187
Moderator banned from their own community for practicing harassment
(sh.itjust.works)
Its a shame because they're prominent voice on lemmy. Good on the admins for not tolerating this. I don't understand the point of targeting a person you don't like on the internet just because they said something that upset you and spamming their post with downvotes. If you don't like someone block their ass and be done with it. I agree with the perspective that its harassment (and an incredibly petty ineffective form of it at that)
...
How many downvotes exactly are we talking about here?
Is it, like, two hundred? Or is it, like, ten?
Edit: Wait, what the fuck? I got bored and checked it more. How did dbzer0 pick literally the most helpful and drama-free of all possible Lemmy users to ban? As far as I can tell, literally the only thing the dude does is post about cool stuff and chat. I didn't even know he was active as a moderator in any real capacity.
checks profile to see if he actually did confess to mass-downvoting dozens of votes at some user or some other sin that, while objectively not "abusive," might have been at least arguably not ideal or something
One of the first things I found was:
Ooooohhh.... oh. Oh.
Good fuckin' God man. dbzer0, we love you, quit trippin'. Just relax. Not everyone you don't like or agree with is "abusive."
That's... not how I would describe the user.
They're banned from blahaj lemmy for repeated and ongoing gatekeeping and they've got a mile long modlog...
Specifically, he said (among other similar things):
"Gatekeeping." Ban.
This whole thing is stupid. I don't even want to step into or bring up the other big relevant issue that caused strife because it's even stupider than that.
You guys are fuckin' with this guy because he did downvoting, and because he expressed what overall sounded to me like pretty reasonable opinions honestly.
People aren't hating on you here. It's fine. You don't have to turn everyone into an enemy.
am I misunderstanding the definition of gatekeeping? It sounds like he doesn't like neo-pronouns because the complicate language and he sees them as pointless but will still use them?
Is from when blajah was bending over backwards to defend drag?
Drag is banned from blahaj. Gatekeeping people's identities and pronouns is still against the rules.
Gatekeeping is when you don't think what I want you to, so I have to remove you from my community because you didn't think what I wanted you to (edit: means YOU were gatekeeping, obviously, in case somehow it wasn't clear)
Abuse is when you downvote people I say you can't downvote
Ban is okay though, for someone I say it's okay for. That's not abuse like downvotes are. Obviously.
Get with the program
/s
And if it was a single comment, you'd have a point, but it was ongoing, repeated and deliberate arguments in a space that had explicit rules against what he was doing, rules that he understood. And rather than following the rules, or posting in other communities, he brought it up over and over again, arguing that he has the right to decide other people's identities.
And when banned for it, he made sure to keep adding flames to the fire.
Whatever else he is, he is not drama free.
Is blahaj drama free?
People have pointed out some times when he intersected with some drama that I wasn't aware of, so sure, fair enough. I guess my point is even when I look at those he definitely was not the source of the drama in the situation. He was banned from blahaj for literally just showing up and saying reasonable things. If that's against the rules of your instance, then sure, you can do that, but don't try to flip it around where the person showing up saying reasonable things is all of a sudden an asshole somehow.
Nothing in the comment I quoted is "adding flames to the fire." It's not "repeated and deliberate arguments." Nothing is transphobic, nothing is denying anyone else's identity. That's why I quoted some of the actual words, to make it clear how ultimately reasonable he was being however you want to spin it into some kind of hate crime. A lot of people feel like, if they think something reasonable, they're allowed to say it, and it's weird and controlling for some other person to say that opinion is the incorrect opinion and demand that they not say it within certain spaces.
I get that you're interpreting it as some kind of deliberate naughty disobedience, but you're not his boss, you're not his parent. The whole "moderator" / "ban" paradigm has brought in this nutty thinking where people who run an instance can be the boss of what opinions are allowed or not allowed on that instance. It's weird. In my opinion.
I hope not.
We're an explicitly protective, safe space for a minority group that is actively targeted by governments, political institutions, churches, and bigots in general
So of course we create drama. Bigots will make sure of it.
Nah. He was banned for repeatedly, deliberately, and knowingly breaking the rules. Whether or not you think gatekeeping someones identity is acceptable, blahaj.zone has rules against it, and his response to it was to deliberately break the rules and stir up shit.
Tough shit. When someones "reasonable" opinion involves positioning themselves as the arbiter of other folks validity and identity, they're doing harm. When they choose to repeatedly and deliberately do that in a safe space for those folk, they're repeatedly and deliberately doing harm and breaking the rules.
All of which to say, even if you're a gatekeeper like him, who thinks that you have the right to tell other people their own identities, if you come in to a blahaj community and do it, you're breaking blahaj rules. If you choose to knowingly and repeatedly do it, whilst then complaining about it in various meta spaces, then you're breaking rules and stirring up drama.
