And lmao wow, one of the mods involved in this is also a mod at lobste.rs. No wonder the "discussion" there looked so uncanny.
- Moderation actions are public on lobsters: https://lobste.rs/moderations
- Irene wasn’t active in that discussion.
- Some of the most upvoted comments were against the moderation clique.
The author of this article doesn't seem particularly interested in checking facts, they implied some nasty stuff about my actions and motivation without bothering to read the publicly available info or contact me.
Nowhere in the ban log you mentioned "attempted brigading"; rather what you mentioned, as reasons for the ban, was "lots of off-topic stories" & "[using] Lobsters to fight with the NixOS project".
https://twitter.com/sridca/status/1751586246026313906
Neither of which is true, of course, nor can they be proven.
To let the readers judge for themselves, here are my lobste.rs submissions & comments:
https://lobste.rs/~srid/stories
https://lobste.rs/~srid/threads
And here's the submission that got me banned (after a NixOS moderator, Hexa, commented on it so as to derail the submission):
The comments are deleted so nobody can verify that it was "abuse". You're basically saying "source: trust me bro".
Back in the day, forums used to put a big fat USER WAS BANNED FOR THIS POST sticker on bad posts, but keep it around for posterity so people could see for themselves what the fuss was about. I don't like the secrecy of how moderation is done nowadays.
None of that means anything if I can't see for myself what the purported infraction was. The most important piece of the puzzle is missing! "It's in the RSS feed" -- oh that's so helpful, I'll be sure to look for that in the locked filing cabinet in the disused lavatory, the one with the sign on the door saying "beware of the leopard".
It's a hallmark of a free and democratic society that criminal and civil proceedings are generally public, when someone is punished, we can easily look up what they were punished for. Obviously software forum arguments aren't as important or dramatic as legal disputes, but we imitate in the small what we admire in the large. It is disturbing to me that one side of this culture war calls itself "democratic", but acts like a Star Chamber.