PTB. This is unreasonable. Also trying to prevent teenagers from accessing the internet is just going to lead to all teenagers just lying about their age. It's not going to stop it. It's just going to mean they can't discuss their actual opinions and issues honestly. It would also reinforce the need to lie to be part of culture, which is just not healthy.
this post was submitted on 10 Mar 2025
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Ye Power Trippin' Bastards
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19 users here now
This is a community in the spirit of "Am I The Asshole" where people can post their own bans from lemmy or reddit or whatever and get some feedback from others whether the ban was justified or not.
Sometimes one just wants to be able to challenge the arguments some mod made and this could be the place for that.
Posting Guidelines
All posts should follow this basic structure:
- Which mods/admins were being Power Tripping Bastards?
- What sanction did they impose (e.g. community ban, instance ban, removed comment)?
- Provide a screenshot of the relevant modlog entry (don’t de-obfuscate mod names).
- Provide a screenshot and explanation of the cause of the sanction (e.g. the post/comment that was removed, or got you banned).
- Explain why you think its unfair and how you would like the situation to be remedied.
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Some acronyms you might see.
- PTB - Power-Tripping Bastard: The commenter agrees with you this was a PTB mod.
- YDI - You Deserved It: The commenter thinks you deserved that mod action.
- YDM new - You Deserved More: The commenter thinks you got off too lightly.
- BPR - Bait-Provoked Reaction: That mod probably overreacted in charged situation, or due to being baited.
- CLM - Clueless Mod: The mod probably just doesn't understand how their software works.
Relevant comms
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Teenagers lying about their age on the internet is as old as teenagers on the internet.
Keeping the age barriers in place is good anyway. It communicates to younger people clearly that the content is not considered suitable for them. It gives them a moment to think and reconsider.
Participating in online culture might be generally not healthy for adults as well.
Did you know? IG is pretty restrict about NSFW content? But does it stop anything? No.
Tumblr banning porn just made porn unlabelable, so I cannot filter it out in any way. It also gets posted to random hashtags (there is porn in #halloween there)
I hope you're independently wealthy and can afford legal fees.
Aw, they actually did the ban. That's unfortunate.
On one hand, yes, legal liability and all that, but on the other hand half the site is copyright violations. The law only matters sometimes. I say this as someone who has hosted web communities myself, there's no reason to be banning for something like age on these instances, especially when we're talking 16 and not 12. It's unenforceable and trivial enough that there's no legal pressure to do so.
Yeah, it seems a little odd to do a full ban for anyone under 18. Do they feel that all communities on there are not appropriate for minors?
Gonna go against the grain here and say YDI.
As others have mentioned, liability. The hosts of Lemmy instances are doing an incredible service enabling us to use this platform for free. And in providing that service, they are also assuming a significant amount of risk in a rather volatile legal environment. The law views a platform that allows ("targets") minors very differently from one that is intended only for adults.
Additionally, TOS. Its as simple as that. This is not power tripping, this is just enforcement. Even if there was nothing explicity wrong about the behavior, once age is directly mentioned, liability is opened, and their hands are tied.
As a side note, there is nothing wrong with adult-only community spaces. Sometimes I want to have a discussion without worrying about whether the person on the other end is a literal child - there are enough adults that act like children as it is...
"The law discriminates against and limits the freedom of children, therefore they're totally justified!"
Yeah ok sure
Wrong way around. The law enforces more protections for children than adults, for which platforms are held to a higher standard.
Specifically, I'm talking about the higher standards for data privacy, user tracking, and content moderation. These are things that are trivial for large companies to implement, but would be a huge hurdle for small teams of unpaid volunteers.
Many people would like you to believe that, the reality is that these laws are designed to keep children away from support networks and just further enforce the idea of parents owning their children. They use these same garbage excuses when talking about children and HRT or puberty blockers, and trying to block trans kids from getting these treatments. They call that "protection" as well.
Things aren't as they say they are. People aren't honest about their motives. If that's new to you, wake up, it's 2025 people have been lying about the real reasons for decades, it's not and never has been a new concept.
You make some good points. I agree there are a lot of traditional ideals engrained in our justice system that enforce archaic power structures and perpetuate harm onto vulnerable people. And you're right, people often use "protecting the children" as an excuse to take more and more rights away from the general populace.
That said, I still don't think its productive to direct that frustration and anger at a volunteer moderator on a free, nonprofit platform.
For real, this type of apologia is downright disgusting.
Just for clarity, are you saying that all rules and regulation which discriminate against young people are inherently bad? e.g. banning them from consuming tobacco, having gambling adverts placed on their shows or being allowed in nightclubs?
If you're looking for someone to say it, you've got me here. Banning children from tobacco doesn't stop them from getting it, banning gambling adverts won't stop them from doing it (cereal box rewards etc) and usually find their ways into nightclubs with alcohol anyways. The only reason these laws exist are to control and subjugate children, not "for their own good." Such paternalist thought leads to shit like children marriage and any number of different types of child abuse, cause if your kid doesn't have any rights, what's stopping the parent from sending their kids to conversion therapy and misgendering then every day?
Fair enough, I think its a rather bizarre take that we shouldnt try stop people who havent fully developed their reasoning capacities from harming themselves but at least you're consistent.
The fact that you're even comparing being on Lemmy or probably also Puberty blockers and HRT to Booze and tobacco shows your motives transparently. Maybe instead of making bad faith comparisons to things that have nothing to do with each other you should actually be thinking of the kids who are hurt by the idea of parents owning kids. Like abused children, or trans kids.
I literally just asked to clarify your position, that you chose to project transphobia onto me from that says more about you than me.
