Note: Can you guys please stop downvoting stuff of his that is unrelated to the situation? Just because he’s a shitty moderator in this particular moment and situation does not mean that his other posts deserve to be criticized or downvoted as well. Leave the dude alone. Only criticize him on his moderator behavior in this thread or when seen in the wild. Do not bully or go after this guy for no reason. Please. That’s not what I made this post for, and it’s not what I’m trying to direct.
Bro is used pretty colloquially and, admittedly, often as a dismissive turn of phrase. Exactly as it was in this comment of mine on the post “Lemmy users are in an uproar because MAGA fascists spun up their own server.”
I made a pretty off hand dismissive comment because I thought the wording of the post was a bit sanctimonious. Didn’t even downvote it. Then I took a nap and woke up to a comment from the mod. He has now deleted it after it hit -20+ comments but was
“Yes, that’s what I’m saying. Also, we’re not related. Refrain from the bro speak.”
A comment that I thought was kind of idiotic and so I dismissed it as much with a response
What I didn’t see was that the moderator had DMed me at the same time.
So because of a moderators personal interpretation of how the word “bro” is used, using the word at all is offensive to them and ergo is banned from usage on !fediversenews@piefed.social under the rule of “Be Civil.”
Now this is utterly impossible for any user to ever follow unless it is made clear. This moderator refuses to make this information clear publicly so I edited my original comment, gave context and added a screenshot of that message.
At the same time I also responded to the moderator via DMs.
I got another notification from @shifty@leminal.space with this comment:
I went to respond but by the time that I had, the moderator had already banned me (effectively permanently) from the community.
So let’s recap here. The moderator is taking the word “Bro” as personally insulting/offensive for whatever reason. They’re using the rule of be civil as a cudgel to enforce their opinion but they refuse to make this opinion clear. Meaning that it is impossible to properly follow this rule. On top of that, if the moderator messages you then you must keep that entirely private or you will be banned.
@atomicpoet@piefed.social is out here complaining about fascism while using fascism. Neato.
The whole time I thought I was just dealing with the atomicpoet@piefed.social account but I didn’t realize that user has made his own instance and account on it with @atomicpoet@atomicpoet.org. THAT account was what posted the original post and that account doesn’t even have moderator abilities. What an utter joke. But this entire community is filled with extremely heavy handed moderation. 11m ago, 12m ago, 22m ago, 23m ago, 24m ago… My apologies to people like @TherapyGary@lemmy.dbzer0.com, apparently you’ve been permanently banned from the above community for “Downvote Brigading”. This AtomicPoet dude should go back to reddit…
I’d suggest people start defederating from this dude though. Looks like he’s a hairtrigger away from doing it to you if you piss him off.
Also… I couldn’t help myself. I sent him the link to this post with the wording “Here you go, bro”
What can I say. I’m also an asshole.
Edit: I forgot to add these into the post and that is entirely on me. One of them doesn’t make me look awesome but I should have put it in and it’s unfair of me that I didn’t.
After my initial response to his DM, he sent this back:
Immediately after he sent that message, he banned me. My guess is that he clicked on my username and refreshed or something, saw the screenshot that had been added to the comment and then banned me for the previously mentioned reason of posting a screenshot of a DM. Guess I’m really violating this now.
Before realizing I had been banned, I then sent this DM to him. This is the one that does make me look like an absolute wankstain.
That last line is really arrogant and narcissistic on my part. I was just waking up from a nap and he was aggravating me but that’s not really an excuse. I did act like a bit of a fuckstick there. I can be a twat. This is known. Also one reason why I don’t do much in the run of moderation anymore, I just don’t trust myself to not turn into what I hate. But I could have worded that a LOT differently. What I was trying to get across was that my most recent post was the Jordan Lund one and getting annoyed by his behavior and that acting like a power tripping moderator to the dude who literally just did an expose on that might not be the greatest course of action. But I didn’t word it as such. I worded it the way I did and came of like a cuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuunt. That is totally on me and I hate myself for it.
If you liked this manuscript of moderator misconduct, you may also marvel at Jordan Lund: Master of Malicious Mismanagement and The Admins of StarTrek.website: Value Subtracted & Corgana’s Calamitous Command. Collect the complete compendium of corruption today!
Bruh, I’ve never seen a mod go full PTB like this just because of “bro” and downvotes. Someone really needs to touch grass.
EDIT: It also seems that this mod does not understand the social impact of sliding into people’s DMs to warn then privately about his little community. Hint: It’s not going to be taken the way you think this is going to be taken.
EDIT2: Whole community in lockdown. I can almost certainly guess they were flooded with comments and posts saying “bro”.
I hope it wasn’t because people from here brigaded 😔
Nah, there was a post in the frontpage of /all (now deleted), with hundreds of comments taking the piss
I still feel like a dick for the part that I played in this. I didn’t want to brigade him. I didn’t want to bully him. I just wanted to make a post that called out his terrible moderation style in this moment. Keep seeing people who are like commenting bro on random things of his and that’s not what I want of this social platform. People can make mistakes and people can disagree. People can fuck up. The problem is when they double down and insist that they have nothing wrong with that and continue to do the same thing. If this dude continues to do the same thing over and over again, then yeah, I stand by the position that he is a terrible person to be in charge of community. However, he has done this on one occasion so far. Granted, he did a bunch of stupid shit in this one moment, but stress can have that happen to a person. I don’t blame him for this entirely. People are allowed to make mistakes. Maybe he made one. But if everybody keeps dogs piling on him and making this worse for him, it’s not going to allow him to see this in any way other than him being bullied. And to be honest, in a certain extent, that will be a correct way of seeing this. I want people to be able to learn from mistakes and grow and be better. I can’t say I always do that, and I definitely make a ton of mistakes. But I want to treat this dude how I would hope people would treat me. None of my comments here show me wanting to go after this dude any more than just calling this behavior out. I didn’t even recommend anything happen. This wasn’t like Jordan, where I was like, oh my god, did this guy must be gone! It was just, hey look, this behavior is suspect.
