This a new one: Banned for abbreviating New York Times to NYT in a comment.
https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/29191692
I don't even know what to think about this one. I'm not angry, more confused than anything. There's only one mod there so i asked them, and they said "It's against policy. It's the abbreviations policy."
I see no such policy anywhere, so who knows what's going on. Is it only the NYT that can't be abbreviated? What about the US? Is LOL forbidden too? And if so, why are we forbidden from laughing there!
They didn't even remove the comment.
The mod is user qrstuv. Maybe the only abbreviation allowed is when they say one? That's a power trip!
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no abbreviations? that is the single most idiotic rule ive ever seen. what a fucking idiot.
Just from a brief glance, you’d think sdf would be super chill. But they were just having some other drama around a week ago. Now this.
What does it stand for? I assume it's not signed distance field
Correct.
I had no idea that was it. Honestly, it sounds like an early name for the Cybertruck.
Oh, it predates flash by a good bit. The instance is hosted for the community of a Public Unix host that dates back to BBS days of the Internet. Lots of cool retrotech, FOSS stuff, and FOSS-themed web comics.
ikr wtf jk
fr smh
Oh no, saying "the US" is also a bannable abbreviation! Lol! What in the world
6 day ban! You must type "laughing out loud"
jfc smh
You've been banned so hard for that comment i can't even read it anymore
You’d best never talk about radar or scuba.
Aren't contractions (you'd, aren't) a type of abbreviation too?
Or ever say "goodbye".
OK! Whatevs.
A pet peeve of mine is when people randomly throw acronyms around expecting everyone to just know what it means, but this is taking the piss.
Is it? I know what the NYT is because Im American. Im not sure if that acronym is universal.
Not American, but NYT is a media source acknowledged internationally. Most people would know the acronym, even if they are not americans, and for those who don't, it's the first result on Google.
I really doubt that but it's not hard to figure out from the context. It's like me writing Yle when talking about some news or sources. From context and a search you'd figure out that it's a news org.
Don't think people that are on Lemmy will have an issue figuring out. We are a bunch of nerds here.
Oh not at all, I was just saying I don't think most people overall would know the acronym offhand. But if you meant people on Lemmy, it might be the case, especially with context.
In this case it is also the first result for me, but it happens quiet often that that is not the case for everybody. Especially now more and more people are abandoning Google
I don't think it'll be different on other search engines or AI assistants...
Often that is the case with abbreviations. Often it happens that there is a company with that name same thing with NYT B.V., but it's almost non-existent so it doesn't have a site. Or that something has a completely different meaning in another language which makes you get different results. It is more often than not that you can totally different results based on your location. Sometime some search engines give different results as well.
I mean their reaction to acronyms are over the top, not specifically "NYT" itself. It's certainly not worth banning anyone over.
What they could do is encourage people to define the acronym the first time they use ie, e.g. "The New York Times (NYT) reports that..."
What is this “e.g.”? I don’t speak Latin.
You need to spell out exempli gratia. That will definitely be more clear.
Damn. I'd best reach out to the mods and see if I can get myself banned for 26 years.
I'd?
Unleash the banhammer!
Banned: Spanish words.
eyetwitch.gif
Sorry. eyetwitch dot graphical interchange format.
Nope, that's Latin ;)
Would native English speakers understand f.ex. instead of i.e. or e.g.?
Smh I work with someone who write it as “for e.g.”
As if e.g. is an abbreviation for “example”
So I always read it as “for for example.”
I once worked with a guy who thought "smh" means "somehow".
I genuinely had to look up what it meant just now!
I always wondered why english uses i.e. or e.g., I never actually looked into the actual abbreviated words. In portuguese, it's always "for example" or "ex:"
And that'd be fine. Remove the comment and explain why and what to do in the future.
plenty of science communities have acronym bots, and i find that excellent: they post a reply comment to any with known acronyms with a table defining their meanings. it can be super helpful!
this is the right way to do things: trying to control the way people usually interact is just never going to work well
In a post about an article from the NYT, I think you should be able to figure it out.
big beautiful cocks???
