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.
I think it’s actually a strength of the fediverse. If you believe a mod is acting out, you can escalate to the admins of that instance, and if they disagree, you can set up shop somewhere else and still engage with fediverse content as much as you’d like.
It’s better than say, Reddit, where if you disagree with the admins, you have to determine whether you want to leave the entire site. This is why I don’t sweat it when there are similar communities across different instances - I think it’s healthy for Lemmy.
Oh absolutely. Not to mention that if we want to get pedantic and legal, at least for reddit circumventing bans breaks ToS and you can’t accept the terms of the site if you’ve already been banned from it. Can you technically do it? Yes absolutely. Will your new account be shadowbanned? Probably, but that’s not to say you couldn’t circumvent that as well when creating the account.
I’m only talking about the rules of one instance here, not the fediverse as a whole. I don’t think we should prevent people from creating instances, and I know we don’t have the power to do so. Lemmy is open source, so someone could try to sneak in code that would prevent certain instances from being setup, but it probably won’t get accepted and those people could still use an earlier veresion. These are all good, healthy things.
On the whole, I agree with you, but I also see how dipshit here (sorry, couldn’t resist) would be upset by this kind of interaction.
Is it perfect? Naw. Is it preferable? Personally, I believe so.
No worries. I make the distinction between people referring to me and people agreeing with my self-deprecation in the context of me making a good-faith comment or argument. The former is fine. The later is, well apparently it’s trolling, I’m learning.