TIL.
I'm actually surprised that it's possible to ban people for blanket downvoting, e.g. I don't think mods of reddit communities would be able to do that.
this post was submitted on 18 Jan 2025
7 points (59.5% liked)
Ye Power Trippin' Bastards
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513 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.
Rules
- Post only about bans or other sanctions from mod(s).
- Provide the cause of the sanction (e.g. the text of the comment).
- Provide the reason given by the mods for the sanction.
- 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.
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.
- 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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Votes are public on lemmy, unlike reddit.
Where do I find those?
If this is power tripping, then shouldn’t meat lovers be justified in brigading vegan communities to blanket downvote posts?
Yes, they would be, see:
https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/27711002
The consensus is that you should not ban people for downvoting. At the time, vegan posts in that community would be massively downvoted vs upvoted so beaver used some sort of automation to ban everyone who downvoted. That was considered power tripping so beaver was removed and everyone was unbanned. I was thinking that maybe beaver took it too far after reading the comments in the thread I linked. But now I'm unsure, since the consensus has shifted and it is ok to ban people for downvoting when it comes to this carnivore community. Idk.
I found I kept downvoting and getting disgusted by these carnivore communities since they kept showing up in my feed, so I blocked them. Votes don't matter as much in lemmy as they did in reddit, but they are public which has always given me the ick.
Well, votes not mattering isn't totally correct, as some communities use the tool that auto-bans anyone who gets enough downvotes over the last month, so you can use brigading to get those people banned from communities they might visit.
Yeah I forgot, I remember someone talking about Pleasant Politics doing this. I don't think votes should be used like that but it is not up to me.
Yeah, I think it's a not-well thought out idea. All it would take is a group of several people, or one person with several alts, and you could send most people into the red on updoots and get them banned.
Wonder if the tool can ban mods? If so, you could dethrone the mods of Pleasant Politics long enough to cause some serious chaos before the admins got on and fixed the problem. It seems like a potential security vulnerability, to be honest.
Yeah no your war on this community is pointless. They are allowed to exist just like you and if you don't like it you can hide them and move on.
Well, this is one where the subject is kinda beat to death.
Blanket down voting is a shitty thing, and it is completely appropriate for mods to ban people that do it
However, they should have a definitive criteria for what thresholds they use to determine what is and isn't blanket down voting.
Myself, I down vote stuff on there that's either off topic for the place, or stuff that's utter bullshit, and/or stuff that's YouTube drek because the YouTube drek is never sourced well. A link to a video is way too likely to be bullshit when it comes down to fad, niche, or weird diets.
Which means I end up down voting more than I do otherwise.
And, there's very rarely any posts worth engaging in.
By the apparent metrics, I should have already been banned. Which means that the apparent metrics don't match what's being used in practice.
However! I think that's less PTB and more "clueless" mods that don't have experience running a controversial community. The more controversial the subject is, the clearer you have to be with how, when, and why you're going to take action, unless you want to end up on a community like this one, lol.
and/or stuff that’s YouTube drek because the YouTube drek is never sourced well.
I've noticed this pattern, I think its kinda rude, I take time to find a really good topical video on onboarding to carnivore and your downvoting it because its a youtube video, regardless of the quality of the video - in this case it was a board certified obesity doctor talking about starting carnivore? Did you even open the video before downvoting?
Conversational videos have value for people who are interested in the community theme
Not required to watch videos to vote on them.
They may be topical, and they all seem to be.
But the ugly truth is that nobody making a YouTube video on almost anything provides anything more than their word that they're using well vetted information. When someone is making health claims, the standard is way higher than when they're casually talking about RC cars, or juggling
You may not be aware, but even board certified doctors can be full of shit. Plenty of doctors choose to make and sell outright scam products, while using their licence as the basis for their claims.
Now, if it were possible for a doctor to prove via demonstration on video that their claims are up to date, best practices, like you can with a chemistry video, or a woodworking video, it wouldn't fall under the drek category for me. I wouldn't down vote.
But they rarely can when making health claims. When they're making health claims that go against current best practices on diet, it is most definitely drek. You can't provide access to studies and the data behind them in that format unless you're sitting there reading the publications on screen.