Ball busting cougars
YES
(that subscribes me, right?)
The difference is the BBC is the name of the organisation, same for the NHS.
Notoriously Huge Shaft?
Naturally Hung Stud
Yeah, I'm okay with discouraging abbreviations. But a blanket ban is silly.
Comments on a post about a New York Times article regarding the United States should probably be fine to use NYT & US.
Comments talking about the best computer role playing game going on and on about PoE2 deserve a ban however.
Power over Ethernet 2 when??
I work in marketing and it's not fun anymore please take me off this ride
That's where you need to use AI acronym explanation browser extension! Only $3.99! /s
What happens if you write GNU since that's a recursive acronym?
Believe it or not, straight to jail.
After they finish expanding it
Spam GNU everywhere to occupy all their threads.
Lots of mod WINEing
Stack overflow.
Arch btw
And PHP
Banned for spamming
I'm a member of the SDF instance and I've reported this. I hope it gets attention and action. I don't appreciate someone making us look like clowns.
Isn’t SDF an abbreviation too ?
Yes.
I blocked the entire instance because of this. Why would i want to read posts i can't even take part in, you know.
Thank you for letting us know that person isn't the entire instance. I'll unblock it.
I mean, it should be general knowledge at this point that instance admins and comm mods are not the same thing.
I never said they were the admin.
Yeah but... if you're aware of the difference, why block an entire instance over one mod's actions?
Give it a rest. Find something else to nitpick to death. You're not being clever.
They're not trying to be clever. They're saying your prior actions weren't logical. You shouldn't block instances for what mods do. You should block communities. If everyone blocked instances so swiftly then the fediverse will become little islands.
Wow people are not chill
Glad to hear it. We've got some fantastic retrotech and FOSS rabbit holes for you to get stuck in, if that's your kind of thing.
yea I don't know what's going on with that comm and/or moderation. In general sdf seems to be one of the lightest-touch-moderated instances out there so this is really surprising
People don't seem to differentiate much between an instance and its individual communities, even if the instance has a really light touch with mods.
After unblocking it I realized I recognize a bunch of people on SDF. You guys and gals are pretty solid. Except for this one person.
You forgot the /s this is the Internet and some people like OP will take you seriously..
He's just some guy, why would anybody take it seriously?
I did not.
I wonder if using the word taxi, instead of taximeter cabriolet, will prompt a ban.
"taximeter cabriolet"
Today, I learned!
That must be where "taxi cab" and "cab" came from too
close. "Cab" is derived from extracting the first syllable from Steve Caballeros' last name. not just one of the great skaters, his family also invented the modern car and public transportation. so, as you can see, that is why when you rent out half of a taxi, you say, "I'm doin' a 'half cab!'" rather than a ca or an ab, as those are each ⅔ of a cab.
the math starts getting pretty wonky, when you get into renting tiny fractions of caballeros, which is why the Cabernet was invented - to make the entire process more straight forward.
hope that clears up everything!
Dude I had a Caballero board when I was a kid, I loved that thing.
🤯
If I were a mod, I'd ban anyone who used "taximeter cabriolet" on sight. /s
You are banned, you should have used "I would" instead of "I'd"
They also dared to say "mod" and not "moderator". That's added moderator disrespect, and we cannot allow that!
I want this community now
Excuse me, my name is also Taximeter Cabriolet
Yes moderator, this guy right there.
Wait.. Taxi Cab is short for something?
Depends how long the ride is.
The short version of Limousine ofc
Before we know it, people will be calling the popular public conveyance a 'bus', rather than the proper name of 'Omnibus'.
Shock. Horror.
Am I the only one that finds this fucking hilarious?
Not at all!
There’s been another post about the same community (or was it same instance?) a week or two ago.
I remember the bans were because of NYT, USAID and probably others.
I don’t know if we had any explanation of what the fuck (sorry, meant to write ‘WTF’) is happening over there.
Yup, it's not a new one: https://lemmy.cafe/post/13017274
Thanks, I was searching for keyword "abbreviations" and not "acronym" so couldn’t find the post.
