A short ban, probably not worth discussing, but which has created a significant chilling effect on my use of my host instance

before i made an account, i reached out to the chief admin of lemmy.dbzer0.com

i was recently banned during a discussion on the validity of a claim regarding the consensus about the safety of a vegan diet:

and, if you bother to go find that discussion, you'll find that, in fact, my interlocutor did become incivil. i did report that. and somehow, my discussion and the subsequent report were the basis of a ban.

it was less than 2 hours. it's almost not worth discussing.

but given my pre-application discussion, i felt strongly that my conduct is within the bounds of the acceptable use of the instance. so if my conduct is not within the acceptable use, that means i basically cant use my account(s) as i planned and under the terms which i agreed.

db0 has said he doesn't want to be the benevolent dictator for life, and has specifically both recused himself from ruling on my conduct and encouraged me to post here and in !div0_governance@lemmy.dbzer0.com (though i'm still holding off on that for now).

so, did i deserve it? power tripping bastard? what do you think?

108 comments

Hi, I am the PTB that banned this user for 2 hours. As what was explained to you in the appeals channel, you've been trolling for months and when the person you troll gets mad, you report them for things like 'incivility.' You've done this many times to multiple users for months. That is why you were banned, not because of a specific thread and report. This was a warning to you to knock it off, as was explained to you.
It was not made known to other admins that you had contacted db0 in advance of making your account that you were using your account just to do things like this. It makes a lot more sense now why there was this leeway. I thought trolling other users was against the rules, but it seems the rules are muddy about it. We have often been warning people through 1 day bans to knock things off. So your timeout seemed appropriate.
- when the person you troll gets mad, you report them
  This comes off like "NSRXN made them break the rules" which is ridiculous.
  People need to be responsible for their own actions.
- so, one of us is mistaken about whether my conduct is acceptable. but which of us is it?
  
  Your conduct is off-putting and should be discouraged, to say the least. Hence a 2 hour ban. Db0's agreement with you was not made with me. It seems like you want it to be a rule that the db0 instance is a safe haven for trolls, effectively putting it at risk of being defederated by other instances.

It's a big of a weird case innit? I think that incivility should be allowed, but I also see that a pattern of behaviour where someone goads people to get upset in order to report them for incivility is manipulative and against anarchist ethos. You got to be able to take what you're dishing out. When I answered your email I didn't anticipate that you would be crying to the mods when you got people heated, yanno?
I don't think any of us admins would mind you having strong opinions on some matters and holding your ground, even if it would upset others, but this constant pattern of trying to manipulate situations to get people sanction by hierarchical power (mods) I feel is approaching /crossing an ethical line.
I believe this pattern behaviour is what the mod is objecting to, not your light trolling and strong opinions.
- so when people become abusive, I'm just supposed to tolerate that?
  my goal isn't to goad. I leave plenty of comments where I simply correct the misinformation, and there is never any followup. which is great because now anyone reading those comments knows something closer to the truth.
  and since the governance of communities does, as a practical matter, require mod or admin action, how else am I supposed to deal with the abusive behavior?
  
  You can always tell them that you don't like how they're interacting with you and disengage. People will get upset at your opinions of veganism, but being upset isn't "abuse".
  One could do the same pattern of behaviour with anti-Trans essentialist arguments and "just asking questions", and then report Trans allies who get upset at it. most trans/ally mods would ban someone doing this tactic for it, but liberal mods might end up banning the other party for "incivility".

You gave zero information to go off of but judging from what I saw from the comments, YDI.
You said about the other person:
You really need to take a look in the mirror and ask yourself why you’re trying so hard to lie about this.
But you were dead wrong about the point being discussed, you kept insisting that their evidence was outdated when they were referring evidence beyond the paper you were talking about. If anything, the other person was remarkably patient with you, and if you were decent you'd own up to having egg on your face and apologize to them. Instead, you reported them for correctly calling out your BS, and are now here whining about a two hour ban.
Personally, I find your whole thing of staying within the letter of "civility" while going "I'm not touching you" and talking down to everyone incredibly annoying, worse than if you just told people to go fuck themselves. If it were up to me I'd issue a permaban, but I don't think we have an abbreviation here for "the mods didn't go far enough."
- Lol, come up with an abbreviation then 😅
  
