So a year ago, or so, I made a big post on TenForward about the insane level of harassment that the admins of Startrek.website decided to subject me to. Due to my posting a lot, I was actually on friendly terms with the admins of STW but then shit changed after I pointed out the abuse of one of their moderators. I left and they went bonkers. Contacting admins of several instances to attempt to get me banned, contacting the admins of my Mastodon instance to attempt to get me banned and using multiple accounts to cover their ass. All of this spearheaded and primarily done by @[email protected] (or VS because I don't wanna type that repeatedly) and I've got the screenshots to prove it. Even more that I can show now that I wasn't able to back then due to certain Admins having left the website and not caring about dealing with the drama anymore. There was also one account that was targeting me aggressively that myself, Admins, and other mods of TenForward came to the conclusion was likely an alt of either an Admin or a mod of that instance. If you want more information and a whole lot of screenshots, check this post out..
Edit: Fun fact. You cannot see this community on Startrek.website. They have completely blocked Ye Power Tripping Bastards.
Just to also say this in case you don't check that post... ValueSubtracted was the lead mod of the /r/StarTrek community. So. Take that as you will, but that community was known for having some insanely heavy handed moderation. Even for Reddit. @[email protected], the other Admin, is known for using the @[email protected] account. An account he told me directly was just his admin account so he can keep a "normal" account. I would have respected this if I didn't see Corgana commenting on SysAdmin posts congratulating SysAdmin for doing a good job. The level of narcissism from both of these people is absurd. The account @[email protected] also belongs to ValueSubtracted, just as a side note. Something he told me a while back when we were chatting and I was just setting up on Mastodon. All relevant in one way or another.
Ever since we set up TenForward, not even mentioning that post, /c/Risa has effectively been dead in the water. What went from THE Star Trek meme community became a distant memory. I, being an asshole, occasionally like to look over at the instance and see what's going on. To be honest, not much. The instance is very much a one trick pony, focusing exclusively on Star Trek and having some abusive admins to boot. But I was wondering how things were going more internally. I took a look at each individual community and then the modlog. Funnily enough, I discovered that if I want to see a post that's a year old on any community, I don't need to go further than the 9th or 10th page. There's just no new content anymore and the little that is on there? They're aggressively controlling.
/c/GreatestGen or Greatest Generation
This is a community made specifically for a Podcast. Value does not actively moderate here as there are two moderators appointed. Only a single person has ever been banned. I know that it was by Value because the same user was banned from several other communities. However, this same user was also banned from lemmy.world for spam and exists on lemmy.tf as a spammer.
/c/DoctorWho or Doctor Who Social Club
Jesus Christ. For a community with 324 subscribers, Value sure has been busy. And yes. Value. He is the only moderator. He also has a weird quirk of banning someone from the instance entirely and then banning from the community as well. Why? My assumption is that he cannot handle the idea that someone is even commenting on the community outside of an instance he controls. I don't even know if it works like that but he routinely bans people from every community after banning them from the instance as a whole.
WraithGear
@[email protected] was banned from both Startrek.website as a whole as well as the DoctorWho community. Going through all posts from within the time frame, I cannot see a single post that has any removed comments on it. There is, however, a post with a single downvote that was posted the day before.
Also, if you look at a banned users account you can find the last time they interacted with anything federated to that instance. This is Wraith's.
Pronell
@[email protected] was banned from both instance and community for 'Downvote Trolling'. Now, this one might actually be legitimate because the same user was banned from two other communities a couple months later for the same claim. However, there is only a single post within the 1 week time frame and it was only downvoted twice. No other posts and no other comments had any downvotes.
Again, this just seems to be like Value is incapable of handling someone not liking his posts. Dude should try being me and getting the fuck over it. You know how often I get downvoted? You know how little fucks I give?
Various Removals
Kind of have two sides here. On one hand you're dealing with some petty, bitchy, whiny little modlog additions. Like just spiteful. On the other hand, these are just opinion. @[email protected] is just openly policing even the Doctor Who community he created. No opinion can exist that is against his own or not worded EXACTLY correctly.
/c/StarTrekOnline or STO Alliance
RiikkaTheIcePrincess
This is the third fucking community out of seven.
Considering the community has extremely little activity, it's not surprising not much was going on. The community has no moderator other than VS and the log is just him featuring and unfeaturing various posts. There were two things that stood out. First was a banning of @[email protected] for 'Downvote Trolling'. I remember interacting with Riikka and don't remember anything standing out as problematic. It does hint to me that they probably just downvoted a lot of VS' comments, disagreeing with them, and VS couldn't handle it. Also strikes me a bit odd that they were banned for 'Downvote Trolling' but specifically from a community and not from the instance as a whole.
