UPDATE: He deleted the community. Good.

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I’m probably an asshole sometimes. When people act like bullies or Nazis, I tell them to fuck off. I’m no saint. I do try to be fair, and also brutally honest. Here’s my personal modlog. I have nothing to hide.

A defense of my modlog...

OpinionHavers was a place for trolls and right wingers to spout shitty opinions.

Raccoon is a Lemmy app. Someone posted a screenshot of their search, saying they couldn’t find the app on F-Droid. I pointed out that they spelled “Raccoon” wrond since it has two Cs, and got my comment removed by the mod for being “annoying”. LOL! I was literally pointing out the problem with their search. 🤦‍♂️ I still can’t believe this one! They also removed another comment where I asked someone why they didn’t just edit their original comment to correct an error instead of only doing so in a reply to a reply, since it was confusing people. That one got removed too. This all happened within minutes of each other. That’s when I said “Fuck this community” because the mod and app author was just so heavy-handed. I can’t even tell someone their search was misspelled? Talk about PTBs…

I’m certain the “hot glue” thing was a joke and not an attack, Although I don’t remember the context. I sure it was posted as a joke question, and not a suggestion that someone do it like an insult. It only got removed as “gross”.

That SPH sub was some kind of roleplaying sub. Or maybe they’re taking themselves seriously. I don’t know. But I gave a roleplaying answer that said, “don’t click this link, it’s a virus” that op had posted and I got banned. Ok.

In c/technology, someone said I sounded like in “ad” when I listed what I liked about YouTube Premium, and they said I triggered their “uncanny valley response” and then said “never do that again”. Which was kind of weird and ticked me off a little. So to prove I wasn’t a bot, I said, “Would it help if I said, ‘fuck off’?”

That picture towards the end was because someone kept posting the same insult over and over again, so I screenshotted their profile and shared it as a reply saying they need to come up with a new insult. Here’s the picture:

I don’t see why that was removed. They were being a dick.

At any rate, I don’t think I’m a real asshole. Not usually. Go look at my post history. No one’s perfect, and I’m certain 99.9% of my post history is funny, informative, and a good contribution to Lemmy.

Trying to be fair and brutally honest is why I got banned.

ITAP on Lemmy.world is modded exclusively by Stamets. He’s a mod of several communities and heavy user of Lemmy. He’s really active.

He created the community and named it “ITAP” after the subreddit of the same name. The point of that original subreddit is to post OC photos. It’s right in the name. But his community rules specifically say that you can post non-OC. I find that a little weird, but it’s okay. His community, his rules.

Here are the rules for his ITAP:

ITAP Sidebar rules

Welcome to /c/ITAP, a place to share any photos you may have taken or seen that you think others would enjoy! It does not need to be OC, it just needs to be a photo that you think is beautiful and worth sharing.

Rule 1: No bigotry or discrimination.

Rule 2: No photos of politicians or political rallies.

Rule 3: Keep it civil.

Rule 4: Add OC or Not OC to the title.

Rule 5: NSFW posts are allowed provided they’re marked as such.

Rule 6: AI generated art isn’t allowed but a low level of digital touching/enhancing is fine

Rule 7: You don’t like the name. I don’t care. The community is called the way it is because I decided to do so. It is almost as if the word took could be used in different ways, such as physically taking the image yourself or storing a copy of the image that you found pleasing. If you have a problem with this, feel free to set up your own community. You may not feel free to openly whine and insult the community or the mods simply because you disagree with it.

Wow, rule #7 is new, I swear, and I feel like it’s specifically calling me out. That’s funny! I didn’t insult him. Well, maybe I did. You can read my original comment below. Rule #4 must be new, too because Stamets hasn’t been following it, which is the whole point of this post.

Stamets posts a photo about every day and none of them are his and none are tagged “Not OC”. Invariably, he gets comments like “Wow, gorgeous photo! How did you take that?”. Or “Great shot! What’s the story of this boat?” He doesn’t reply to any of them to eliminate their confusion. Not once. I checked.

That last one was an actual comment, and after seeing so many of these comments day after day, I finally decided to say something. I wish I could copy my comment, but Lemmy doesn’t let me see it because Stamets didn’t technically remove it. I think banning me merely hides all of my comments, and I can’t copy it from the modlog because it isn’t there. I’ll try to summarize. It was like 3 paragraphs.

I can see it now, so here it is. It appears he “unremoved” my comment, but removed all of my other ones. It’s not even inflammatory. It’s just “resigned”.

