AND YOU THINK WE OVERMODERATE? [Author: Snowspinner]

Reading IGN boards for a prolonged period of time makes me want to weep, and so I’m not going to try to sort out the reason that Yelinak, ummmm, went psycho on the boards. But the short form is that he did, and a bunch of people created the Rocketship board to get away from him. At which point, in a fit of modding genius, he or his superiors decided it was time to start banning postings containing the url of the new board. Of course, that would be over-moderating, so instead we’re only banning people who spam the url of the new board. To wit:

I will ban anyone who posts that link as it is spam….people have and will continue to be warned…..

He also demanded that the board has a disclaimer that it be pr0n. It’s… ummmm… not.

Which would just be an example of over-modding, except that eventually Yelinak managed to start degenerating into outright threats and abuse of power. Consider:

just a thought for you…..

I might be one of the people on this board that bailed over to Rocketship and I may have even banned my own account….

Now maybe Yelinak is joking here. Maybe he’s not. I could maybe play lots of l33t hax0r games to try to find out, but it’s not really worth it. The point here is that this is a flagrant abuse of power. Particularly in light of the response of Raivin, one of the posters:

There’s been a mole since it opened Yelinak. I can’t be bothered to catch or do anything to them. I don’t have the resources your multi-hundred dollar corporation has.

and of Yelinak’s other post

I hate posting on this mod character, but here goes……

Now these comments are far from proof of anything, but they sure suggest that it might just be the case that we have a moderator here who did exactly that: created an account and wormed his way into a breakoff community just to be able to mod them.

This is, to be blunt, fucking sick. This is a level of egoism I expect even the worst of the Verant CS to be able to rise above. It’s not that hard to figure out that grief-modding other boards because they piss you off on your board is about as far from appropriate as possible. And it’s not that hard to figure out that when you’re already a hated mod on a board, joking about abuses of power isn’t the brightest plan. In fact, it frankly constitutes an abuse of power in and of itself, in that it is essentially threatening people into changing activities you should have no jurisdiction over.

That’s wrong.

“I learned that anarchy is not a noun, but an adjective. It describes the tension between moral autonomy and political authority. Especially in the area of combinations, whether they’re going to be voluntary or coercive. The most destructive, coercive combinations are arrived at by force. Like Ammon said, force is the weapon of the weak.” – Utah Phillips