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Ye Power Trippin' Bastards @lemmy.dbzer0.com

4mo ago

!Linuxsucks@lemmy.world mod silently bans people from their community for disagreeing, and tries to hide the comments from being seen in the modlog.

Hello I'm not a person who is affected by this community moderator but I'm posting on behalf of people who are, since they don't seem to know of this community yet. I attempted to reach some via DM but I'm not sure they'll respond. So I'm making this post since I feel this needs to be addressed.

Recently I was made aware of a community that appeared randomly on Lemmy.world. It seems to be a troll community given the type of content, but the reason I'm posting about it here specifically is that this mod seems to be banning anyone who points this out or goes against his narrative. Furthermore he is only using the autoremove on ban function, not removing any content the users have posted, which I believe is deliberate in attempt to prevent the content from showing up under the modlog and revealing the hypocrisy.

Some samples of comments:

All of these were retrieved from the API, even though they aren't included in the modlogs, I could've included more but it's kind of a time consuming process to look for them and retrieve them. Viewing removed comments is easier on Lemmy than it is on Reddit but it still isn't easy.

What do you guys think, does this seem like power-tripping? Also does this person's content seem like blatant troll content?

CC: @glimse@lemmy.world @rain_worl@lemmy.world @the_toast_is_gone@lemmy.world

People who's comments I mentioned, I CCed them so they know I did this on their behalf

116 comments

This is an example of a community I don't subscribe to, because I'm not the target demographic.
I think a Linux sucks community should exist, it can exist, and if the moderator wants to remove anything about Linux not sucking that's fine too. The way this moderator is doing it, they should just turn on mod only posting.
I looked at the community sidebar, and one of the community rules is no promoting Linux, no defending Linux, so at least it's consistent
Lemmy needs a diverse set of voices.
Counterexample: if I go into fuck cars and talk about vehicles in any positive fashion, I'm going to get dog piled and probably banned
- I've had run-ins with Linuxsucks' owner and basically only poster over on linuxmemes. They're a troll, a contrarian, uninterested in any kind of honest or good-faith discussion, and an overall dickhead. The community is a one-man circlejerk.
  You're right about needing counterpoints, but Linuxsucks ain't it.
  
  I think he basically only made it because he somehow thought that if he had his own community his memes wouldn't get as heavily downvoted, as they do on !linuxmemes@lemmy.world though they're pretty wrong about that. Pretty much all but one of their posts there on linuxsucks are getting downvoted heavily.
  
  Maybe the just want to vent, and not get sealioned all the time
- I've actually been fairly fine in fuck cars, both Reddit and Lemmy editions. I actually like cars, well, some of them anyway.
  
  The difference between !fuckcars@lemmy.world and linuxsucks is that the first one is largely a fact and logic based community about the problems with car dependency in urban areas, and car-dependent infrastructure.
  linuxsucks is a single troll who's talking shit about linux for seemingly no real reason, some of his posts are insanely illogical, and make very little sense. So yeah I definitely think these communities are anything like each other.
- Oh, Hello voice of common sense. Been a while!
  Going into subs about a specific topic to troll should get your shit removed.
- I think that there are key differences between
  A community criticising something, backed up by reason and evidence. Even if it's something popular, doubly true if there's a circlejerk around that thing. This can and should exist.
  A community created to circlejerk against something, through insane troll "logic" and silencing any dissidence. This is fertile grounds for idiocy and misinformation, thus harmful for the society [I can go further on that if desired] and the Fediverse [ditto], and should not exist.
  Sometimes the boundary between both is not clear - but this community, unless it's a troll comm, falls cleanly into the second case. Specially given how opaque the moderator is trying to be (check how none of the removals appear in the modlog).
  
  I think it's very clearly a troll community since really the only person posting there is the mod, most of which are very transparently troll content, like this one hating on the idea of OpenSource and Free licenses for some really weird reason, that hasn't actually been clarified. Someone said to me when I showed that to them that they could be an alt-right corporate shill, but I don't have enough information to come to that conclusion. Only thing I can clearly tell is that they are very obviously a troll.
  And yeah I definitely agree that these types of communities are very harmful, and definitely something we should nip in the bud before they get out of hand and start spreading disinformation, as well as fostering toxic or even dangerous sentiment.
  