I keep seeing comments like this with no reply, and it bugs me. Stamets doesn’t take any of the pictures he posts here, so he can’t answer these questions and just ignores them. ☹️

I guess itap has no meaning. At first I thought I’d start posting here to encourage more people to do the same, but I’ve changed my mind. I’m going to delete my one post and block this community.

Stamets’ posting of non-OC in a community called “I Took a Picture” is akin to stolen valor. [EDIT: It was dumb to say that, and I’m sorry. I just meant stealing praise.] It’s his community, so he can do whatever he wants, I guess. Just post in pics, @stamets@lemmy.world, and let itap be itap. Or don’t. I don’t really care. But by copying this community from reddit, and violating its core principal by making up your own rules, I feel like you’re tricking the Lemmy community in some way. It’s dumb.

Is that insulting? Really? I guess I did call his use of the name ITAP dumb. He banned me, saying I was creating “unnecessary drama”. He changed the title to say “Not OC”. It wasn’t there originally. Here’s the post: https://lemmy.world/post/25565845

[EDIT: To his credit, it’s probably silly of me to complain about being banned from a community I said I was blocking. It is. But it’s the principle of it. I actually forgot I had said that until I was able to see this comment today. I never ended up blocking the community. All I saw is that I was banned today. But now that I’ve seen his reaction to this criticism, I’m not taking this post down. I still think my criticisms are valid, and seeing him slander me in the comments with false narratives makes me even more upset about him and how he handles things.]

Turns out, he made just a sticky post about this: https://lemmy.world/post/25582946 trying to defend himself and his community’s name. “I made /c/ITAP for myself and by myself.” Well, that’s a really weird reason to make a public internet community. 🤷

I don’t really buy the whole “took” pun thing. Then again, it’s kind of clever, even if really obscure. But it was never in the sidebar until today, that I remember seeing. As for not even acknowledging that he created this community’s name as a direct copy of Reddit’s community… That’s an odd position to take.

Am I an asshole for telling him that posting non-OC in ITAP and not labeling it is like stolen valor? Am I really creating unnecessary drama? I’m definitely creating more by posting here! 😂

Update: It looks like he edited some of his submissions to say “Not OC” to follow his new Rule #4. Good! Now I feel like I’ve made a positive change and I don’t feel like an asshole at all. I feel like I took one for the team for making that community slightly better. I had seen so many of those kinds of comments praising “his” photos. I don’t feel like I deserve a ban when he changed to rules to fix exactly what I was talking about. My comment clearly had merit.

I don’t need or want any remedy. Although, if he gave up moderating ITAP and let it be a community in the spirit of the one he copied, the spirit that seemingly everyone thinks it has, that’d be great. It’s never gonna happen, though. He could apologize for taking criticism so badly, but I doubt he’d ever do that, either. [EDIT: To be fair, I did call his community “dumb”.] If you look at some of the comments he’s made in defense of the Star Trek show he’s named after, and comments he’s removed for spurious reasons, I think you’d come to the same conclusion that he’s just your average PTB.

The kind of comments Stamets lets stand without any response:

https://a.lemmy.world/lemmy.world/comment/15094272

https://a.lemmy.world/lemmy.world/comment/14791492

https://a.lemmy.world/lemmy.world/comment/14647577

https://a.lemmy.world/lemmy.world/comment/14626113

https://a.lemmy.world/lemmy.world/comment/13422232 (The top comment is removed. I think someone asked about this photo, they were told it’s not OC, and… well, you can see the reply. Again, it’s not just me.)

https://a.lemmy.world/lemmy.world/comment/13424089

I guess that’s all of them. I don’t see any posts older than 3 months. I can’t find any example of him actually answering questions like this, despite what he says in these comments. Those are just the ones asking questions. The one’s containing only praise could be seen as general praise and not targeted at Stamets necessarily. I didn’t link any of those, but he doesn’t reply to those either. Yet any time he sees someone criticize the community’s name he bans them. So he’s clearly reading comments!

Do you see the pattern here? Stamets posts a photo. People comment on it and ask questions. Stamets ignores them. I have a really hard time believing he was too busy each and every time to reply and eliminate the commenter’s confusion and admit it wasn’t OC. So that’s why I said what I said when I made my exit. I don’t even care that I was banned. I was leaving anyway. It’s just the principle of it. I never ended up blocking the community, though.

Stamets’ reaction to this thread

Down below in this post’s comments, Stamets keeps pushing this narrative that I was “jumping between multiple threads”, “creating drama”, and “stirring up shit” by making “numerous comments across numerous posts”. This is such an exaggeration that it constitutes slander.