Ah thank you. I didn't even think to look, I was too much in a state of disbelief
And before that, weren’t they having problems with some white supremacist running coms over there and then they couldn’t find an admin available to instance ban them? smh
For like 24 hours. As internet things go, that's not a long time. A much bigger deal was made out of it than it deserved.
I recall commenting last time this community came up that it was weird that NYT was allowed when other abbreviations were not. I guess their mod caught up. It’s a dumb rule, but even ignoring that, it’s not listed in the community!
Yeah and they're refusing to explain where the policy is, or even what the policy is.
And most of all, why the policy is.
Oh policy, oh policy! Wherefore art thou policy!
These are my rules, you cannot have them!
Also how the policy is.
its the abbreviations policy
AKA TAP.
D'oh!
its the abbreviations policy
their instance's own fucking domain name is not.... "lemmy.superdimensionfortress.org"
They've locked every post so I guess they don't really want any community whatsoever.
That isn't even power tripping, it's stupidity.
Which, it is power tripping, and grossly over reacting, but the stupidity is piled so much higher that the PTB part is miniscule in comparison
It's extremely weird.
You really want a laugh, go look at the mod log on any community on dubvee.org
It’s like that instance was created for the sole purpose of scale testing high volumes of bans.
It’s like they have a whole system for synchronizing instance wide bans from comments made in other communities on other instances in the fediverse.
Having been inspired by the Core Wars at an impressionable age, I just thought of a truly perverted version that could be enacted on a dedicated Lemmy "shitpost" community. The community would have a committee-designed list of moderation rules (including that nonsense, irrelevant or data-flooding posts/comments are ban-worthy), and teams would develop LLM-based agents as the Lemmy-bot equivalent of Core War "redcode". The two bots would be simultaneously unleashed on the channel as the only posters, commenters, and mods, armed with internet-access to find links for posting and commenting on. Every time a bot does a ban on the opposing bot the game is paused for the human adjudicators to decide if the ban is valid based on conversational context. A bot wins a round when it achieves 3 valid bans, or when the opposing bot reaches 3 invalid bans. A yearly tournament could be held. The winning team's bot would have to be exceptionally good at finding & posting links, and reading & commenting on them, and replying to opposition comments in ways that induce the opposing bot into footgunning in bannable ways. I think it would be critically important to not give the bots access to the Dark Web when finding links to post, otherwise things would get harrowingly nasty really fast.
I don’t remember Core Wars. But dubvee.org very much reminds me of SRS on Reddit.
Ah Srs, the original boogeyman of all reddit shitLords
Is/was SRS "shit reddit says", or am I confused?
First part correct. It got banned for getting just a hair too extreme. And by a little I mean a lot, like repeatedly brigading posts that found themselves x-posted to SRS.
Yes
Core War
And now I learned about SRS too :-)
Dude, it sucks that we can't drop analogies to Core Wars in casual conversation. I feel that pain.
Honestly, SDF is becoming the home of the bad weirdos. There's constant examples like this one coming from them, not to mention CSAM staying up for way too long without them handling it etc. They really need to get their shit together before the threadiverse has enough and just summarily defeds them.
PTB
What does SDF even mean? These abbreviations are getting out of hand and should be banned.
Super Dimensional Fortress. It's an old public unix server and BBS. We've had some bad actors recently and insufficient admin coverage.
You didn't even break that rule, because an abbreviation is when you shortened a word to its first few letters, like 'Inc.' for 'Incorporated'.
NYT is an initialism. NASA is an acronym. Neither are abbreviations.
Being a pedant is fun but you need to get your shit straight. Abbreviation is an umbrella term that includes shortening of words or phrases in various ways including acronyms and initialisms.
It is if you don't give a fuck about precise communication.
Usually this is what people who are too lazy or stupid to figure out how to be better people will act.
I'm sometimes lazy and/or stupid so i can confirm this with my own experience
Ab-brevis. It literally means "to shorten". You're confusing it with something else.
Being wrong doesn't make you any less of a cunt.