  I think that many people here would benefit from you going further into why it is harmful to society, since people seem to be nonchalant about this issue, or worse, are dismissing the post as an opinion piece.
- I've suggested a rule in the past, but we don't have this rule now.
  Community Manipulation
  Communities should not be overly moderated in order to enforce a specific narrative. Respectful disagreement should be allowed in a smaller proportion to the established narrative.
  i.e. A user should be able to (respectfully, infrequently) post/comment about a study showing marijuana is a gateway drug to !marijuana without moderation tools being used to censor that content.
  There are times people wouldn't like it, but it'd fully solve this !linuxsucks issue.
  
  Communities should not be overly moderated in order to enforce a specific narrative.
  Agreed. That's exactly what is killing Reddit. They ban/permaban so many people just for disagreeing with them.
- I've done that in fuckcars and not gotten banned. A lot of the users can be rabid but the mods aren't quite vegan tier as far as I can tell.
- Will you though? Dogpiled? Yes, that’s just the nature of Lemmy. Banned? I have not heard of this happening but maybe I’m just ignorant.
  Edit: I realized after saying this that there are two fuckcars coms. The one on LW has banned like 3 people ever. The one on .ML has banned tons of people though it was hard to tell which ones were instance-wide bans since the admins love to do that over trivial BS. So depending on which com you might be right. But on LW community you can definitely go there and argue that cars are great and harmless as long as you’re nice about it. I personally think that’s healthy.

Linuxsucks community? It got to be satirical!
Oh... It's not...
It could be a place to discuss interesting points, for after all, there are legitimate points to be made. But it's not...
- The ironic part is that by creating this community the mod is actually working against his own movement because he's resorted to trolling and power-tripping, instead of a community to discuss interesting points. Meaning less people will ultimately be willing to take him seriously.

- Agreed !unixsocks@lemmy.blahaj.zone is a far superior community in so many ways, best part of all though, they're not tolerant of slur usage. Which is more than I can say about the one I mentioned in the main post unfortunately.
  
  Interesting to see people who argue for free speech but also are against it.

I unfortunately am starting to lose faith in Lemmy's desire to reduce toxicity. They just now finally banned Linkerbaan, but it took 11 months of extreme trolling in support of Trump for it to happen. Days before the election, they finally took action. The user is probably laughing his ass off, having already reached 99.9% of the users they were hoping to.
Their cherry on top is they got away with accusing people of supporting/loving genocide hundreds of times unscathed. Most of the time where I witnessed that behavior, the person they attacked hadn't even expressed any form of support for Israel.
- Glad to hear they're gone
  
  Yeah, only downside is at this point we won't know if what many had speculated would happen. After the election, a lot of us expected them to vanish.
  
  That account. I doubt they are gone.
- If you hang out in politics communities they are gonna be toxic. I don't think that's a fair characterisation of lemmy in general though tbh. There are plenty of wholesome communities.
- Yeah, I've noticed that very often admins are very slow at dealing with these kinds of problems, also many community mods seem to protect users from receiving admin action. Which really is not good, it leads to people like Linkerbaan and CookieJarObserver being able to thrive and troll for months without issue, and only finally being banned after they've caused the harm months later.
  
  I find it really stupid that Lemmy’s Devs think that reports are a fast and reasonable way of dealing with harassment
  What would be the alternative? As you pointed out, it's the admins who can be slow to act
  I mean the fact that they consider registration applications to be a silver bullet just goes to show that it never occurred to them that people can and do blatantly lie on their registration applications.
  What would be the alternative?
- They just now finally banned Linkerbaan
  Good fucking riddance.
- They finally banned them? It's about time, they were insufferable.
- Unless I’m missing something this seems like a significant misrepresentation of that user’s behavior. I found them to be an annoying ideologue but having strong views and a focus on a singular topic isn’t the same as trolling.
  
  Okay well they were banned from the instance for trolling. I think many people thought they clearly were doing so.
  
  Any review of his post history would show that above all, Linkerbaan was pro-Palestinian.
  Many users on lemmy.world seem to think any criticism of the Biden Administration's support of Israel's Genocide in Gaza and deliberate war crimes (which Israel often brags about) is somehow supporting Trump.
  One of the reasons I left reddit was the circlejerking that went on there but Lemmy.world is giving reddit a run for it's money.

Yea we should remove Linux from existence just to see all the things that stop working. No more internet.
Whats next? Watersucks? Unless you are drinking the closed source Coke.
- It's what plants crave:-(

Lol I just figured I'd respond to a random post about how Linux users are paranoid conspiracy theorists. Got banned on sight. I shoulda seen this coming...

