this post was submitted on 20 Dec 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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There's a key difference. A subscribed member of the community has the right to downvote poor quality content, whereas drive-by downvoting via All is something else altogether.
I have not seen the content that OP downvoted, so I have no idea how poor-quality it might be. But why would that even matter? The mod defended the community from someone who, by OP's own admission, is neither a subscribed member nor someone who has ever contributed beyond, and again this is OP's very own wording in this post, "mass downvoting".
"mass downvoting" is a form of vote manipulation.
Let's even take for granted that OP did it entirely in good faith, thinking they were helping the Threadiverse. Okay then, but in that case why bother being salty about being banned, from a community they claimed to have no interest in contributing to?
It seems to me a case of play games, win prizes. Yeah OP can mass downvote, and yeah the mod can ban them as a result. And now we've all had this conversation about it.
Maximum friendliness would have been for OP to simply block the community, or perhaps the poster to it, and then not have to worry about seeing that low-quality content anymore. Instead, they seem to want the right to continue to downvote it despite not ever wanting to post or comment. But I am siding with the mod in this case that I might well ban someone for the same reason, if the only "contributions" they ever made were drive-by downvotes like that.
So now OP is banned, so they don't have to worry anymore about it, problem solved. In the future though, I did recommend blocking rather than mass-downvoting all posts in a community that they are NOT a member of.
Anyone has the right to downvote. Subscribing just means you want to see it in your subscribed feed, not that you somehow get more “rights” to vote. What a ridiculous notion.
No it is not. Get off your high horse. If I downvote every post from a specific user because it clearly doesn’t belong in a community, that is not vote manipulation. Yes it would be better if the content would get removed, but waiting for that to occur and in the meantime allowing upvotes to continue when people might not even realize the post is in the wrong community just warps what communities are for.
This was readily apparent for years on Reddit (probably still is). People that don’t pay attention to what sub something is on, and then they just upvote it because they like it. It makes it to the top of the subreddit, more people see it, think that’s what the community is actually about, and then join it thus warping the actual intention of the community.
I’ve made it clear why this is a terrible system.
You're completely missing the point. Downvoting bad content is entirely desirable, but what constitutes bad content varies by community and instance. For example, I think most of the stuff in memes communities is pretty shit content. So I don't subscribe to any. I don't go to All and think "well this isn't to my tastes, better downvote it all!"
If someone is actually spamming, not just turboposting, then report it and block it. If they're just posting a lot, maybe point it to them, report it if it's against the rules, and block them so you don't see their posts. Posting a lot of stuff to relevant communities is very rarely harmful behavior.
And the mod also has the right to ban people that mass downvote so... yeah, everyone has their "rights" here, until they don't anymore.
OP said something that could be interpreted to that effect, but we don't know? And fwiw, I did not interpret the OP as saying that, everything that I have said here presumes that the downvoting is not restricted to merely one user but rather than that content from that user is merely one example of many low-quality posts from that entire community. This post is very much lacking in these crucial details, upon which a proper judgement is predicated.
That said, what would that change? Whether one user or many, either way OP admits to mass-downvoting many posts in a community that they are not a member of. OP has the capability but no (protected) "right" to be able to do so. Someone made a post, someone else downvoted it, then a mod banned the OP, now OP is complaining about the situation here (without providing all the evidence necessary to fully understand, e.g. were all the downvoted posts from a single user or from multiple?). And since the ban was a direct drive consequence of the mass-downvoting, it makes total sense to me why the ban occurred?
Though it seems next to impossible to continue to discuss this, without an example of such a post to examine. All we have here is OP's word that the posts sucked ass - but OP in this very post has already been quite free with use of language, implying at first that they saw the content in their subscribed feed (that being the most natural interpretation of the phrase"my frontpage"), so I am unwilling to take OP's word on other matters that it was the burden of OP to have provided.
Hence my determination of YDI: mass-downvoting leads to bans, it's kinda known, so if someone wanted to have not been banned, it's extremely easy to avoid that fate by simply not doing the action.