Blahaj policy is very explicitly that it's a safe space, and transphobia and transphobia-adjacent content (and other forms of bigotry) will be removed. It's supposed to be somewhere people can go and have it taken as axiomatic that their neopronouns are valid, and therefore they won't have to debate them, so while it's pretty reasonable to say that you'd prefer people grew to be happy with they and neopronouns didn't become a permanent feature of English because they're awkward, it's not Blahaj-friendly, so can't be said on Blahaj, especially if you're going to repeat it a lot.
It's perfectly reasonable for people to like crisps, but it doesn't mean I have to let people keep adding them to my cake when I'm trying to eat cake.
Yes. That's one of the problems with the "I am lord and master of this domain, and all will obey me and my nutty definitions of words like 'transphobia' into some wild alternate reality" model. Human interaction doesn't need to work that way, even if it gets more comfortable when you're aligned with the lord and master to do it that way.
Personally I think that two things are going on here: One, the whole Lemmy model where people are divided into the lords who must be obeyed no matter how arbitrary their rules, and the people who must obey, breeds and normalizes some toxic models of interaction. And, two, basically 100% of Lemmy is already queer-friendly and trans-friendly, and so an instance that wants to "stand out" as a particularly queer-friendly instance has to keep ratcheting up the level of overt queer-friendliness of the rules of their instance until they're again in a position of giving other people a hard time for not being queer-friendly enough. And so the inevitable conclusion is that the rules have to include things like "dragon is a gender!" and "questioning certain things I say is transphobia even when it's not!"
Like I say, in my opinion, the whole thing is fuckin' ridiculous. I have heard the same from queer people who have been drummed out of blahaj for exactly the same reasons (basically, having and stating opinions that aren't the official lord-and-master opinion.) In my opinion that makes for a bad model for an instance. It's got nothing to do with the identity of the people who are making the rules that way for the instance, it has to do with the nature of the interactions that it causes.
You act like the majority of us on Blahaj don't agree with these policies. Like it's a dictatorship that we're being subjected to against our will. Queer, and trans, people aren't one homogenous block of opinions, there are going to be plenty of disagreements and that's okay. Blahaj just isn't for them, like Blair White wouldn't fit in either and Blahaj is better off for that.
Fair enough, but it's just not impacting blahaj users. It's not like a private forum on a server somewhere. You're participating in a big intertwined network, but then reserving the right to run some sections of it according to these super-strict (and to me pretty arbitrary) rules, and so you're winding up with a situation where blahaj people can talk to off-blahaj people, on some blahaj community, and some off-blahaj person can see it and respond reasonably and then get attacked, falsely accused of being transphobic, and then have it escalate into this thing where (for example, in this exact post) they're getting kicked off being allowed to run their own forums on some whole different instance, because now they're officially "bad" with the way they violated the dictates of the blahaj lords as part of the evidence.
If blahaj was its own private area, then sure. "Only come here if you're okay with the rules." That makes sense. But they're participating in a shared network, storing their messages on other people's servers, having posts replicated into random other sections for random people to see them, but then retreating to the "but this part of the space is MINE!" standpoint when anyone tries to raise any kind of objection to how they set up the rules for it. And also leveling this bigotry accusation if anyone doesn't obey how they want the interaction to go.
This is the exact nature of decentralised networks though. It's a tacit agreement of "you follow my rules when you're commenting on my instance and I follow your rules when I comment on your instance". It's a shared attempt at civility, and if that breaks down, defederation is only a few clicks away. We've never had direct control over other instances, so we've defederated them when that civility has broken down, and other instances have the exact same right to do the same with us. The Blahaj admins are paying hundreds of dollars, usually out of their own pocket, per month to run the instance. I think they get to dictate what goes on in the spaces they run. It's not like other spaces, like lemmy.world, don't have their own unpopular rules, like their heavy-handedness with "advocating violence".
The reason PJ gets called a bigot, is because he dramatically said in that original Blahaj meta thread that he was leaving the instance for good, but then has spent the last 6-9 months going around to every space he can, dragging the Blahaj admins through the mud and loudly proclaiming "dragons aren't real" like it's some self-evident revelation that proves how smart he is. Drag wasn't even a fucking dragon, they were a dragon fucker! It was literally drag's username for fluffs sake. It's not Blahaj's fault that other instance admins have gotten sick of his whiny, self-aggrandising bullcrap. Drag was literally banned from Blahaj not long after that thread, trans people just don't believe respecting pronouns are a cookie you get for being one of the good ones... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It's a feature, not a bug, at least when they're upfront about it. With non-federated platforms, you're still subject to the domain's lord and master, but you can't pick who that is or maintain access to your communities if you upset them.
While Blahaj isn't the right instance for me, it's no problem that it exists side by side with other instances, and people who want to use social media with no risk of running into things they're already fed up with can have a place for that. If you get banned from somewhere, it's because it wasn't the right fit for you, and nothing's stopping you from finding or making a place that is. It's not like the has to be only one 196, it's just that the one where all the cool people are is the one where everyone agrees to give everyone the benefit of the doubt on all things gender and sexuality.
