After being harassed in multiple discord channels by powermod FlyingSquid the news mod blackbeard has shuttered his account and moved to bluesky.
https://lemmy.world/u/Blackbeard
"The recklessness with which people downvote polite disagreements reminds me of all the worst parts of Reddit, and it proves to me that this isn’t the social media savior I’d hoped it would be, and is instead just another echo chamber. I hope eventually lemmy.world (and the fediverse more broadly) can grow out of that, but some of the behavior I’ve seen on the inside from both mods and admins doesn’t really inspire much confidence for that kind of evolution in the short term. "
FlyingSquid is the same mod who has the power to siteban people from lemmy.world
Why does lemmy.world keep having issues with their powermods and admins? Why do powermods get the ability to siteban their enemies from the largest instance?
Sadly this is what happens on oversized instances. If your goal is to grow, you will foster the worst community spirit. It’s a shame that Blackbeard isn’t giving another instance a chance.
Flying Squid has a site wide reputation for being like this. Arguing/discussing anything with this person is like talking to a wall. Not to mention their overuse and abuse of authority.
If you want some insight, check this user’s comments and sort by controversial. Then do the same for FlyingSquid.
Have some citations for that abuse of authority? OP alluded to abuse of authority by pointing out various powers FlyingSquid has, but in my mind very tellingly didn’t actually provide any examples of abuse of authority. The screenshotted conversation, where a person with some site admin powers is reporting things as a regular user, and then when a mod gets really hostile and insulting with them, simply says “Oh, okay, I think I just won’t participate in your stuff then, if my presence is unwanted,” doesn’t exactly paint the picture of some kind of power-mad petulant tyrant.
It’s clear FS has been doing this for some time and Blackbeard was getting sick and tired of it. Telling someone who regularly reports users to mind what they consider report worthy is something I imagine a lot of mods have to do. Saying “Well then, I guess I won’t report anything if that’s the way it’s going to be” is pretty childish IMO. Especially considering FS is a mod themselves.
FS is just very combative in nature. I’ve seen it several times. They’re not an easy person to have a discussion with.
So, no citations for abuse of power? Just that they had a disagreement with someone in Discord?
Hey, yo, I got one! I once argued with FS about something where he continuously attempted to goad me, argued disingenuously, and acted childishly, and when I rightfully called him out on all of that, he removed my comment. It was a rather small abuse of power, but I have seen him act righteously indignant, especially when he is called out for acting like a child. He does not differentiate this from a personal attack, especially when he was very much responsible for escalating several interactions he has with others.
What community did this take place in?
Edit: I think I found it.
https://lemmy.world/comment/12606768
https://lemmy.world/modlog?page=1&userId=1040702
It’s sort of an ESH situation, and after that length of bickering I can’t see why either of you continued the conversation. But I don’t at all agree with your summary. It looks to me like he wanted to talk facts, you wanted to insult him and avoid the factual discussion, and he ended the conversation and then removed one comment afterwards where you started going after him personally (“insipid” “impetuous” “childish”).
I’m not sure what you were trying to accomplish by refusing to answer his questions and instead inflaming the bickering, but ending the conversation and removing the escalation sounds like the right response to me.
Yeah i cant believe the people defending them in this thread. I guess anyone can build up a little following of devoted supporters regardless of how childish and argumentative they behave. Really makes you think. Flying Squid does not come out of this looking good in any way.
Why not? flyingsquid simply wanted clarification on how to discern what something is misinformation and what ain’t.
Blackbeard seems to not cut it as a mod.
Asking another mod to mind how they report things should not have been met with this kind of hostility. It was a very simple ask.
Lmao he was literally sea-lioning. Misinformation is also not something that needs to be clarified beyond blackbeards first statement which is “someones opinion that you disagree with, that is clearly just an opinion, is not misinformation”. I think the person trying to silence dissenting opinions and then acting like a child when they get called out for it is the one who doesn’t cut it as a mod, actually.
Blackbeard was actually an excellent mod. I’m not picking sides on this fight, as it was resolved 2 months ago.
Patently false and wholly unsupported, too? Tell me you’ve had irrational run-ins with said mod that somehow refused to react how you wanted, you know without saying it word for word, right?
Ooh, yeah, that’s it. C’mon, baby, Baader mein hof like only you can. Unf. So good.
FS is annoying and thinks every single time someone disagrees with them, its a personal attack and they must be aligned to some power.
Literally anytime someone used to just lightly criticize their favorite thing or person, FS would write blocks of text explaining why that opinion or fact was unjustified, and if you continued, you got banned.