The fact that you are comparing access to spaces like Lemmy to drugs, alcohol, and tobacco says enough about your motives to let me know that any further discussion with you is fruitless. You're trying to get me to say something that you could claim was implying I support kids taking drugs or alcohol so you could say that the "groomer" (me) supports giving children harmful substances. Ignoring the fact that access to spaces like Lemmy, and access to drugs and alcohol aren't even remotely similar.
If LW has a tos they have to be consistent and follow it as a normal business practice for it to protect them when something goes wrong.
You waved a red flag and said I'm violating the TOS, what are you going to do about it? You volunteered this information, nobody asked you to do it.
You backed LW into a corner, and they had to apply their TOS or in a future court case they couldn't rely on it to protect them. I.e. the prosecutor would say that LW didn't enforce it's TOS, here are reports of TOS violations being ignored, etc....
In many communities children's data is treated differently, and their is a higher moderation and safety requirement for the service provider. You often see this in online services saying you have to be at least 13/16/18 to use this service, it's because they don't want to have to follow the special rules for children.
Wow, this comment got 7 downvotes from 2 year old accounts with no posts or comments and 4 digits in the name........ That is quite the coincidence.
- https://lemmy.world/u/Malisu19997@lemmy.world
- https://lemmy.world/u/GodzillaFanboy129@lemmy.world
- https://lemmy.world/u/EvilShakespear1192@lemmy.world - Cake Day 2023-08-05
- https://lemmy.world/u/TheStanMachine7263@lemmy.world - Cake Day 2023-08-05
- https://lemmy.world/u/AustereOctopus1997@lemmy.world - Cake Day 2023-08-05
- https://lemmy.world/u/AllukaTheCutie7725@lemmy.world - Cake Day 2023-08-05
- https://sh.itjust.works/u/BomberMan9865@sh.itjust.works (this looks like a real account, but fits the naming pattern)
- https://sh.itjust.works/u/MonsterCity7732@sh.itjust.works (this looks like a real account, but fits the naming pattern)
- https://lemm.ee/u/anomolous0 [this one might be real, but it fits the pattern]
@lwadmin@lemmy.world I suspect the LW accounts above share the same ip address, you might want to look into your logs for astroturfing.
Interesting
More fun tidbits 4 of those accounts were created on the same day - Cake Day 2023-08-05
Eh, kinda half and half. Kids these days seem to forget rule #1 of the internet: if you're under 18 never admit it anywhere, anytime, for any reason.
Hell, don't even admit you made your account when you were underage, but aren't now. I've seen regular forums and MMORPGs ban people who admitted they were underage at the time they made the account, but not anymore
I'm biased here. I'm still against .world and their tendency to use "legality" as a smokescreen. (Blaming it for banning Luigi content right after he axed that United guy has earned my ire forever.)
However... I'm almost 40, and it was always the rule to never mention your age until it didn't matter. So on the one hand, world loves to use legality to push it's agenda. On the other hand, this is an expected outcome.
I agree with you that no one should really mention their age, though I don't agree with you that there's a point where it doesn't matter. You'll find plenty of groups willing to discriminate against older individuals, gaming groups, activist groups, STEM groups, it's weird but it's unfortunately a thing.
Lemmy.world has a problem with over modderation when it is out of scope in situations like this, they also have a problem with undermoderation letting shit slide that shouldn't like Reddit did. Lemmy.world has a lot of very big problems right now and they shouldn't be cut slack of any of them, even if it is obvious how it happened.
This is a weird nit to pick. If you're doing it right, you're only mentioning your age when it doesn't matter (in safe places or places where your age is helpful, versus places like Lemmy where someone will ban you.)
A good example would be me saying, in this thread, I'm almost 40. Anybody who can use that against me doesn't matter to me.
I think an 18+ rule for an instance that allows porn or federates with porn instances is reasonable. And when you interact with another instance's communities, you are beholden to their rules. And the admin who did it said they're talking about changing the rule. So it's not like they're just trying to be dicks.
So... I'm going to go with admins did what they had to, sag learned a tiny lesson about not giving people more information than they needed. I don't want to say YDI, though.
Oh Reddit have 13+ requirement and have porn on it. You can lie about your age.
And the trick to lying is not telling the truth.
Hey, I’m the one that decided to ban this user. I understand the frustration, but it is very much in the TOS of lemmy.world and has been for a long time.
We are having an internal discussion to see if there’s room to lower the age to 16 and if we can make exceptions for federated users.
I hope you see that this really isn’t meant as a powertrip, and we are just trying to protect the Lemmy.world site.
Sorry if I do not respond to comments quickly, it’s late in my timezone.
Hello,
Thank you for chiming in. Exceptions for federated users would be nice, especially for someone turning 18 in a few months.
Yea, I agree, and I would personally be for that. But I am not well versed in the law, and don’t have any stake in the legal side of it all except for me liking lemmy.world, so it’s not my decision.
I really hope people understand where we as admins are coming from, we really take no enjoyment out of banning anyone (except for spammers).
I really hope people understand where we as admins are coming from, we really take no enjoyment out of banning anyone (except for spammers).
That's one of the most transparent lies I've heard. Power corrupts, and I've seen plenty of lemmy.world admins who certainly do enjoy it, and who do it to people to prove a point or as a knee jerk reaction to disagreement. You can call it whatever you want to call, you can deny this fact but it does happen and I've seen it myself, and I'd prefer you don't try to feed me lies I'm smart enough to see right through.
I understand that my comment was ambiguous, I tried to say that the current admins, in my experience, don't enjoy banning people.
I'm sorry but the "(happy birthday in advance)" doesn't really paint that ban in the best light
That wasn’t meant to sound mean, just something that popped up in my head because it was about a birthday.