this post was submitted on 15 Jan 2026
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Ye Power Trippin' Bastards
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25 users here now
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.
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
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
PTB - Power Tripping Bots
This seems like the normal ideological purging that takes place in any externally managed echochamber.
Remember, data scientists have proven that around 30% of all posts and comments leading up to the US election in 2020 were from automated accounts managed by threat actors linked to Russia, Qatar, Iran, Saudi Arabia, etc.
Those same data analysis tools indicate that in the post-LLM era bot traffic has grown 10x since then.
We know that the strategy of these groups is to occupy, support and promote the most extreme positions on any topic.
It stands to reason that these same threat groups are active on Lemmy and that should make you INCREDIBLY skeptical when you encounter an account/community/instance that displays extreme ideology. You're never going to win an argument with them, because they're not people who are trying to defend a position... they're trying to make sure that anybody reading will only see their ~~position~~ propaganda.
This is done by using multiple accounts to post comments along with a brigade of cheap throwaway accounts which can be used for vote manipulation. It doesn't matter if you make a devastating argument that clearly shows the OP/commentor is wrong if you're buried under downvotes so nobody sees your comment.
This also extends to communities/subreddits.
An easy example that most people on the left are familiar with: r/conservative . It's very clearly not an organic subreddit made up of a random assortment of the population, the comment section is so heavily pruned that you think Reddit is broken when you click 'show 28 more comments' and there is nothing there. If you post there with any comment that doesn't imply your tongue is tickling Trump's duodenum you will be banned very quickly.
I look at any instance that houses these extreme opinions in the same way. While I'm sure there are real actual human people who arrived at their position on their own and hold some of the ideas being promoted there, I'm equally sure that there are a huge amount of the 'people' and moderators are operating in bad faith if not outright maliciousness.
Benn Jordan on YT (music/DIY tech youtuber, not a political content creator) lays a lot of this out, with citations: https://youtu.be/GZ5XN_mJE8Y
Not sure if I'm ready to assume/accept that. But good video and good to keep in mind. Thanks.
It's an odd situation that we're in where everyone understands that social media is swarming with bots and also are mostly unwilling to believe that it is affecting the social media that they personally use.
I don't think that lemmy is a big enough target for that, frankly. It's not like this is Twitter, instagram, bluesky or Facebook.
On the scale of intelligence agencies it requires very, very few resources to pay some minimum wage call center workers to manage moderator/admin accounts on every social media site where they're capable of creating such accounts.
We know for a fact that they use Telegram channels, population around 80-100k, to push content. It doesn't seem a stretch to think they'd be interested in communities on Lemmy with similarly sized userbases.
I mean, it could also just be people who have been conditioned by social media to be primed for outrage and self-righteousness or a mod having a bad day.
That being said, if there are bots on social media (and we know there are), where they would want to be and what they would want to be doing? Hosting a far left instance (or far right instance) is on brand as is forming an echo chamber by purging non-aligned members.
It may not be a duck, but it's sure quacking and eating a lot of peas