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 that’s admirable, but I also think you may be making a mountain out of a molehill, sorry.
You’re not betraying your principles by circumventing bans handed out inappropriately.
While it would be nice to avoid arbitrary decisions in moderation, I think that would require a different system of handling such moderation or a vast restructuring of human culture to make such things anathema.
Edit: In a way, I think I prefer Jonas in Minnesota banning me from posting in c!coffee because he thinks my opinion on Godzilla 2000 is bad than a team of corporate employees deciding I can’t post about alternative services to their product. Jonas has to sleep. I can get my licks in if I’m patient 😌
My motivations my be strange, but they are bigger than just this one account. If it helps, I’ll say that I ran a “social network” prior to facebook existing (if you want to call about 20 users a social network, still it had basic forum features). I got hooked on digg, then went to reddit and now on lemmy. Part of this is time wasting that I’d like to redirect elsewhere, and part of this is genuine interest in trying to fix the ails of social media. I’ve been thinking deeply on this for years and I haven’t come up with anything useful for a fix yet.
I try to behave online and try to challenge people’s ideas intelligently, but I’m a monkey-brained human like everyone else and sometimes the most appropriate reaction truly is to just call someone a name. Or, at least it feels that way.
I’m not sure I agree that it’s a good idea to circumvent bans handled out inappropriately at least for me because it asserts that I know better than the (multiple) people who agreed “naw, ban this guy”. Maybe if I were trying to get the word out about atrocities, sure. But, in my case, I was responding to a guy who was basically saying “yeah trump is old but biden is old so i don’t know hard to say” so this wasn’t the hill I was willing to die on. I mean, I guess it was the hill I got a 7 day ban on, but that was a bit unexpected. I don’t like that I can’t speak my mind in politics, but hey if I broke existing rules, that’s the rules.
Moderation on digg, reddit and lemmy has interested me because it almost doesn’t need moderation - the community moderates itself, yet the power of the community is weak in doing so. Downvotes have little effect, simply showing a lower score on a post. Visibly hiding a post that’s massively downvoted until a threshold is met which basically makes the comment invisible unless someone clicks a button to view it would make it less likely for people to pile onto people and might reduce trolling to a small degree. Even if people do dogpile, the upvotes to responses by other users in that thread could be used to further minimize the visibility of a comment. If a user gets more downvotes than they do upvotes over time, that user may find themselves only allowed to make a few comments a day until their “community reputation” perks up. Or, take the existing system and when a report comes in, consider the amount of downvotes a person receives vs upvotes they receive in what communities (which may have their own admin reputation depending on if the admins want the community around or not, instead of outright banning them, give them a warning system) in the decision to ban / appeal a ban.
Some sites have experimented with some of these features. I’m halfway curious to implement ActivityPub myself and try to make something like this for lemmy, but I’ve got a lot of research to do before I get anywhere close to doing that.