team/
I presume the admins just don't know about this. They also moderate over 50 subreddits, including the Mastodon one. They tend to be the controlling moderator, or the top moderator that is regularly active.
Doing my best to compile more content about it...
It might be worth letting them know.
I am extremely convinced that bad actors have become pretty good at taking over subreddits, and I know there are companies that will sell services where they will do this sort of stuff ("reputation management") if you want the internet as a whole to have a better impression of your company, or overall control the narrative. I don't really know anything at all about carrotcypher specifically, but it sounds a lot like this person might be doing something at least similar to that. So assembling something that's well-documented and organized enough that it's hard to dismiss and then sharing it with any people who are giving carrotcypher a position of authority, sounds like a really good idea. I can help with it in any way if you want me to (although like I say I have no idea about this person specifically beyond suspicious things like this that people have brought up).
The fediverse is very vulnerable to this kind of stuff I think, just like Reddit is, because there's always such a shortage of people who are really willing to put in the time and effort it takes to do behind-the-scenes work like moderation. I think we should definitely be vigilant about calling it out if it seems like someone is doing stuff that's sketchy.
Now, or after a couple more posts? I have commented about this moderator's political attitudes elsewhere but I still have a bit of a backlog of posts to release info about.
I feel like maybe with a blog post or something. Or just a post with a detailed laundry list of all the least defensible decisions. I think just having particular political attitudes are (in most cases) fine... but the stuff like this that I have observed on Lemmy, and most of the stuff you've been talking about, there's simply no reasonable reason for. I feel like Reddit is sufficiently anonymous-because-of-bigness and sufficiently corrupted that they get sloppier with it over there.
I want to say it would be a good idea to reach out to carrotcypher and get their take on some of this stuff, too. It's proper due diligence even though something about it makes me not like the idea.