Then, like you said, you took the time to find a topical video. You said nothing about finding a video, vetting its claims, finding opposing data and evaluating it. Which is the standard necessary when making health claims.
Why am I the arbiter of quality? I'm not the sole arbiter. But I am someone that has worked with bariatric patients, their doctors, their nutritionists. I'm someone that reads jama articles for fun, and tend to be willing to w ade through the jargon to understand why best practices are what they are.
So, a video making health claims is an automatic bad video because YouTube doesn't have the structure to give citations. Well, a channel could actually provide links in the description, or even list the citations. I've never seen one that does, and it's still not useful to expect that someone go to YouTube, then check for those citations, then go and find them. That's a bad post, even when topical. It's too many extra steps to find actual data to support a claim.
Conversational videos about health do not have value. That's regardless of what the conversation is.
Seriously, have you not run into any of the numerous jackass doctors selling their shit via infomercials, or hawking their own products in their practice, or ending up losing their licence for ignoring best practices? Just being a doctor does not mean you can make claims on YouTube and get a free pass on backing your shit up on YouTube.
With all of that in mind, it would be a waste of my time to go and watch a video to individually evaluate it for voting on lemmy. The general state of YouTube as a source is so poor that it can be dismissed entirely. It's like using Playboy magazine as a source because they interviewed a doctor.
The bait post does read like a 9 year old just learned the words pipi, caca, boudin or something.
I might not have all the numbers because it's a remote community (to me) and it seems the bans and some of these downvotes might not all have federated to us, maybe from a lack of SJW subscribers at some point in time.
Those I can see have single digits total votes, so that wouldn't really meet my ban threshold even for a small community.
I do ban mass-downvoters now and then on SJW. At some point, if your only interaction with a community is repeatedly, exclusively downvoting stuff, either learn to curate your feed or GTFO, but I do have a much higher bar than this.
Coming to the community, especially a small one, just to downvote without posting a single post/comment is antisocial as fuck so stuck your rage where the sun don't shine, sweetie.
Your reference to "respectful dissent" shows you don't understand what the rule means - it is to encourage participation, ie posting and commenting. Blanket downvoting has exactly opposite effect discouraging participation.
Gonna have to say YDI here sorry. Blanket downvoting is a bannable offense in any community because it denegrates the platform as a whole.
I also want to apologize to the carnivore community for my previous assumptions about the diet as a whole. I had unquestioningly believed a post that labeled the diet as unconditionally dangerous, and I commented encouraging people who had that opinion to report the community. After doing more research, I realize I was mistaken.
While there are risks associated with the carnivore diet, and it certainly shouldn’t be marketed as “for everyone,” when approached mindfully and appropriately, the diet is not necessarily dangerous.
How can mods or admins see this?
Votes are public information, its published on the activity feed protocol.
How can they see it?
With just two clicks. Or we can run queries directly on the database, for example to detect downvote patterns. And react if the downvote patterns seem like abuse.
How can I as a mod/admin do that
Gonna have to say YDI here sorry. Blanket downvoting is a bannable offense in any community because it denegrates the platform as a whole.
Ironically, I'm not even banned myself, as I participated (and generally don't downvote that much anyway, whatever the community)
What isn't really clear here is that users seems to have been banned for one single downvote? Seems a bit extreme.
Nope.
Only users not participating and either blanket downvoting multiple posts or downvoting specifically this ONE moderator's post banning downvoting without participation were banned.
You are actually the best example here - you have participated and are not banned.
Coming to the community just to downvote is toxic. Since banned users don't contribute, they have no interest being there.
You don't like a certain community - block and move on with your life. Don't behave like a dick.
i’m aware; i said YDI because thats the colloqualism in the sidebar. “you” means the modded users here :P
if you have evidence that it was truly a single downvote ban i would post that because that’s a real issue of algorithm manipulation — but way different from blanket downvoting bans.
Yeah, don't go to communities you dislike and downvote everything. It's a dick move. Just block them.
The initial removal was about rule 3 - no rage baiting. That rule has been removed.
Well, that explains why the posts were restored? Mods are allowed to change rules, right?
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