Oh the irony! Stahp, we can only take so much of it
It's social media. It's not a submission for peer review
Unfortunately, you are likely wrong. "Abbreviation" — to my knowledge — is a borrow from French and simply means to shorten in time or length; nothing about words specifically, as you are suggesting.
“Abbreviation, N., Etymology.” Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford UP, June 2024, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/8875868501.
Pre-word meaning: “Abbreviation, N., Sense 1.” Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford UP, June 2024, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/1149358652.
Word meaning: “Abbreviation, N., Sense 2.b.” Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford UP, June 2024, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/3259923213.
It's worth noting that the OED is, in its nature, a descriptive dictionary; therefore, this rather general definition should be taken with a grain of salt.
The word may — indeed, as it is common — have a more specific meaning, as you suggest.Edit:
Nope, you were definitely wrong (this time a free dictionary!):
The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. "abbreviation". Encyclopedia Britannica, 4 Jun. 2024, https://www.britannica.com/topic/abbreviation. Accessed 19 February 2025.
“Abbreviation.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/abbreviation. Accessed 19 Feb. 2025.
Im assuming snowwoman was correct, i didnt state the definition only used the argument i found
Akshually
What is SDF?
Also, since the rules aren't written down, I wonder if they would object to defined acronyms. Like if I wrote "laughing out loud (lol)" in a comment, could I use the acronym later in the same comment? Could I use it in a subsequent comment? Could other people?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SDF_Public_Access_Unix_System
It's a pretty old internet nonprofit, and I don't think they're involved in this community but it's the moderator?
I saw a previous post about this community and I still don't know what's going on
"Super Dimension Fortress" that's an abbreviation, bud. Straight to jail.
Ok see, that's pretty cool. Im down with that. It's too bad this one mod had made SDF look bad.
Exactly. Now we're on the same page.
I was making a joke, but that's really informative, thank you!
I looked around and the closest thing I could figure out is SDF has something to do with linux. And they also ask for donations every chance they get.
Edit. The provided wiki link explains them
That place is eerie. Their sidebar has zero rules for me. But more importantly, who uses Corporate Memphis art? Feels like an outsider set it up.
The mod keeps replying to me in DM, but has repeatedly refused to answer any questions about thier supposed policy.
They're also aware of this post, but won't say a word here.
Trolling and then watching the chaos from afar?
Possibly
Which mod is this?We had a bad actor recently posting all kinds of nazi shit.Told you not to use the N word
Sounds like the mod had some kinda mental episode where they imagined some non existent rules. Maybe they were sleep walking and happened to open their phone lol.
I wasn't the only one banned for it haha
"qrstuv" isn't an abbreviation. It's the alphabet dawg
I figured it was "queer Stu + V", but yours makes more sense.
I thought it was just a spam name made by mashing the keyboard randomly lol
Lmao so it is! Good catch
"Where did the acronym touch you?"
It touched me in my P P
Ok, you know the rules. Get in the box.
kinky
omg
Pierre Polievre doesn't belong to you
I think qrstuv is trolling you. They post some surreal stuff on other servers and don't seem to take anything on here seriously :)
To be fair you should have read the abbreviation policy before posting though.
This is kind of my favorite thing on Lemmy right now.
I used to be part of forums where like one forum, the mod was a person who demanded sources with every comment. So you'd write everything like you're submitting it to a college professor.
Then another forum, the mod wants everyone to roleplay as their forest animals.
Reddit made us forget how to be weird.
If they had simply said at any point "I'm messing around" or taking a piss, I'd have 180'd and laughed. But they won't say anything useful. So it's whatever.
What a clown show.
This person is a PTB for sure, I mean seriously? Banning people for abbreviations? That's outright petty. This person strikes me as one of the biggest losers I've seen on here in a while.
Oh and before some whiny asshole who's probably an alt of the mod comes here whining about how they're allowed to make whatever rules they want, they didn't actually. I mean make any rule about it. The sidebar of their community literally says:
So this person is a power tripper because they are banning people for something that isn't actually a rule, nor is it a common decency violation. It's just purely and simply banning for spite.