That being said, I haven’t looked into this guy any further than this. I don’t know what else is going on, but I don’t want my one single post to be a reason for him being bullied over the word Bro. Since making this post, I’ve heard a couple of different complaints about them, but nothing I’ve heard has been extremely egregious, just maybe a bit of a dick occasionally. Maybe that shows a pattern where maybe he needs somebody else to help him out or maybe he shouldn’t be in charge of a community or whatever else But giving him shit over the word bro here and banning me from a community for 74 years that I will never comment in again anyway?
But from the one experience that I’ve had, I don’t want people going around bullying this guy and giving him this level of shit from this one event. I want this place to be better than Reddit, not a clone.
And now I go back to begging for money because my life is its own misery filled wasteland.
That’s nice of you.
Unfortunately in this case, this isn’t the first time he’s featured in this community, the other post got removed for whatever reason. The only remaining evidence of that is
Still don’t want people to use my particular post as a jumping off point to give him shit for that. Especially if he’s reverting bans. Like maybe he shouldn’t have the community, Idk. I didn’t find him important enough to bother doing a real deep dive into his shit of. I just don’t want to be the reason for bullying I guess. I hate myself enough as it is.
I’m honestly a bit puzzled why you’d want to put me on blast here. From my side, I thought we had been working together amicably on !movies@piefed.social, and I’ve always appreciated your role there.
As for the recent events, the explanations are straightforward. At first, I thought there was a brigade, so I acted quickly. When it became clear that one of the people wasn’t part of it, I unbanned him, and he took down the thread. Not every ban has been undone, but in the cases where it was uncertain, I reversed course. The main feedback I got was that I should reach out before taking mod action.
So this time I tried to put that feedback into practice—messaging first, in what I thought was a kind and gentle way. Maybe it wasn’t perfect, but I was genuinely trying to reduce toxicity. For clarity: in the last 24 hours, the only bans were for accounts that publicly posted private messages or openly brigaded from this thread and from !asklemmy@lemmy.world.
And I do hope you don’t think “go harass a mod” is the right response to situations like this. If something like that ever happened to you on !movies@piefed.social, I would absolutely stand up for you and shut it down without hesitation.
I didn’t put you on blast, I provided context of previous events, including the ban reversals.
We are probably going to disagree here, but messaging people about using a word as common as “bro” today and threatening them from a ban if they reiterate doesn’t really seem kind or gentle.
Messages sent to users from mods threatening them from being banned should be allowed to be made public, as bans should be related to a rule, and rules should be public.
I’ve been on the other side of power tripping, on a movies community no less, so wouldn’t be so categoric about “stand up for the mod”.
https://lemmy.zip/post/25898384?scrollToComments=true
Tl,dr: power tripping mod perma banned me from a community I built, instance admin didn’t want to intervene as it was against their admin policy. It took me months to rebuild that community elsewhere, and that’s probably why I’m very cautious with power tripping mods since then.
Being a mod on Piefed/Lemmy requires more transparency than on other platforms due to the transparency of the mod actions and the federated nature of the platform.
Users here have choices between several versions of the same community, they will usually avoid the ones where the mods are enforcing what they perceive as arbitrary decisions.
Harassment is never a good thing, but mods are also accountable for their actions.
If you have doubts about how your rules or actions will be perceived, feel free to ask on !fedigrow@lemmy.zip where other mods can discuss it with you.
Let me ask you honestly—not rhetorically—what would you see as both practical and kind in a situation like that? I truly want to understand.
I’ll say again: I don’t think it’s realistic to list every possible insult or epithet in the sidebar. That’s why I’ve tried different approaches.
So have I. That’s exactly why I started !movies@piefed.social. A moderator there didn’t like my reviews and removed them without explanation, so I decided to create a new space where that wouldn’t happen.
From that point on, I promised myself that if something wasn’t clear, I’d do my best to make it clear. At first, I did that with public notes, but then I was told private messages were kinder. So I shifted. Then I listened to more feedback—but this time, things still didn’t work out.
And this is where the challenge comes in: moderation takes time, it’s unpaid, and when you step into it, you often end up facing dogpiles and harassment.
The truth is, I’m the main contributor in most of my communities. I spend hours every day creating original posts to keep them alive. Given that, it’s hard to see what purpose it serves me—or anyone—if a wave of people shows up only to harass.
I don’t believe everyone is automatically entitled to participate if what they bring is hostility and outrage. And I hope you’d agree that building a healthy space means drawing that line somewhere.
“bro” is a commonly accepted term on the Internet today. If I had to ban it on my communities, I would add this in the rules, even potentially with a link to a post with an extensive list of banned terms. That way it’s clear for everyone.
The context were probably different. For moderation decision regarding brigading with non subscribers downvotes, private messages can work better, as users prefer to keep their votes private.
For rules decision, public communication is better, see above.
I’m well aware, but a lot of mods can still mod and step in without being considered power tripping. One important part is to make the rules you apply public, as I said already.
There are two options for you