Over the freaking Drag troll issue. You'll forgive us if not everybody shares the same opinion of who's creating the drama in that particular case.
There's more than that https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/49571446/20253309
Drag, as in someone who is also banned from Blahaj? 🤨
Nobody's perfect.
Yeah. I missed some drama because I tend to avoid lemmy.world politics forums because they are unbearable. Point taken.
Check out PJs LW modlog, it's not all rainbows and sunshine. I know you love to do that anyway.
Nobody accused him of "mass downvoting", that's a strawman. What he was accused of was harassing one of our users, looking him up for the specific purpose of downvoting past posts/comments and to leave salty comments and reports on old threads like a goddam stalker, because he's an angry turbolib who blames the left (and Eugene in particular, for some reason) for the pathetic failure of the corporate-c**k-sucking Democrats to defeat Donald Trump. There is plenty of evidence for all of those things.
At the very least, his behaviour around this has been petty and childish, not great qualities in a mod. And if he was even a slightly reasonable person, he probably wouldn't have quit our instance in a huff, and started up a personal grudge community to stir up pointless drama all because of a 7 day temp ban. Like just how fragile is his ego, anyway? We've all copped short bans without going into a full breakdown about it.
And it's pretty well known by now (except for you it seems) PJ has a bad temper, and that he's been losing his shit more and more lately. He even states as such in his profile. While I do feel empathy for the fact he lives in chronic pain, that's no excuse for harassing one of our users in this manner.
I believe that Eugene was sincere in his complaint, and he was very upset by the situation. PJ has all the power in this situation as a "power mod" and very active poster. Eugene is just a random user who was targeted for his political stance. And the fact you are defending PJ here instead of believing the victim is concerning to me. Much like the "believe women" slogan during the #metoo movement, my default position is to believe my upset users, not to side with the person bullying them. That's just how we roll at dbzer0 and I'm not gonna apologize for it.
I mean, what's the difference between your position here and something like, "Harvey Weinstein has made lots of great movies and nobody else has complained about him, so that woman must be lying"? There is no difference. PJ is just busy trying to launder his bruised reputation imo, and you are helping him with that project.
Assuming you're not a PJ alt, I was surprised by your comment. It got me thinking.
I'm beginning to wonder if PJ has a psychological disorder. They have stretches of being a nice, helpful person, interspersed with being a melodramatic, rage baiting, borderline troll shit stirrer. They tend to delete many of their shitty comments, showing they know the behaviour is wrong, but are still known and disliked by many for that behaviour.
Exactly, tell me you look at Pug's comment history and their moderation history and tell me he's "drama free".
Notice how Phillip didn't respond to this.
They're a mod for MeanwhileOnGrad of all places and you've regularly engaged in the same debates they get embroiled in. This feels like some strange feigned ignorance.
You are dead on. I hate that shit, but it's mega popular here, especially these chronically online weirdos who think they're in a holy war against eachothers opinions.
The dudes who have the time to get in fights and document them, or spend their precious minutes digging through mod logs for evidence. They are telling on themselves.
Yeah it's feigned ignorance, he knows what he is doing.
Oh, I don't like engaging with him or any of his posts because he tends to be a loudmouth radlib but he is a power user and his posts on other communities are just fine.
It'd be nice if I could, like, put a comment on one of his political posts, though, without it turning into a gigantic, massive thread arguing about the specifics of electoralism and lesser evil and all of that nonsense.
He has literally said he wants to start fights online because he finds it fun, and that hell never stop harassing members because he doesn't like them.
https://lemmy.ml/post/33527767
Yeah, this had put a target on his back in any lefty instance.
Also, following a user from tiny community to tiny community that you're not a part of just to downvote their posts that you disagree with personally because you got into an argument with somebody is a bit extreme and I agree with the admins that they did the right thing.
Wth is going on with the db0 instance? Db0 the guy seems very chill and understanding, at least in the posts I've seen.
Db0 is still very chill and understanding. Seems like the person reported here is having a hard time recently
https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/49556709/20248126
That's legit. The UN report clearly found that people from the Hamas side of the fighting had committed widespread sexual assaults. Bringing up misleading talking points and blog posts to try to spin it around into the report finding the opposite is textbook misinformation.
I actually don't agree with banning people for this type of misinformation, I think arguing back in kind is the right way in most cases. But if you're going to ban misinformation (which most of Lemmy seems to think is okay), then this is a pretty reasonable ban.
(It's probably offtopic to get into an extended argument about the original Hamas sexual assault claims under this post... if anyone wants to re-inaugurate my whole "debatebro" community by having it out with me there about it though let me know and I'm down a little later today.)