The ban was issued on Tuesday, November 12th. So I went back and looked at every post from within that range. There are no comments that I could find that have any downvotes. There are, however, two posts that have been downvoted, each a single time. One was posted on November 12th, the other was posted on November 11th.
Feel free to check it out yourself. I cannot find any other comments or any other posts that have any downvotes within a 1 week of that ban.
The only possible conclusion I can come to is that VS was downvoted twice and just instantly banned Riikka because "Why would you downvote me otherwise?"
Millie
@[email protected] was banned for making 'Junk Comments'. A single comment of theirs was removed, more may have been under the ban removal. The only one directly removed was this:
However, the user wasn't actually banned sitewide and nor did the user delete the account. They appear to have just left the instance entirely, leaving it behind. This is the last interaction they had, a few months after the initial removal
I'm kind of with her. There are so little posts that are made on these communities outside of VS' spammy featured post of the week. When I was on the instance I was also openly downvoting all the STO ones because I was being driven insane by it.
/c/Quarks or Quark's
The only moderators here are ValueSubtracted, Corgana and @williams_[email protected] who was added as an admin shortly before I left. It might have been shortly after but fairly sure it was before. I know absolutely nothing about Williams but if Value and Corgana added him as an admin then I don't exactly have high hopes for the man.
CorsicanGuppy
@[email protected] was banned from both Quarks and the Site as a whole. The reason given is vote manipulation and also "Learn to curate your feed". They were also banned from a number of other communities from db0 for both vote manipulation and being anti-AI. Now, I'm typing this post out as I'm getting all these screenshots so I feel I need to say this really quick. This isn't the first time I've seen the same ban from the same Db0 communities. Pronell, mentioned earlier, also had been given vote manipulation/Anti-AI bans to both Stable Diffusion Witches and Stable Diffusion Mycology, granted this happened MONTHS later. However, I feel I should say it now because twice is a coincidence but three times is a pattern. So far we're just at twice. Hopefully I'll remember to delete this if we stay at twice.
Now back to the French fish. There were several posts within a week timeframe of that ban, but only one was downvoted and it was nearly a full week prior to the ban. No other posts were downvoted and the only comments downvoted during that timeframe belonged to @[email protected] for questioning ValueSubtracted/TrekSite and Corgana/SystemAdmin and their stance on defederation. Legitimately have no idea where the downvotes are coming from that Guppy got banned over. Nothing is visible on either lemmy.world or on startrek.website during that timeframe.
Me
Well, not really me. I just found this funny. This was a post linking to TenForward just after it was created and me posting the information about VS harassing me behind the scenes.
/c/DaystromInstitute or Daystrom Institute
This community is moderated by a number of moderators. ValueSubtracted is not one of them. Probably why I have literally nothing I can point to here. Absolutely nothing. There are no removals of stuff on this community within the past year. The only bans from the community are also from people who were banned from every other community on the instance. More on those later. It's fucking amazing that the two communities that don't have ValueSubtracted as the primary mod are also the two communities that don't have any unnecessary removals.
Risa...
My former home. The place where I literally started. I was only ever posting Star Trek memes for like a month until I realized @The_[email protected] was posting elsewhere. I went "Hey, I have a lot of saved memes too!" and so it was born. But it all could have gone very differently if not for @[email protected]. Literally the only moderator on the community. Now, there's also something quite important here. The community has no rules. The sidebar straight up says "we have no real rules" which was the spawning point of me leaving. Things were being removed for dumb reasons with Burrito Truck being the sole arbiter on what went where. So let's see how things have gone, shall we?
Neato
@[email protected] was banned from both Risa and the instance as a whole for 'Downvote Trolling'. A number of posts made during this time were downvoted. While looking through to see if I could find anything specific, I did find this comment from @[email protected] that made me laugh my ass off:
SendPicsOfSandwiches
Yet again, @[email protected] was banned from both the community and entire instance for 'Downvote Trolling'. Also at about the same time as Neato so the same number of posts that were generally downvoted. Even the post that Crackhappy commented on only had 9 downvotes.
Vaggumon
Again, @[email protected], now presumably @[email protected], was banned for 'Downvote Trolling' in the exact same time frame from both the community and the instance.