  YDM - "You Deserved More"
- that reply is a direct quote from the comment to which I was responding
  
  Yes, but the difference is that they were right. This is exactly the sort of thing I'm talking about. Saying "Go fuck yourself" can be perfectly called for and justified in certain contexts, but extremely uncalled for in others. They had basis to say that, because you were fucking wrong. You did not, because you were fucking wrong.
  From what I'm seeing, there's a consistent pattern of behavior of trying to hide behind language, civility, and tone while being disingenuous as fuck and acting in bad faith.
  Imagine an argument over a vaccines where the pro-vaccine person has a bunch of evidence in their favor and the antivaxxer keeps bringing up a flaw in one specific paper that the other person isn't even relying on. The pro-vaccine person would be perfectly justified in getting frustrated, accusing the other person of lying or operating in bad faith, etc. But if the antivaxxer did the same - even if they parroted the exact same language - they would be completely unjustified and out of line, even moreso than they already were. So no, you don't get to hide behind this "it was a direct quote" excuse, because you're the one who was out of line. You don't have the right to hurl accusations back at people when they're right and you don't have a leg to stand on.

Insufficient information. The ban mentions report abuse. Did you report your interlocutor? If so, how many times, and for what.
I'm tending towards YDI because I've witnessed some of the borderline bad-faith arguments you've made in the past, but this specific instance perhaps seemed a bit mild for a ban just from the conversation alone, so I'll reserve judgement for now.
- Just FYI you can't report someone more than once, you can report multiple of their comments but no comment more than once. It would be stupid and PTB to punish someone for reporting multiple of their comments, as it is beneficial to point out violating content. Maybe if he reported a hundred comments sure but two, three, or seven is not reasonably report abuse.
- Did you report your interlocutor?
  yes. for incivility, to the best of my recollection, but since lemmy doesn't let you review your own reports, i can't say i recall perfectly
  
  indeed we’ll have to rely on your memory. do you remember how many times you reported this admin (even across separate comments count) and whether you have reported others multiple times in the same sitting? i would ping the admin somewhere (here or in a thread you might start in /0 governance)
- borderline bad-faith arguments you’ve made in the past
  either it's bad faith or it's not. and i'd be surprised if you could point to any such interaction, since i rarely make an independent argument on this topic. mostly, i call into question the validity of others' arguments.
  
  That's not how this works. Perhaps you're familiar with the concept of JAQ? You don't need to make positive claims to argue in bad faith. In fact, the avoidance of making any positive claims can often be indicative of bad-faith discussion.
  JAQ is effective precisely because it often comes along with plausible deniability. It's established as bad faith because it's a pattern, even when most individual instances can look rather innocuous.

YDI: you sound like a whiny little pain in the ass who adds little value to any conversation they're a part of. this post is emblematic of this fact.

I couldn't find the post but I did find you claiming that your logician training had caused you to logically deduce that the philosophically subjective state of sapience is required for consent rather than the empirical reality of sentience, so I'm gonna assume it was completely justified. And then, of course, you're arguing with the mod that banned you about why they banned you.
You aren't just the asshole in this case, you are generally an asshole.
- I feel you're playing a bit fast and loose with the characterization of what I said here but I guess I literally asked everyone for their opinions....

anarchy for me but not for thee
ignorant jokes aside, i think i might be interested in your consumer opinion. maybe ill find the referred read
- Anarchy isn't "no punishment", it's "no indubitable (the 'correct' spelling of undoubtable) power, especially not hierarchical ones". Having a benevolent dictator or oligarchy is indeed hierarchical but to their credit they're working towards implementing some sort of admin rotation system last I heard.
- to db0s credit, he is not asserting authority in this case, though one of his admins clearly did.. he encouraged me to bring it here or to the instance governance community

