Please follow this comm guidelines. Your post is too vague. Post the modlog so people understand what you're talking about at least.
this post was submitted on 20 Mar 2026
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Ye Power Trippin' Bastards
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21 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
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The modlog is on the picture? Should I have linked to it? I'll edit to add that.
edit: Oops is there no picture?
No picture that I can see
I'm using Boost, for some reason the picture didn't post.
"Vote manipulation" is the wrong term, really. It means that you were identified as bloc downvoting in specific communities, usually with no contribution either.
I usually surf /All, block communities I don't want to see anymore, and just vote to remove a post from my feed. I will downvote posts like a Youtube video post with no description, or the 4th and 5th duplicate post sent to multiple communities.
and just vote to remove a post from my feed.
But do you realize that downvoting a post counts as a downvote, which can lower its visibilty across all of Lemmy in certain cases?
Downvoting just because you don't want to see something in your feed isn't a great use of the downvote button on this platform. If you do that a lot to posts from one specific community, the mod there might notice a pattern of downvotes coming from your account with zero comments or other interaction. It can look targeted serial downvoting, which some label as vote manipulation.
Lemmy has quite a few people who go around mass-downvoting every post in certain communities simply because they hate the topic, a particular poster, or the whole place (trust me, I know this all to well!). They're basically serial downvoters, and it's a real problem on here.
You don't come across as one of those guys, but that's probably why you're getting mistaken for one. It'd be way better if there was just a simple "hide" button so you could remove stuff from your view without tanking the post's score, but that's a different topic.
And honestly, if you don't like any of the posts in a community anyway, getting banned from it shouldn't bother you much. You can just block the community or the user and move on.
You could probably appeal to the admin or the mod, explain the misunderstanding, and get the ban reversed.
It's been used as a catch all by mods and instance admins to describe all forms of malicious voting.
It's likely that a mod or admin looked at and saw you downvoting in communities without participation and/or downvoting a lot in those communities without contributing anything back. And banned you from all their communities or instance banned you completely (Lemmy instance bans apply community bans to any community you participated in on the instance to allow federated content removal).
These types of patterns are generally not welcome on Lemmy because communities here are smaller and people systemically downvoting hurts community reach, and because there are already a lot of people who do it on Lemmy, many mods and admins just aren't having it, and I don't blame them. Lemmy has the most robust community blocking system out there for a reason. They want you to use it to filter out communities from your feed. If you don't wish to block a whole community then hiding posts is an option too. Blocking users is an option if you hate what they post and can't be bothered to ignore them.
Unless it's the downvote circlejerks they are in on, Funny how normal users have to go through exceptional means to find out who is upvoting and downvoting while mods and admins clearly aren't subjectively performing on the feature. Sounds to me like the worse pattern is excluding someone from entirely unrelated communities, and that modlog hardly offers an explanation.
How much do you want to bet the powermod/admin saw their comments downvoted and that was basically what fueled their ban rage moment? And how much do you want to bet that that user probably has an alt user to do the same, with several months between any actual comments but a daily tabulation of upvotes and downvotes, just to avoid the same scrutiny?
This doesn't need to be justified, if downvotes are a problem then they should be particularly addressed in the platform (and they are, and sites like reddit have already done so for years), besides the obvious of making them as easy to see as they are to mods or admins. By all means allow communities to vote neuter non-active participants.
Lemmy has a "robust" "community" blocking system (that is easily circumvented by alts - and I've even seen admins encourage this over just working out issues and retaining that bit of traceability to an actual person) because users are forced to leave their "communities", they can't just choose to switch to a moderation team for the same community. And yes, only a very small portion of most "communities" ever care that deeply about any particular mods, which ironically they would actually do if they had a choice between competing moderating teams instead of the community dramas we've had as a result of this "robust" system.
Incidentally, regarding the whole blocking thing, you've got a post on Ye Power Trippin' Bastards that does not make your own moderation look good FYI.
I've not dug through it, nor have I picked a side, but I figured I would share that a users votes are public
...So... Someone looked through my vote history and decided they didn't like the way I voted?
Edit... It won't load for me completely, but I have over 100,000 upvotes, and 2,000 downvotes. Someone might be overreacting.
More likely they looked through your interactions with their communities and saw you didnt contribute and only downvoted.
If you look at my modlog and voting record, you will see a very similar story as yours. With the exact same ban messages regarding "systemic downvoting" months apart, but with "different" moderators.
Some people create instances or communities with the explicit goal of creating an echo chamber for their opinions. These modlogs reflect much more upon them than the people they ban.
Have your tried appealing to the mods and admins?
No, I noticed a couple weeks ago, and didn't really care. But I tried posting to an Elder Scrolls comm this morning and was reminded.
That's my guess, but I have no info to prove it.