So I’m going back through my comments to see what I ever said in that community. There was no drama other than in Stamets’ mind. All of my comments were upvoted. None were inflammatory. They are now all removed. Whenever I mentioned the non-OC thing, it was in reply to someone else bringing it up, and it was only two posts. (Besides my last comment up above.)

Stamets said:

you made numerous comments across numerous posts

you were jumping from thread to thread and creating unnecessary drama

They were removed for jumping between multiple threads and stirring shit up

a littany of repeated comments throughout multiple posts

I was tired of clicking on multiple posts and seeing them complain

none of them were being constructive in anyway whatsoever

And slandering me in general:

Going around randomly calling users assholes and saying fuck this community and just stirring shit up left right and center? [emphasis mine]

Childish and immature behavior that is openly display throughout the entire of their modlog and posting history.

And that… that really pisses me off. It’s one thing to disagree with my assessment of this interaction, or to be petty and ban me, but to lie about my use of the ITAP community and to slander me in general, that crosses a line. I have half a mind to report this behavior to the lemmy.world admins. This is not how mods should behave.

Again, I challenge anyone to read my comment and post history and see if this narrative fits me, including my modlog which I linked to above (and tried to explain my actions in each case).

My other comments in the community

I’m putting them all in a spoiler because this is getting long. I just feel I had to defend myself against Stamets’ slander.

My only comments in the community

Starting 4 days days ago, I had a conversation to help someone learn how to post images directly to Lemmy instead of imgur.

Pretty!

Just so you know, Lemmy can host images directly. It’s a lot nicer than having to go to a third party site to view them.

They mentioned only using a browser and suggested an add-on to make it easier to view photos. I replied:

I use the Thunder app on Android to browse Lemmy, and a lot of other people use apps, too. Your post doesn’t even get a thumbnail, so we don’t know what we’re going to see until we click it, and it requires us to view the link in a webview that takes significantly longer to load, and imgur is kinda ugly. Meanwhile, Lemmy hosted images are downloaded and cached automatically and load almost instantly when tapped.

Just my thoughts. Using the built-in image hosting is free, and has benefits for Lemmy users.

They said didn’t know how to upload images to Lemmy, so I took the time to explain, with screenshots:

There’s an image button when editing a comment:

Or when creating a post, there’s a separate field for adding an image. You can add additional images to the post body, same as a comment.

(I’m always trying to help people use Lemmy better. You will find tons of comments in my history with me explaining markdown to people and how to use it better.)

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Two days ago, I posted a photo of a concert and answered questions about it. Commenters made jokes, I interacted with the jokes and posted a second photo. A good time was had by all. I erased these comments entirely and can’t copy them now. This is because I had seen the last straw and, I decided I didn’t want my content there any more.

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4 days ago, someone posted some OC and another person commented, “Finally some fucking OC. I love it.” (See? Not just me.)

I replied:

Agreed. I’d rather this comm be dead than be full of random non-OC. I mean, I get it, it’s a chicken and egg problem. No one’s going to use the comm if no one uses the comm. It needs content so people even see it in their feed, but I’d honestly rather it be full of average OC than professional images from the web. It totally defeats the point of “I took a picture”. Stamets could have just posted a bunch of average OC instead of 5-star web images until it picked up. I dunno. Just my two cents.

Not being dramatic. Not stirring up shit. I was replying to someone with the same thoughts as me. The sidebar before today never explained his pun on “took” (that I know of), so everyone was confused on the name of the community. This is why I mentioned the community name making no sense for non-OC content.

Then the OP of that post also replied to that comment: “I thought this place was all OC? Anyway, that’s all I’ll post, OC only.” Again, it’s not just me who gets confused by the name! Most of us came from reddit, and we all knew what ITAP was.

I was already in this conversation, so I replied again:

From the name one would think, but no.

From the sidebar:

Welcome to /c/ITAP, a place to share any photos you may have taken or seen that you think others would enjoy! It does not need to be OC, it just needs to be a photo that you think is beautiful and worth sharing.

Isn’t that what /c/pics is for?

I guess that’s “stirring shit up” and “creating drama”, right?

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That’s it. Those are all of my comments, ever. All I did was reply to people expressing the same confusion as me. I wasn’t particularly inflammatory. I was just saying I’d rather see OC then non-OC in “I Took a Picture”. Until I saw yet another person thinking Stamets’ photo was OC. Then I just wanted to quit. But I didn’t get that choice, because Stamets immediately banned me.