Eh, the part about your pre-join discussion is irrelevant as any given community may well have more restrictive standards than the instance, and it's a benefit that admins not intervene in cases that aren't egregious and/or in violation of instance policies.
That being said, I think you got it right, a 2 hour ban is so borderline as anything at all, that it doesn't merit much of anything here. It was definitely unnecessary, but it's so minor that calling it power tripping seems dubious.
Has the mod in question said anything about the temp ban beyond what's shown? That's just personal curiosity more than anything relevant, tbh.
My take? If the action of a single mod is "chilling" your use of the rest of the instance, that's a you thing entirely.
Yeah, the action was unnecessary, but it was also effectively meaningless, so it's one of those things you just shrug off and move on while blocking the community.
Edit: leaving this up for context with the rest of the thread, but I missed a very important fact, that this was an admin action, not a mod action on a community. Ignore the fuck out of this drivel, please.
- the ban was by a db0 admin, not a community mod.
  
  Fuck, how did I miss that? My bad!
  Yeah, that essentially negates my entire comment, sorry. That is fucked up. That's way outside of what an admin should be poking their nose into without some serious evidence to back it up and the willingness to provide it here since this community is on that instance.
  Again, my apologies for misreading. I'd blame my dyslexia, but the word admin doesn't fall afoul of that, I just wasn't paying enough attention.

Coming back to this thread, I do think some of your comments were inflammatory. If you were to receive a ban, it should have been for trying to bring fights in the comments (but even that is ambiguous at best). I agree that the ban for a comment was too much. An admin shouldn't be conflating one such action with overall behaviour. As for "repeated bad-faith behaviour", it is not so far out to ban you I think. People should be responsible for their own actions.
- given the guidance i've been given from, now, 3 admins, i'm just going to find another instance.
  
  And nothing was learned whatsoever, it seems. Good luck on your instance hunt.

God I love this petty bullshit, Lemmy is so cool lol. It's two hours mate, go for a walk
- if i'd been on a walk, i might have missed it entirely, then, if the same admin took offense to my continued use of the site, they'd be able to say i'm a repeat offender.
  i thought it to be important to understand the actual acceptable use, so i could use the site without wondering if any comment or report might end up getting me banned, and i pro-actively established my honest uses with the admin before i joined. now that is in question, and, yea, i do think the admin that banned me is power tripping a bit, since none of the other admins took action.

I think you're taking things way too seriously, friend.
All of Lemmy is just a discussion forum. If you go somewhere on Lemmy, end up not liking that space, then you can go somewhere else on Lemmy.
YDI. And that's ok. Laugh and shrug it off and move on. There will also be times you DON'T deserve it. Then you do the same thing: laugh and shrug it off and move on.
Lemmy is fun. But it's just an internet forum of anonymous randos talking shit. Which can be great! But it's not that serious.

Regarding the admin in question making the statement that your prior conversation with db0 "wasn't with them" - fuck that noise. That attempt at rationalization alone is enough for me to call their action an abuse of power. I was in agreement with their thought process up until that statement, but using that as a justification reads as "I have authority and what I say goes." More than one admin on this instance has served as an illustration of the corrupting nature of authority.
That being said, you come off as the type of person who has far too often avoided, by virtue of hiding behind a screen, being punched in the in the fucking mouth for your cowardly behavior. If you know you're an abrasive asshole, don't be a craven little shit on top of it. Starting static and then hiding behind a hierarchy when you get your little feelings hurt in return is some real bridge-dwelling bullshit. You deserve the action that was taken, regardless of the piss poor "clarification" given by the admin in question. If that little wrist slap, which is far less than you ask for in consideration of the way you engage with others, is enough to make you tuck your tail and scurry off to find a new viaduct to settle under, good fucking riddance.

Send the link to the discussion and the screenshot of your comment
- the issue isn't my comment: nothing was removed. here's the whole thread
  https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/41959890/18040557
  
  I'm not the same person you replied to, but the link doesn't work for me and neither do your images. It might be on my end though
  
  Ban was unjustified. db0 needs to at least point to someone accountable, seeing that he is still the benevolent dictator

108 comments