this post was submitted on 11 Feb 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:

  1. Which mods/admins were being Power Tripping Bastards?
  2. What sanction did they impose (e.g. community ban, instance ban, removed comment)?
  3. Provide a screenshot of the relevant modlog entry (don’t de-obfuscate mod names).
  4. Provide a screenshot and explanation of the cause of the sanction (e.g. the post/comment that was removed, or got you banned).
  5. Explain why you think its unfair and how you would like the situation to be remedied.

Rules


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.


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So, I saw a report from one of my users. They reported:

https://ponder.cat/post/1594852/1813842

For the reason:

Unreasonable fighting with everyone in every simple post

I think that's ridiculous, so I talked with them about it. Posting private communications is frowned upon I guess, but long story short, they weren't receptive. I've decided to ban the account.

IMO the general culture on Lemmy is that users are entitled to their free account and everyone needs to be careful and circumspect about limiting that entitlement in any way, but I don't see it that way. I don't think it's a requirement for me to provide hosting space for anyone who wants to use my stuff as a jumping-off point for abuse of Lemmy's systems, and isn't apologetic or receptive when I talk with them about not doing that. The fact that it's in service of harassing FlyingSquid in particular is just icing on the cake, since my perception is that people like to harass him apparently for no legitimate reason at all (with this as an example).

AITA?

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

That's actually not true. People overuse the word "gaslighting," but this is actually a perfect example of the original meaning of the term.

This is the second time recently he's "accidentally" posted on something I wrote, and both times, he switched away from one of his commonly-used alts, to a different one that I didn't have blocked, right before posting. I can, if you want me to, send you the output of this from my system:

Huge SQL query

WITH target_people AS (
  SELECT id, actor_id
  FROM person
  WHERE name LIKE '%UniversalMonk%'
)
SELECT 
  action_time as timestamp,
  actor_id,
  item_id,
  score,
  creator_actor_id,
  CASE 
    WHEN score IS NULL AND content IS NOT NULL THEN 
      CASE 
        WHEN length(content) > 20 THEN substr(content, 1, 20) || '...'
        ELSE content
      END
    ELSE NULL
  END as content
FROM (
  -- Comments
  SELECT 
    c.published as action_time,
    p.actor_id,
    c.id as item_id,
    NULL::smallint as score,
    creator.actor_id as creator_actor_id,
    c.content
  FROM comment c
  JOIN target_people p ON c.creator_id = p.id
  LEFT JOIN person creator ON c.creator_id = creator.id
  WHERE NOT c.deleted AND NOT c.removed

  UNION ALL

  -- Posts
  SELECT 
    p.published as action_time,
    person.actor_id,
    p.id as item_id,
    NULL::smallint as score,
    NULL as creator_actor_id,
    NULL as content
  FROM post p
  JOIN target_people person ON p.creator_id = person.id
  WHERE NOT p.deleted AND NOT p.removed

  UNION ALL

  -- Comment votes
  SELECT 
    cl.published as action_time,
    p.actor_id,
    cl.comment_id as item_id,
    cl.score,
    creator.actor_id as creator_actor_id,
    c.content
  FROM comment_like cl
  JOIN target_people p ON cl.person_id = p.id
  LEFT JOIN comment c ON cl.comment_id = c.id
  LEFT JOIN person creator ON c.creator_id = creator.id
  WHERE NOT c.deleted AND NOT c.removed
) combined_actions
ORDER BY action_time DESC;

 

So what it shows this time, is UniversalMonk using his sh.itjust.works account and lemmy.dbzer0.com account and nothing else for a few days, including most recently at Feb 12 at 23:27, and then at 23:36, switching to his r.nf account, which I haven't blocked and which he doesn't use much, and the first thing he did with it was comment on a post of mine.

The previous time was actually even a little more egregious. He was using his other accounts (including his lemm.ee one, before that one was banned), then at Feb 4 at 21:04 I made a comment in some thread mentioning the existence of a new alt of his, and he switched from other actions on his mainly-used accounts (most recently at 21:38) and then at 21:39 from his vegantheoryclub.org account, his first action on that account was to post this:

https://vegantheoryclub.org/comment/1670126

Then, when I semi-politely told him that he was evading the block (since it was pretty obvious to me that something along the lines of the above had happened, although I didn't verify it at the time) and asked him not to, he played the exact same game of pretending he had just innocently stumbled across a post of mine and wanted to say something about it, and it was totally unreasonable for me to ask him not to.

There's a reason he switches to an account I haven't blocked right before leaving these comments. And yes, I know it sounds semi-psychotic that I went digging around in the database to verify that he is gaslighting you when he feigns total shock and surprise that he had left a comment under a post by me, pretending it was total coincidence. This is why he keeps getting banned on different instances: His behavior is really very strange, dishonest, and malicious in a kind of unique way.

Anyway, yes he was block evading on purpose to minorly irritate me. I'm happy to DM you proof excerpts or similar. I know it sounds kind of petty for me to go to this extent, but the other way to look at it is, this is the extent that someone has to go to if they want to not be communicated at by UnviersalMonk. He has a history of targeted harassment of users in the past (which is what got him banned from lemmy.world), and for me he seems to have chosen this kind of "gaslighting and hoping I'll complain about it, so he can feign innocence and write a big italicized innocent message" approach.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 hours ago