I cannot repost what Flying Squid was posting here, because it involved highly disturbing and dangerous content, including:
Content Warning
Graphic content, harassment, self-harm, and suicidal ideation, which I reported immediately.
While this behavior is shocking, it’s not completely out of left field, as members of this community and platform will already be familiar with their behavior. Flying Squid has long been regarded as one of the least productive and most problematic mods on all of Lemmy, often picking fights and abusing their mod privileges. I view this change as a positive step for Squid, .world, and Lemmy as a whole.
It’d only be enforcing what probably is going to happen voluntarily anyways.
What the fuck? What is this comment?
I definitely think, at this point, that there is a little cabal of people who are devoted to harassing FlyingSquid, not just about his moderation but on a personal level, and they aren’t stopping even when it sounds like he is clearly mentally struggling right now. That’s fucked up. Don’t do that.
You said “call out his BS, get asked for evidence, show evidence, it isn’t enough” along with a lot of personal attacks towards FlyingSquid. What is your evidence of him being a PTB? Literally the only thing I have seen after asking this question a few times is that he sometimes argues with people, and a few months ago made a mistake on a report and didn’t realize that multiple copies of the same message were all different reports about duplicated spam content, IDK, some weird honest-mistake situation like that. And he’s rude to people sometimes. Nothing about banning people unnecessarily, or setting arbitrary rules for content removal, or anything like that, which is normally what I think of as PTB. Not “arguing.”
What is your evidence for him being a PTB? I promise, it’ll be “enough,” I’ll take it seriously if there is any.
I definitely think, at this point, that there is a little cabal of people who are devoted to harassing
Definitely. I haven’t seen evidence (though I might be wrong) that it’s any more than one user with a bunch of discuss.online alts. One of their alts DMd me immediately after Squid’s removal saying “you’re welcome” as though I am thankful for harassment just because I don’t like the guy. Honestly I hope this user doing the harassment gets IP banned. Imagine taking pride in provoking someone’s mental health. Freakish.
Update: some pointed pointed about the ban from this user 5 months ago: https://lemmy.world/modlog?page=1&actionType=ModBanFromCommunity&userId=580006
I don’t have much more context unfortunately
What, return2ozma, the precursor to UniversalMonk? That’s the PTB is that FlyingSquid banned him?
He’s calmed down recently, but he used to be pretty spammy and unapologetic about it. He was finally banned “officially” because he basically said that he was seeking out specifically anti-Biden stuff and posting a steady stream of it to make sure that side of the story got some heavy airtime on Lemmy, as if there was a shortage of it. I’m not convinced that that should be the final straw in terms of handing someone a ban, but there was broad agreement from the mod team that he should be banned.
It also, as far as I can tell, wasn’t FlyingSquid that banned him. Unless it was from an alt used for admin, or something?
https://lemmy.world/modlog?page=1&actionType=ModBanFromCommunity&modId=477305&userId=580006
Edit: Update: Here’s all the actions that FS took against return2ozma. Looks pretty legit to me.
https://lemmy.world/modlog?page=1&modId=477305&userId=580006
He’s calmed down recently, but he used to be pretty spammy and unapologetic about it. He was finally banned “officially” because he basically said that he was seeking out specifically anti-Biden stuff and posting a steady stream of it to make sure that side of the story got some heavy airtime on Lemmy, as if there was a shortage of it.
TIL, then I’m surprised he didn’t get banned earlier.
It also, as far as I can tell, wasn’t FlyingSquid that banned him. Unless it was from an alt used for admin, or something?
Wait, aren’t bans impossible to trace to the mod who did them? I remember this being something to avoid mod harassment
What is your evidence of him being a PTB?
For what it’s worth, I just had a look at !yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com and couldn’t find any documented example of actual power tripping naming him. Maybe the posts about him didn’t use his nickname. Maybe there was nothing about him in the first place. Definitely not a clear case.
Edit: https://lemmy.world/modlog?page=1&actionType=ModBanFromCommunity&userId=580006, see other comment
I’ve directly asked a few different people who claimed he was a PTB what it was that he did, and it’s always some kind of bizarrely hyped-up misdemeanor. Every time. Not even “he banned this person who arguably wasn’t actually a troll, but it’s a gray area” but literally like “he sent this person a rude comment while they were in an argument OH THE HUMANITY.” It’s actually always the same two or three examples from four to six months ago. And they’re always incredibly vocal and emotional about how terrible he is.
I’m not trying to get involved in lemmy.world moderator drama. I haven’t even looked into this latest thing with him posting self-harm things. But I’ve formed a much more firm opinion, just as of today, that there is some kind of organized effort to drum him out of being a moderator, which seems to be succeeding.
to drum him out of being a moderator, which seems to be succeeding.
To be fair, even if there’s no evidence of actual power tripping (e.g. banning users without reasons), the way he interacts with users is still not ideal as a moderator.
Using an alt to moderate would already help in that regard, as he wouldn’t be able to threaten “I’ll ban you” in the middle of an argument
Recent example: https://lemmy.world/comment/14488436
In this case the user indeed seems to be trolling, but just banning them without further comment would probably more effective than commenting like he did, which can contribute to the PTB reputation
I already talked about that one, and found your explanation for why that was a horrible thing for him to say pretty unconvincing, but sure, I’ll look into it more. Who was he talking to? Where was this so I can see the comments context? I already gave my reaction but maybe if I looked at the full context, I would feel differently, and it’s so old a comment that it’s not on my instance and obviously I’m not going to look through 4+ months of comments to find it and see the context for myself.
Lemmy’s search is quite good: https://lemmy.world/comment/11470634