FS is annoying and acts like they are better for just random things. Literally recently they said they’re trying to leave the United States, and acting like its a noble sacrifice to leave the queer and BIPOC they once “defended and care about” behind. Said “Maybe I’ll give some GoFundMes, I don’t care.”
Full disclosure, I tend to agree with FlyingSquid in the instance that kicked all of this off. I don’t have a clear opinion of them as a mod, but personally I wish the LW mods would do a lot more about the “Kamala Harris = Hitler” type of misinformation that gets a free pass on a lot of LW.
FlyingSquid comes across as perfectly reasonable in this conversation. Their arguments that another mod thanked them for reporting stuff, that it’s two reports over the course of two weeks a week which is hardly excessive, and then when the two people couldn’t see eye to eye, they said they just wouldn’t flag anything, sounds all perfectly reasonable and sensible. For some reason that wasn’t okay, and the conversation got personal, with Blackbeard constantly posting these aggrieved attacks about how FlyingSquid was being childish if he didn’t continue to report things in someone else’s community occasionally, but never anything that the mods there thought was not worthy of removal. And then petulantly refusing to say something along the lines of, “Of course you’re welcome to post there if you want” when asked repeatedly if it was okay for them to just post and participate still.
I haven’t seen any Discord harassment, so maybe I missed something, but if this is what gets posted as justification for why FlyingSquid is a terrible moderator, I suspect that the “harassment” is more of the same. Maybe it’s along the lines of “not saying exactly what I want you to say, or having conversation with other people where you say things I don’t want you to say.” People are allowed to disagree with each other over what is misinformation, or choose not to report content in someone else’s community if they get some hostile responses when they do. Trying to order someone else around and then getting personally insulting with them when they politely tell you “No, I don’t agree with how you see it,” is ridiculous.
Edit: I don’t know why I said two weeks, it was one week.
I fully ack with this statement.
There is a failure to settle what Misinformation is, FlyingSquid can’t be “more discerning about flagging/reporting” that Blackbeard wished him to do. YET Blackbeard failed to answer FlyingSquad exactly what he meant by this. And in that little inciting report “equating the US runners to X,Y,Z.” is not just an opinion, its defamation, a felony.
Blackbeard had the option to clearly say, “We want to allow people to say any bad thing about the Democrats that they want, even if it seems clearly disingenuous or like a pattern on the part of that particular user. We don’t consider that to be misinformation.” That would have clarified things and my guess is that FlyingSquid wouldn’t have argued with it. Blackbeard’s desire to tiptoe around saying that directly, for obvious reasons, and just say “be more discerning,” was what led to FlyingSquid’s confusion which Blackbeard for some reason interpreted as being hostile and obstinate about it.
It’s like a flashback to every boss who gives unclear direction about expectations, even when giving you a bollocking about how you did it wrong this time and even when asked point-blank. Except, FlyingSquid isn’t getting paid to put up with it, hence the “I think I just won’t participate then” which is probably a lot more polite than I would have been about it.
Blackbeard’s desire to tiptoe around saying that directly
Well I imagine that a Moderator should have a solid stance regarding, well, moderation. Blackbeard simply didn’t cut it. They could have just stepped down, but no, they had to nuke the account, post that screenshot to show their people skills and finally head to bluesky.
It is not misinformation to say that Kamala Harris is the commander in chief of the largest military force in the world and she is overseeing a genocide.
That is textbook misinformation.
- Kamala Harris is not the commander in chief, Biden is.
- Kamala Harris is not “overseeing” anything in Gaza. Netanyahu is overseeing the genocide, Biden is arming it for some reason, and Kamala Harris is a whole different person running a political campaign to be able to make decisions about what we’re going to do now that our ally has apparently decided to kill millions of people who didn’t do anything wrong.
The linkage of Kamala Harris with the genocide in Gaza, persistently and disingenuously, with an apparently-successful outcome of greatly increasing the genocide by putting Trump in charge instead, is one major type of misinformation on Lemmy. If you were coming and saying “It is not misinformation to say that Kamala Harris hasn’t even condemned the genocide and is losing Arab voters because of her attempt to waffle on this crystal-clear issue,” then that wouldn’t be misinformation, whether I agreed with it personally or not. But going off into factual la-la land in order to accomplish your political goals for any particular discussion is absolutely misinformation. Thank you for providing a good example.
Tell me you don’t know what the Vice President does without telling me you don’t know what the Vice President does.
