I cannot repost what Flying Squid was posting here, because it involved highly disturbing and dangerous content, including:
Content Warning
Graphic content, harassment, self-harm, and suicidal ideation, which I reported immediately.
While this behavior is shocking, it’s not completely out of left field, as members of this community and platform will already be familiar with their behavior. Flying Squid has long been regarded as one of the least productive and most problematic mods on all of Lemmy, often picking fights and abusing their mod privileges. I view this change as a positive step for Squid, .world, and Lemmy as a whole.
I've directly asked a few different people who claimed he was a PTB what it was that he did, and it's always some kind of bizarrely hyped-up misdemeanor. Every time. Not even "he banned this person who arguably wasn't actually a troll, but it's a gray area" but literally like "he sent this person a rude comment while they were in an argument OH THE HUMANITY." It's actually always the same two or three examples from four to six months ago. And they're always incredibly vocal and emotional about how terrible he is.
I'm not trying to get involved in lemmy.world moderator drama. I haven't even looked into this latest thing with him posting self-harm things. But I've formed a much more firm opinion, just as of today, that there is some kind of organized effort to drum him out of being a moderator, which seems to be succeeding.
To be fair, even if there's no evidence of actual power tripping (e.g. banning users without reasons), the way he interacts with users is still not ideal as a moderator.
Using an alt to moderate would already help in that regard, as he wouldn't be able to threaten "I'll ban you" in the middle of an argument
Recent example: https://lemmy.world/comment/14488436
In this case the user indeed seems to be trolling, but just banning them without further comment would probably more effective than commenting like he did, which can contribute to the PTB reputation
Yeah, picking the argument with the user in the first place didn't seem like a smart move. I think he likes to argue with people on the internet, which is fine obviously, but it's better to keep it separate from being a moderator. I agree with you that it's not exactly power tripping, but he shouldn't have been in the argument in the first place and he was absolutely the primary aggressor.
Agreed