This is such a common attitude, and it’s nonsense. Non-moderators think moderators are “power hungry” when they ban people. While there are some few exceptions, moderators don’t ban people because they like power. Moderators ban people because they’re disruptive and causing trouble.
99% of the people I’ve banned who were not obvious spammers or bots are one kind of troll or another. Usually they fall into three categories: Concern Trolls (“But I’m only saying this for your own good!”), Factoid Trolls (“I’m here to tell you the TRUTH!”), or Disruptive Trolls (dick picks, offensive memes, slurs and racism, etc.).
Roughly 1% of the people I ban apologize for their mistake, remove their rule-breaking content, and either follow the rules or quietly leave.
I regularly get called a power-hungry mod by the crybabies who get angry when they aren’t allowed to break the very clearly stated rules, and repeat their offenses after getting first, sometimes second warnings. They run to other places and go try to stir up other crybabies to come and cause the same kind of trouble.
Moderating is tireless and endless. Jerks don’t get banned for saying “Dur the mods suck! Free Speech!” Jerks get banned because they think the rules are for other people, or because they think that the rules are wrong so that means they don’t have to follow them.
Thank you for coming to my Moose Talk. (Ted is taking a nap right now.)
Different platform, but exactly the same deal moderating Twitch chats. I think my favorite insult that I’ve received was that I was personally “the downfall of Western civilization.”
The upshot to those disruptions happening in an active chat like that though is that everyone sees how much of a knob that person is being and is perfectly happy to see them gone.
There are also moderators that ban out of some weird form of spite/echo chamber enforcement.
Ive seen some examples of feminist / human rights forums/subreddits that had it explicitly in their rules that hate speech and attacking people based on gender was against the rules. Someone was going on a long hate filled speech about how all men are trash and terrible, and I just reported it to the moderators that it broke the rule and I proceeded to get banned for making the report (not even engaging with the chat, just reporting)
I also got banned from /r/askscience during the late stages of COVID and was accused of being an antivaxer by the moderator… Thing is I am extremely pro-vaccines, lol
The reason I got banned? Someone posted some faulty stats interpretations of information and I posted the correction, giving an example case to demonstrate how there was a hole on their claim. Largely speaking they were, in a damaging way, accrediting assumed success to vaccines that wasnt quite proven yet, and I was just like “Well we’d need to the info for X/Y/Z to make that assumption, its very possible but we are missing key info”
Moderator sent me this lol:
We don’t allow conspiracy anti-vaxx nonsense here. Your understanding of stats in general is incredibly flawed.
So yeah, sometimes you just have moderators that are complete assholes and genuinely seem interested in enforcing some kind of weird echo chamber deal, where rationality is not supported.
That one in particular sticks out to me because you’d think that a place like /r/askscience would be understanding of calling stuff out like confirmation biases… >_>;
This is such a common attitude, and it’s nonsense. Non-moderators think moderators are “power hungry” when they ban people. While there are some few exceptions, moderators don’t ban people because they like power. Moderators ban people because they’re disruptive and causing trouble.
What moderating is really like, part 1
What moderating is really like, part 2
99% of the people I’ve banned who were not obvious spammers or bots are one kind of troll or another. Usually they fall into three categories: Concern Trolls (“But I’m only saying this for your own good!”), Factoid Trolls (“I’m here to tell you the TRUTH!”), or Disruptive Trolls (dick picks, offensive memes, slurs and racism, etc.).
Roughly 1% of the people I ban apologize for their mistake, remove their rule-breaking content, and either follow the rules or quietly leave.
I regularly get called a power-hungry mod by the crybabies who get angry when they aren’t allowed to break the very clearly stated rules, and repeat their offenses after getting first, sometimes second warnings. They run to other places and go try to stir up other crybabies to come and cause the same kind of trouble.
Moderating is tireless and endless. Jerks don’t get banned for saying “Dur the mods suck! Free Speech!” Jerks get banned because they think the rules are for other people, or because they think that the rules are wrong so that means they don’t have to follow them.
Thank you for coming to my Moose Talk. (Ted is taking a nap right now.)
No need to get offended just because I mentioned one of the valid reasons.
Different platform, but exactly the same deal moderating Twitch chats. I think my favorite insult that I’ve received was that I was personally “the downfall of Western civilization.”
The upshot to those disruptions happening in an active chat like that though is that everyone sees how much of a knob that person is being and is perfectly happy to see them gone.
Eh, I have had mixed results.
There are also moderators that ban out of some weird form of spite/echo chamber enforcement.
Ive seen some examples of feminist / human rights forums/subreddits that had it explicitly in their rules that hate speech and attacking people based on gender was against the rules. Someone was going on a long hate filled speech about how all men are trash and terrible, and I just reported it to the moderators that it broke the rule and I proceeded to get banned for making the report (not even engaging with the chat, just reporting)
I also got banned from /r/askscience during the late stages of COVID and was accused of being an antivaxer by the moderator… Thing is I am extremely pro-vaccines, lol
The reason I got banned? Someone posted some faulty stats interpretations of information and I posted the correction, giving an example case to demonstrate how there was a hole on their claim. Largely speaking they were, in a damaging way, accrediting assumed success to vaccines that wasnt quite proven yet, and I was just like “Well we’d need to the info for X/Y/Z to make that assumption, its very possible but we are missing key info”
Moderator sent me this lol:
So yeah, sometimes you just have moderators that are complete assholes and genuinely seem interested in enforcing some kind of weird echo chamber deal, where rationality is not supported.
That one in particular sticks out to me because you’d think that a place like /r/askscience would be understanding of calling stuff out like confirmation biases… >_>;