This is exactly the sort of misinformation I remove from Politics on a daily basis.
There is a PUBLIC PROCESS for Harris to become President:
https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/19/politics/kamala-harris-presidential-power/index.html
"To officially transfer the presidential powers to Harris, Biden sent a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the president pro tempore of the Senate, at 10:10 a.m. ET before going under anesthesia.
The letter reads: “Today I will undergo a routine medical procedure requiring sedation. In view of present circumstances, I have determined to transfer temporarily the powers and duties of the office of President of the United States to the Vice President during the brief period of the procedure and recovery.”"
I’m not sure I’d agree that FS comes off as perfectly reasonable because I do get a pretty strong beg me to stay or I’ll leave vibe… but I am amused that OP here read that thread and decided that FS was the aggressor here.
Sorry about your tiny wiener, man. woah this is such a weird comment without the context of the now removed parent. I swear it was like a really good zinger.
I agreed with you up until you said “FlyingSquid saying he won’t flag anything is super reasonable.” If I’m working with a peer and I’m an asshole to them about our shared responsibilities and they say “well fine I just won’t do the thing both of us are supposed to do any more,” I’d argue that’s childish. Granted I started it and drug them down to my level, but they’re down there too. Both sides get real fucking dramatic after that. It’s pretty clear Blackbeard started swinging and FlyingSquid came along for the ride.
To me, the long discord screenshot is just evidence that FlyingSquid had a bad day and said some dumb shit to someone pushing his buttons. I don’t think it contributes to the evidence that he’s a bad mod; that has to come from elsewhere. If we had evidence that FlyingSquid drops down into the mud a bunch with users, not fellow moderators, that would be sufficient.
But, it’s not a shared responsibility. Two times in a week he saw something in someone else’s community and flagged it, trying I guess to be a good citizen, and then he got this demanding and rude extensive DM chat about it with all these personal accusations. I sort of agree that he let his buttons get pushed, but he tried way harder to keep an open dialogue about it and reach a real resolution than I would have.
I think about the time when he offered to just not report anything, problem solved, and Blackbeard said he was childish and ridiculous, I would have just said “I wasn’t asking. You’re not my boss, I am free to report or not report in any fashion I would like to. If you want to give me grief about my reports, but refuse to clarify which ones you do and don’t want to receive, then I will not report. Have a good one, the matter is closed as far as I’m concerned.”
So they’re not co-moderators in this situation? That definitely changes my analysis. I feel like instance mods have some shared responsibility for the health of their instance so I wouldn’t say it’s completely not his job; the rest of my understanding was wrong if they don’t share responsibility!
I disagree that Blackbeard wouldn’t “clarify which ones you do and don’t want to receive.” Blackbeard laid out their perspective for moderation of the community, which, if FlyingSquid is not a co-moderator, is what flies, not the opinion you and FlyingSquid share. I didn’t think that was unclear at all; FlyingSquid just didn’t agree.
It’s very easy for me to say from my armchair that I’m not going to take shit from a moderator over unclear rules; if it’s not in the sidebar fuck off with telling me what I can’t report. I think you and I both agree Blackbeard was shit at trying to resolve conflict here.
If you continue to report opinions and simple disagreements as misinformation, we will take action against your account for report abuse, same as we would any account.
It doesn’t seem unreasonable to me to interpret that as a threat to ban the account.
Daw. You think that you shouldn’t have any rules? How fast would that go downhill, hmmm? The rules aren’t to power trip. It’s to keep it civil, and on topic.
But you knew that. You just love being an ass.
Oh, and zero of your community bans are from .world
That one was the other way, Blackbeard threatening FlyingSquid. Blackbeard has never had the power to site ban, only community ban.
Why are Lemmy mods from .world coordinating on discord lmao
It’s an easy way to work together. Yeah, Matrix would have made more sense.
They have other chat solutions as well, but not my place, so not my topic.
When you join, you can verify, and you’re added to channels for your community/ies. If you’re the first, they create the community channel automatically. Overall, a good idea.
I left the server, but for my own reasons unrelated to the mods/admins. Just needed to get rid of some discord servers.
There are multiple back channels for coordination, I’ve been invited to Discord and Element, there was even (briefly) a Slack channel, but that seems to have closed due to it being a trial period or something. There are likely others I’m not aware of having not been invited.
But it’s good for mods and admins to collaborate.
But they have no mutual servers in this screenshot. So it looks like someone just randomly found someone on discord which is kind of weird. Unless one of them left the server(s) you reference before the screenshot.
