Hello Admins! I’ve been recently banned because I broke down and called someone who had 70 downvotes and was already acting like a troll a “dipshit”. As punishment, I’ve been banned for 7 days from the site, and permabanned from the politics community. I feel like this was a little harsh, given the content that stays up on that community, but it felt especially weird because I was banned by a mod who was losing an argument on why voters voted for a specific law. This to me felt like someone was annoyed with me, so they looked at what comments I made in other communities they moderate and banned me accordingly.
I tried to find a moderator code of conduct for this site but there wasn’t one created - only mention of one being created and a link to a boilerplate legal document which doesn’t mentio a code of conduct for mods.
Another moderator didn’t like a take I had on some topic so he decided to troll me for 3 days, trying to bait me with emojis.
If this is what trolling truly is (caling someone a dipshit) then I need to recalibrate my reports and there’s LOADS more people on this site that troll. I didn’t think simply calling someone a name would constitute trolling but if it does, whoa boy: be prepared for many more reports.
If instead, these moderators are abusing their powers, how can I report this?
Moderators make this site work, and they need to exist. Abusive moderation wlll only make people angry and cause the site to be even more difficult to moderate (not a threat by me, just understanding how people operate when they are upset at forums online). FWIW, I’m not a troll, but boy do trolls find me.
edit: Also, I’m not being mean-spirited here. If the mods I referred to earlier wanted to reverse their actions because they made a mistake, that’s fine. No harm, no fowl. I can and did survive 7 days without access to this site, I can do it again but I do try to avoid bad behavior. I’m also not asking for special treatment, so if the actions these mods took weren’t mistakes, I just ask that they enforce the code of conduct of their communities accordingly. Nothing wrong with making rules for a space and enforcing them. If I’ve still managed to upset folks, sorry? I would love to know what for so that I could make a real apology, but I recognize that it might be outing you. If you want to create a burning account and DM me, DMs are always open. As a human, I do want to be decent. I have some strong opinions (and can be an ass at times) but I strive to be good.
That’s unfortunate. I mean, let’s acknowledge that admins to an extent need to protect mods, and again that mods do labor for free. Lots of mods do the work they do because they want the communities they cherish to flourish.
But let’s also acknowledge that there is such a thing as user churn and that will ultimately be the downfall of any site. With enough money you can burn through the churn indefinately. Volunteer sites will just disconnect and users will go to the for-profit sites like reddit, causing more users to be tracked, the internet to be more centralized, etc..
I think it’s also worth mentioning that mods can create their own burner accounts and use those to troll users. Mods are also humans and if they want to speak their minds they should be able to do so. But, speaking their minds from a position of power puts them in a different power dynamic from users, which reflects not only on them, but on the community and the instance as a whole.
And then users get to see literal scat porn on the front page from a username like “admins are assholes” because a mod wanted troll on main. (edit: this was an actual bit of content I reported not too long ago. maybe it was “mods are assholes” I’m not sure, but it was long that vien.)