I've straight blocked that News channel for this reason for some time. If the content is going to be filtered through the hands of mods this obnoxious, its not worth following.
news@sdf is ran by a crazy right wing lunatic. I am banned from there and I do not recall posting on it. SDF is nice because it federates with everything but the communities here are wild west.
That explains a lot actually.
Yeah i read a post about wanting SDF at large to put effort into the lemmy and mastodon branches. I see the pain you guys are going though.
I do not take the local front page very seriously but we do have some funny smaller communities like bun_alert. My favorite post was a stupid rant by the admin on the rant community.
It’s there. You just missed it because the rule is abbreviated.
See, in this timeline, the rules about abbreviation can be abbreviated, but not content.
Are they having a psychotic break into bipolar or are they extremely autistic? Focusing on what would appear to be odd details and reacting beyond what everyone else does, does occur, but it’s not typical behavior for people outside certain diagnosable zones. This feels almost arbitrary, otherwise.
Unless it’s a weird Elon thing to try to never say USAID on social media and using a broad rule to do it and hide it at the same time. Even that idea is stretching and should belong in the tinfoil hat club. Maybe not on this timeline, it’s hard to say.
What's weird is that they've allowed other people to comment with acronyms, and they themselves have used acronyms elsewhere on other posts.
If you look into those other peoples modlog you'll see theve been banned too.
But yeah, the mod themselves has no problem using acronyms.
So they're banning people for acronyms but keeping their comments? I don't know if there's a word to describe that strangeness.
And then they lock the post.
None of it makes any sense.
Maybe they want an RSS feed on Lemmy but don't know how to set up a bot? It's strange.
Drugs?
Hypocrisy
Extremely autistic is something i considered. I can't think of any other reason, really. They won't explain any of it, so we have to guess and assume.
Considering the special interest nature of a pubnix instance, I think that those who are there for that have a higher chance of neurodivergence.
It doesn't really matter what they are, it's downright petty, and shows a certain level of incompetency to moderate a community properly and fairly. At the end of the day a person like this should not be moderating a community.
I’m an SDF member and, I want to state openly that @[email protected] does not represent me, but is also making my laugh my ass off rn.
Banned for using “rn” instead of “right now.”
Make up bullshit reasons when people post from or about a certain thing, and people will only think you are nutty instead of actively suppressing content. The fun benefit of doing this is that you can even do it when a community has more members of the type you want to suppress, you just do it occasionally and statistics slowly allow the content to be herded to where you are leading it. Troll factories love this one trick, as it is indistinguishable from actual power tripping mods.
A very common technique back on Reddit. The political subs loved to ban for petty or "humorous" reasons whenever a particular account got too popular. I remember /r/Libertarian banning an account for having too much accumulated karma. /r/neoliberal had all sorts of "joke" moderation rules they referenced to as posting monetary policy. It was all childish bullshit intended to filter who participated and narrow content down to whatever mods preferred.
whats the point of being a mod if you dont get to do that though
this sounds just like an enforced jaywalking law
That's a hilarious rule in how stupid it is. Why on earth no abbreviations?
Community only has one mod and their account is not marked as a bot. If they are using scripts as a bot they're violating rules and etiquette about automated accounts needing to be marked as bots.
Do they also make people spell out diversity, equity, and inclusion? I might get behind that, because it changes it back from a meme rally point into a meaningful set of moral ideas.
In your next post on sdf, really push the boundaries and use contractions or, yikes, an acronym.
Without the unwritten abbreviations policy we are animals
this is funny, so YDI
It gets dumber:
The user was banned for saying "mark my words". And in the context it is clearly not some sort of threat, just an "I'm 100% sure of that".
PTB.
[USER WAS BANNED FOR THIS POST]The mod is just a flat out troll. They've proven that for sure during this drama-fest.
They run a news comm and ban anyone that comments before they can lock the post. It's very strange and, quite frankly, pretty dumb.
Lol
Ikr
Isn't this the same server with that n4zi guy?
They took care of that.