I'm glad this community is a thing. There is !fediverselore@lemmy.ca for lore, drama and debacles, which is interesting to see when there is conflict between multiple somewhat reasonable sides, but when it's just mods behaving silly it doesn't feel as right a place.

it's me!!!

Recently blocked that community and person, once it became unavoidably clear it's not a gag. Just a trolling asshole extraordinaire, picking a fight with like half of Lemmy, and worst of all, doing a shite job of it.
- He's currently sunk to using a slur in his memes. Probably thinking it makes him sound cleaver but it just makes him sound immature. Ah well, at least it'll probably contribute to their community or account getting booted faster. Trolling can be overlooked, but slurs are very often a no-no.

People dont get notifications if you pinned them from a post, you have to do it from a comment
- Oh, that's unfortunate. Well I guess I'll just do it in a top comment.

CC: @glimse@lemmy.world @rain_worl@lemmy.world @the_toast_is_gone@lemmy.world

Well my only post was telling them to ban me, so mission accomplished I guess
- I don't think it was that big a feat, he was banning people when the comments were too vague to tell if they were pro-linux or anti-linux. Really funny, and goes to show how insecure he is in his opinions.

That community is a troll farm.
- Yeah, it seems to have gotten way way worse since I made this post. Also he finally locked it because he couldn't censor people's comments fast enough and wasn't getting enough positive interaction for it to be worth it.
  I ended up actually taking over his other community !linux_vs_windows@lemmy.world and the first thing I did was permaban madthumbs with content removal and the community posts shrank to almost nothing. Just goes to show how little actual people actually care about these communities. Yet some idiot tried to argue I'd somehow make them popular, which still hasn't happened.

I guess it's fine it exists as a site. But, what a juvenile, immature thing.

But it's not a good fit for those comments. If they want to have a little community to hate on Linux and ban everyone who doesn't what is the problem?
- So the main purpose of these posts is to make people aware of such communities for what they are, so they are aware and don't assume they are something else more redeeming due to a lack of any dissent about or against them. That's the purpose of !yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com.
  Though when it comes to troll communities like this one there are indeed some problems, the biggest one is that troll communities do often become breeding grounds for toxicity, bigotry, and even disinformation.

from their community
Their house. Their rules. You aren't welcome everywhere. We aren't ants.
I use arch, btw.
- By your logic it seems you believe this community has no merit and that moderator power tripping isn't a valid. You're entitled to your opinion but many people do indeed disagree with you on that. I'd suggest blocking this community because a good amount of the posts here center on the idea that community stewards can indeed abuse their power on an instance to either obscure information pertaining to the reasons they actioned someone, or that they are banning people and removing posts to avoid being banned themselves from the instance for Code of conduct infractions on their part.
- NTA your house your rules /s

Honestly if you get pissed because someone makes a community detected to slandering your favorite OS you should probably touch grass (I use Alpine Busybox/Linux)

This happens ALL OVER Lemmy.
Welcome to mods and power admins with no rules.
- If you see it you should post it here. Help bring attention to it, instead of just trying to accept it as normal. At the very least it helps people know to avoid those communities.
  
  I do. I rarely see it acted on in mod log.
- If you see it, feel free to report here in this community.

Subscribed! The amount of linux fanboyism on this platform has been insane as of late to where if you even post anything factually negative (yes, Linux can get viruses) you get downvoted to hell. It’s nice to see a counter-culture sub once in a while.
As others have said, if you don’t like it, block it.
- As others have said, if you don’t like it, block it.
  I didn't say explicitly that I didn't like it or that people shouldn't use it, just that the main mod has been power-tripping and very likely is a troll. So if you want to hang out there that's fine. Though I wouldn't expect any kind of content diversity there. It's likely going to be just be the main mod making posts, which he might even give up on later. It's also very likely he'll ban you for a misunderstanding, since some of the people there were banned seemingly for nothing.
  
  You’re aware of the Streisand effect, right? It actually cuts both ways. I browse all and hadn’t even heard of that sub and a lot of others probably haven’t too. But your whining about the mod and community have brought a spotlight to it which raises the amount of attention it gets, probably not in the way you’re wanting.
- As others have said, if you don’t like it, block it.
  We can also criticize them (and you), if you can't handle that skip the post.

116 comments