Random Removals
Literally could be absolutely anything. No clue. My guess? Basing it off of past experience of seeing other posts removed, this is just stuff Burrito Truck doesn't like but I have literally no way of knowing because USSBurritoTruck is terrified of just giving a solid reason.
/c/StarTrek or Star Trek Social Club.
The moderators here are USS Burrito Truck, Value Subtracked and @[email protected] whom I know absolutely nothing about. But I can tell you right now, this is going to be bad. This is where all the conversation happens about Star Trek. As much as people want to give me shit for being protective over Discovery, I am nothing in comparison to the absolute fanboy that Value Subtracted is. Did you know he was the literal reason that /r/StarTrekDiscovery was created? People were so frustrated with being unable to talk about the series without being completely policed that they made their own community. Even that community is accused of being too protective but it's insane that it even had to happen. It's also not the first time. Most Trek shows with their own subreddits were made explicitly due to Value and Corganas practices as the mods of /r/StarTrek.
XTL
@[email protected] was banned, just like before, for Downvote Trolling. Thankfully this is the only one that's really on this list that I can see at the moment. But, just like before, there are only a couple of posts within that one week time frame that I see. They each only have one downvote. Both were posted by Value Subtracted.
Random Removals
@[email protected] is told to keep on topic. It is on topic. It's talking about Star Trek. But because it is critical of Discovery, it isn't on topic after all.
@Tim_[email protected] also gave a critical opinion of Discovery and was told to "Be Honest". Because evidently criticizing Discovery at all is just a lie against the universe. The delusions here are insane.
@[email protected] also needs to "be honest" about just 'not hearing about Discovery'. Like... I'd have just downvoted this and moved on.
In fact, here. Just have a ton of 'em.
Just The Whole Ass Website
Downvote Trolling
@[email protected], @[email protected], @[email protected] and @[email protected] were also banned for 'Downvote Trolling'. And that would be a pattern too. So I guess I'm late to the game on this, considering some asking around, but evidently it's known that there are a number of mods, such as @even_[email protected], who just outright ban you from their community if you downvote. Quite a few of them seem to not be believers in sorting by 'All' and just get really aggressive about banning anyone IMMEDIATELY who dares downvote. How incredibly fragile.
EleventhHour
I remember seeing this person a LOT and then suddenly vanishing. They left their lemmy.world account about a month after this ban.
DefaultDefect
@Default_[email protected] was banned for "Conspiracy Nonsense". Their last comment federated to the instance is this which just seems like more of a joke than anything else.
Phoenixz
Fairly bitchy way to ban someone, especially as a reason. Took a bit but I believe I found why they won't be missed. Of course, @[email protected] was critical of Discovery.
More
There are more. Many, many, many more. Go take a look at the modlog yourself. See if you can find any easy and simple ones that I missed.
Conclusion
"Stamets... why are you making this post? It was a year ago that you left Startrek.website. Are you seriously so mad over these dudes that you can't let it go?"
I spent a good chunk of this morning dumpster diving for breakfast and got yelled at cop for my troubles. Not the first time it happened. Doubt it'll be the last time. But it did leave me with a particularly frustrated taste in my mouth and I wanted to be able to do something against dickheads in some position of authority. So, my ADHD mingled with my spite and I hyper focused this over the past few hours. Do I feel better about myself? Not really. But these assholes are smearing the name of Star Trek. They act like Gul Dukat while trying to pretend they're the pinnacle of the Federation. They're changelings in disguise. These are the people who took over in Picard Season 3. They're not good people who don't have good morals and have taken explicitly bad actions. Fuck the lot of 'em. I greatly dislike the fact that they're using the name of Star Trek while acting so counter to literally everything that Star Trek stands for. I'm frustrated and annoyed that they're not called out more often for abusing their position. That's why I made this stupidly long post despite my stomach devouring its own lining.
If you're on StarTrek.website, you're not likely going to be able to see this post on that specific instance for very long. So, if you have any friends who are on Startrek.website and want to let them know that the admins are doing this type of stuff, just check this out on lemmy.world and send that link specifically. And if this does get pulled off of Ye Power Tripping Bastards, a copy will be available on /c/[email protected]
You gotta give it to him though. He did what he said he would.
He subtracted every ounce of value from that website.
Yep. I've got so many arguments in the backpocket against this crap. I especially love the people who scream about retcons. There wasn't any. You can argue that Burnham being Spocks sister is technically a retcon by the definition, but no lore was actively changed. Spock just didn't talk about her. Much like he didn't talk about his father, his wife or his brother...