Sounds like crazy-making with the way they've got you questioning the obvious... does the sun really rise in the east, will it really hurt if I jump off this bridge, can fish really survive under water 🤪
Thank you for informing me, as someone who tends to use acronyms quite frequently (usually adding the meaning in parenthesis for the first instance), I've gone ahead and blocked that community. I have zero interest in a news community that is enforcing rules that they are not publicly displaying, especially ones that don't go under "common sense" principles.
An interesting decision from the moderators of the Signed Distance Field Organization
Or maybe from the Syrian Democratic Forces?
It's Structured Data File, an SQL Compact database. Oh no, I said SQL, please don't ba
The funny thing is that this mod has used a bunch of acronyms in their post and comment history.
I don't really know what the point of sharing that here was, because your comments in that thread do not help resolve this issue at all.
I'll respond specifically to this comment:
Your comments throughout that thread were very unclear as to whether you were talking about the SDF instance as a whole or ![email protected] (a problem caused, in part, by Lemmy's use of the general noun community for its proper noun Communities). Frankly, even now I'm still only like 70% sure you meant the latter. So I think it's incredibly rude of you to accuse @[email protected] of being obtuse.
But anyway, even putting that aside, I fail to see how any of your points make things better. You keep harping on about how scribbled time stamps make it obviously satire. I saw that and presumed it was put in there to help the reader keep track of how much time was passing over this conversation. Frankly, if you wanted to point out that the post was obvious satire, concentrating on the body text would have been better evidence.
But all that is is evidence that they're poking fun at something. Not necessarily that it's at themselves as an admission of guilt. If they were in this thread or pinning a post in their Community explaining "hey, I fucked up", and then following up with a meme post about their fuck-up, sure, it'd be clear. But as it is, it's just as possible to read it as them laughing at their victims.
But I come back to the question of why did you link that thread here? Nobody in this thread was discussing that, and even if the dog pile in that Community was not warranted, the dog pile on their actions in the non-satire News community, and their terrible behaviour in the DMs with @[email protected], are still highly worthy of criticism. And will remain worthy of criticism until such a time as they publicly and explicitly admit culpability and promise to moderate in good faith via reasonable and clear criteria going forward, or they are removed by their instance admins and replaced by someone who will.
Or, if that news Community is supposed to be some weird experimental artsy space...there needs to be somewhere people can be pointed to in order to explain that. Not necessarily in the Community itself, but something somewhere, even if that's just a bunch of people (not just the one person making dozens of comments that exist without corroboration) who are in on it being able to come in and explain it.
dr wesker and i are completely different people
First: you were being talked about, not to.
Second: I merely quoted @[email protected]. If they mentioned you by mistake, take it up with them.
Third: if this is a continuation of that alleged avant guard art experience, can you not see from context how that is not appropriate in this thread? This is not one of your Communities, and this kind of trollish bs is exactly what's caused this thread to be necessary to begin with.
You paged me, I wouldn't be here otherwise. Perhaps you should reflect upon your own actions? This is the fediverse; a collective. I didn't hear no bell.
To be clear, if you want to come in here and comment because you were mentioned, I have no problem.
You coming in here and telling me I did something wrong by mentioning you and playing some bullshit game pretending to be someone different is the problem.
I normally wouldn't even patronize this community, because I see it as being in direct competition with my own, Mod Abuse Hotline. There we actually try to constructively discuss our grievances, instead of paging people, and then telling them that children are to be seen, not heard.
Ahoy matey. How can I get in contact with the hotline? I need a mod abusing, and I don't want to have to do it myself.
So they're incredibly immature? Gotcha.
Not to defend this mod, but people go on the internet and do weird internet things for their own reasons.
Don't take it personally and overthink it.
And from the positive side, your post here made a lot of people laugh. This is the silliest drama I've read in weeks and I needed that. Thanks!
I appreciate that. I am glad so many people got a kick out of it. It's just so weird lol
Amén to that! Fuck abbreviations and Americanisms, lemmy is for the whole world.
Another instance to block.
The Fediverse gets a little smaller
Why would you block a whole instance if you don't like the actions in just one of its communities?