this post was submitted on 20 Dec 2025
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Ye Power Trippin' Bastards
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87 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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It's context-driven. Small communities trying to build can get visibility hammered by random downvotes. Downvote trolls can be a problem for small communities trying to build up as they can successfully bury threads. I managed to discover the serial downvoters on my old television lemm.ee community and when I banned them (about 5 of them?) it had a huge impact. They didn’t all downvote /everything/ but they downvoted a lot of things, and they had no contribution to their names. Some of the accounts in question literally had no posting history. These accounts just existed to downvote.
Now, I wouldn’t just ban random accounts for occasional downvotes spread out over a time period - but if I kept seeing the same names on threads (and they never actually engaged with the community) with no discernable pattern of downvoting - that's a different story.
Now, did abbotsbury's behaviour justify that? I have no idea. I'm speaking generally.
And i'll tell you HHHHwhat, power tripping mods have significantly more negative effect on any community than any downvotes.
Does the situation I refer to above sound like power-tripping to you?
Yes. Take some responsibility, have some humility and harden the fuck up don't put yourself in a position of power if you are going to use that power when your feelings get hurt.
Has nothing to do with sensitivity. Just simply not wanting new posts to be buried because of random repeat downvoters who clearly have no interest in the community. My community is now long-past this, but it wasn't always.
So what exactly makes them trolls? You can't just call someone doing their own thing a troll, that's nazi tier wrong. So are they doing it on purpose or are they trying to curate their own feeds by upvoting and downvoting content they see accordingly?
I didn't use the term "troll" - just that mass-downvoting of content in a community that you don't engage in is harmful to that communities health and stunts its ability to grow if its sustained.
Whether or not they're doing it to curate their feeds or not is irrelevant, the point is that it is unwelcome bulk downvoting that only harms the community. If they have no interest in it, and are never going to post in the first place, why would it matter if they're banned?
Buddy listen to yourself "why would it matter if they're banned?" and yes you did use the term (((troll))) as a way to justify your actions against individuals you disagree with. You shouldn't be expressing your opinions through moderation it's always going to be wrong.
You realise I'm not the person the OP is referring to, right? I'm just saying that mass-downvoting all posts in a community can be harmful to that community and thus sometimes is reasonable for the community owner to ban the person doing it if they have no other contribution and clearly just outright dislike the community.
Okay mass downvoting is bad - is mass downvoting something an individual expressing their opinions can do inadvertently or is it a malicious action by a malicious individual? Again you are trying to paint someone with a different opinion than you as deserving of mod actions.
Whether or not it is malicious or not isn't relevant really. The effect is still the same.
I mean, speaking broadly - that goes for all actions. If people abuse others or harass others or throw out slurs then I also regard that as "deserving mod action".
All I'm saying - and being outright open about it - that if someone mass downvotes the majority of posts they see coming from a specific community on the feed, that it's a perfectly legitimate reason for the community moderator to ban them for that.
"Different opinion" is not equal to "abuse or harass others". If you were right would you need to make such leaps in logic?
All moderators already make decisions based on their opinion.
As I said: If someone mass downvotes the majority of posts they see coming from a specific community on the feed and have no interest in the actual community topic (which seems obvious to me if they're only downvoting and have never contributed any posts or comments), that it’s a perfectly legitimate reason for the community moderator to ban them for that because of the impact that downvoting at scale has to the community.