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?
I often agree with your positions on various things, Phil, at least to the extent that it seems that we’re operating from a similar point of reference. That said, and in light of the nature of the private communications remaining private (as it should), there’s only one conclusion that seems fitting.
PTB.
One instance of anything hardly seems like grounds for a ban. Repeat behavior certainly could justify that action, but in the absence of any pattern it seems like an overreach. There might well be further justification for a ban based on the direct messages; but, as you’re submitting your own action for analysis, the only fair way to evaluate is on the grounds of what we are directly privy to. Anything else has to be viewed as simply your biased interpretation of the private conversation.
In the circumstance you describe the onus on the user is not to be “receptive or apologetic” to you in the private conversation, only to correct their usage of the report system. As presented, it reads as if they were banned because they did not show adequate respect for your authority, which is clear PTBehavior. Further, you attempt to bolster your point by painting Squid, a user who loves to try to win bad-take arguments by referring to their own mod status in other communities (essentially a PTB themselves), as undeserving of ire despite an extensive history of spinning out, losing the thread, and generally being a dick when it happens. Carrying water for someone who comes across as power-trippy does little to shift perception of your own actions away from that mark.
Yeah, I appreciate it.
The POV that banning for one report is a big overreach makes perfect sense to me. I talked about it a little bit below, you can search for “clear pattern” to see.
It wasn’t that they were unapologetic. I’ve actually had people have hostile disagreements with me in communities I moderate, and it didn’t even occur to me until later that I had some kind of power not to “get talked to that way” or disrespected or w/e. That kind of thing doesn’t bother me except very occasionally. The issue was that this person refused to back up their reasons for wanting mod action against FS, and rejected my request to not use the report function that way. I do feel like someone needs to be receptive to someone asking them “I consider this against the rules, please don’t do it on my server.” Of course I was less polite than that. Also, maybe I am biased because of course my rules make perfect sense but someone else’s might not, if I’m on their server and the roles are reversed. That’s just how I see it though.
This whole thing of being officially a person with authoritah is new to me, hence posting here to ask about it. I take seriously the discussion about it, even if I might not agree with individual POVs or sound like I’m rejecting anyone who’s trying to tell me I did wrong.
Maybe. In the little bit I’ve observed about FlyingSquid, it looks like they tend to get tangled up in long intense arguments which maybe they don’t need to get tangled up in. That’s sure not ideal, but it doesn’t make them a bad person or a power-tripper. I think there was one time several months ago when they noted to someone they were in a long argument with that the person had a habit of breaking the community rules in some other posts, also, and now everyone keeps referring back to that one time as an example of how FS is terrible and threatened to ban the person just because they were disagreeing.
I’ve just noticed that there are all these disparate attempts to get FS banned, removed from mod status, and similar things, and when I looked into the “why” of them they tended to boil down to not that much of consequence. So I have sort of a hair trigger now for something along the lines of “okay THIS comment was perfectly fine but we all KNOW that this person is bad, because they are, and anything they say needs a moderator to step in and remove it,” which to me is harassment unless the person’s done something absolutely truly reprehensible. If someone is being awful all the time, just report the awful comments, they should be pretty easy to find.