this post was submitted on 12 Jun 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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I don’t have a problem with modding multiple communities, because some people simply have the time and patience for it while others don’t. But there should 100% be reasonable limits. Maybe a cap of 3 or 5 communities, and sweeping bans in multiple communities should automatically trigger a manual review from other mods.
Nah, lemmy is way less intensive work on the mod side of things still. Most communities, you'll go weeks without needing to do anything at all.
This community here has a bias towards high traffic communities. The more traffic you get, the more reports you get, the more chances of someone doing stupid stuff that needs mod action. And, with a higher volume of mod actions, there's a higher chance of even the most level headed mods fucking up in one was or another.
Most of lemmy, one person could moderate a hundred communities and you'd never know that they were there at all.
I think there should not be power mods on lemmy. It should be baked into the core code to have a max limit.
A person can easily avoid that limit by having multiple accounts, and that should be an accepted solution if a community truly needs a mod. But it will lessen the practice.
I don't disagree about power mods. I'm saying that using an arbitrary number of communities won't prevent that by itself. It's a more complicated issue to address. A power mod could have two or three communities and if they're the right ones, dominate a topic.
That's the problem, in my mind, that the limit would be arbitrary. No matter what number you pick, unless it's one, you can't totally eliminate power modding methodology from controlling discourse. And, like you said, it's trivial to bypass to begin with.
I think you are correct. I have seen how mod abuse grew on Reddit. A lot of that was company culture allowing such a thing. But some of it was simply human nature.
Lemmy is very innovative. I think it will find creative solutions when the problem slowly gets a little worse each year. But I can’t think of any now.
Exactly.
(And no cheesing it by serially leaving and rejoining multiple communities; you can mod one community. If you quit you can mod one other. And so on, with a limit of, say, two communities per year. But you can't go back to the first one for, say, a decade.)
You are missing the point. This is about limiting power, not workload.
Sure, but what I'm saying is that part of the problem with power mods is that they can't do the task properly in the first place because the ability to moderate fairly and effectively is Sudbury directly relates to how much work and time a mod is willing/able to put into it. It's trivial to moderate dozens of lemmy communities both fairly amd effectively when you only run into trouble on a given C/ maybe once a month due to low volumes of users.
A lot of people start with the assumption that a moderator with a lot of subs/C/s under their management is there to fuck shit up from the beginning, and that just isn't the case on average. Yeah, people can and do moderate to serve their egos sometimes. And it was very common on reddit to see people that didn't start that way get that way.
But this isn't reddit. The user base is different, the people running instances are different, and vary in their oversight of mods. The mods are different too, so far. Go back and scroll this community. There's assholes here and there, but it isn't because they've swept up dozens of communities and hold the names hostage.
It's impossible to stay a power mod on lemmy for long because once you start being a douche in general, someone is going to another instance and start a new community and people leave yours. It's happened. Multiple times. Look at ten forward, or the 196 communities.
Even the dominance in numbers that .world has isn't going to make communities there immune to being abandoned and the mod/s left with the crickets.
Power mods here are an annoyance at most. So until the user base gets so big that even obscure little C/s that see posts maybe once a month are all getting high traffic, workload is a factor in whether or not moderating a high number of communities is viable as a way to abuse the position of moderator.
Again, this is not the point. Power to ban people in multiple communities should not be aggregated in hands of a one person.
That's only a problem if abused.
And it isn't. The nature of the beast is such that there's always admin oversight.
More importantly, nobody can own a topic here. It doesn't matter if one asshat abuses their position, there's still 5 other c/bogantalk communities, or there can be.
Having mod positions in multiple communities isn't inherently abusive. Reddit conditioned us to think so, but it really isn't the case.
Nor am I personally willing to indulge my misanthropy to the extent of defaulting to the assumption that anyone moderating is on an inevitable path to douchebaggery. Which is separate from there being a severe lack of effectiveness to it when people have tried to go all god emperor over the last couple of years. Power mods that try it, fail, and become power mods over emptiness.
If a given mod is both fair and effective, it doesn't matter how many communities it is at all anyway. You'll never know how many they moderate because there's nothing to see but stable communities.
It's hunting for a problem that just isn't here.
Again, you are missing the point. It is about removing possibility of the concentration of power in one hand.
It CAN be abused and WILL be abused. This very thread is an example how.
I'm not missing the point, I'm disagreeing with you.
In a post about a powermod routinely doing precisely the very thing you claim powermods won't apparently do, out of the goodness of their black little rotten hearts.
Pointing at the sky and yelling green won't make it any less blue.
You are clearly missing the point then.
Why you don't seem to get is that your opinion isn't incontrovertible fact. Saying it a dozen different ways doesn't make it more important, more valid, or even just better expressed.
I'm not missing a fucking thing, I just find your opinion weak and pessimistic.
Now, you don't have to like that. But repeating over and over that I'm "missing" something is an even weaker rhetorical gambit.
So, bugger off mate. You're crossing the line into inanity as well as rudeness
Since you don't seem to understand what I am saying and where I am coming from, you are clearly missing the point.
Me? Are you sure about that?
I am!