this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2024
-7 points (41.9% liked)

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.

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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.

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Banned from [email protected] for making a title more descriptive (lemmy.nz)
submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Earlier today drag was banned from [email protected] for this post: https://lemmy.nz/post/15864724

The reason stated was "Dishonest headline and quoting".

The sidebar of the community states the following on article titles:

Title must fairly describe link contents. If your title differs from the site’s, it should only be to add context or be more descriptive.

The article's original title was "Harris vs. Trump spoiler’s supporter says the quiet part out loud" - in drag's opinion, this is clickbait. The quiet part is not stated in the title. The reader has to click on the article in order to learn what it's actually about.

Drag's post title was "Jill Stein ally says the Greens' strategy is about making Harris lose the presidency" - this clearly states which group is involved and what precisely the controversial statement was. But drag was banned for making the title more clear.

The sidebar of the community states the following on article quotes:

Do not post entire articles in the body or in the comments.

Drag quoted three passages from the article in the post body: The quote from the Jill Stein ally which the article was about, and two passages about Donald Trump's relation to these events. None of the quotes were edited. As asked by the sidebar drag did not post the entire body, only the parts drag believed was relevant, and drag was banned for following this rule too.

The vast majority of comments on the post, including all the highly upvoted comments, agreed with the points made by the article and expressed zero problem with the presentation. There were two comments which had a problem with drag's presentation of the article:

…um, where is the second half of this article? (2 upvotes)

This comment is a non-issue; posting the entire article in the body is against the community rules. Drag was following the rules by only posting half.

Least dishonest LW politics OP quoting an entire article out of context (1 upvote)

This comment agrees with the moderation decision but does not explain why, and drag can't work out why on drag's own. Drag tried drag's best to represent the article accurately.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Is there a reason you're referring to yourself in the third person? Seems weird lol.

But, dude, regardless of the ban being overkill or not, you did violate the rules as listed.

Now, how much of that is on you vs being on the vague language of those rules is back to the ban being justified or not. The title change rule is vague as hell, and needs rewriting if they're going to take issue with the degree of editing of the titles for clarity. But you did totally replace the title, no matter the reason for it, so some kind of mod action would be expected. A temp ban seems at the very extreme of appropriate, and even that only if it isn't the first time you've done it, and the rule was clearly written.

If I was to draft the same rule to reflect the application of it here, I would go with "title must match linked site's title if a title exists, which may include clarification, but must follow the original title's structure".

The way they wrote the rule encourages alterations to titles because it starts off directing posters that the post title must describe link content. As written, not drafting descriptive title is out of bounds, so people are going to assume exactly what you did, and come up with their own. Very badly written rule.

The part about not copy/pasting though, you posted enough length that a mod would have to follow the link and read the article to know how much you copied. While it coins be debated whether or not that's part of moderation when you have rules against copying entire articles, it's also not unreasonable to not follow every linked post to see if that's the case. Depends on the volume of posts that include long quoted sections as to whether or not that's a reasonable expectation on the mods.

That rule is well crafted and simple, but should be clarified if they're going to apply actions to copied sections as well, if they're above a certain length. You didn't break the rule as they listed it.

So, it's kind of a fuck up on both ends, with the onus being on the mods for not having their rules as written indicate the way they're going to apply them. You definitely changed the title far beyond what it should have been, but you seem to have done so in good faith based on a badly written rule

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I don't know if they have a reason for it, but I do know that as soon as I see it, I skip the rest of whatever was written.