4
The mod banning these users is the same mod who made the posts they downvoted. This is mod abuse, turning the downvote button into an auto-self-ban button.
The message is "If you disagree with me, you will be banned"
Monitoring and banning users for using lemmy as intended to signal boost your opinion should be grounds to have all mod privileges removed. This behaviour undermines the integrity of the server and the wider fediverse.
It used to be that votes were meant to be used as an indicator of the quality of the post according to the community guidelines, not how "agreeable" a comment or post is. This cultural change is one the most toxic behaviors that made Reddit such a crappy place for discussion.
This was already bad on Reddit, but at least there one could avoid this problem because people were used to browse only the subreddits they subscribed to, so niche subreddits could still have some semblance of "good" community participation. On Lemmy, most people browse by /all and lots of them still treat the downvote button as a some mechanism to train an algorithm. These users are the worst.
In the beginning, I was actually sending DMs to people asking them to please not downvote something if they were not part of the community and their reaction was basically "I don't want to see this, so I will downvote to bury it" (completely ignoring the fact that they could simply hide the post or stop browsing by /all).
So, while "banning everyone who downvotes the post" might seem an overreaction, I could definitely see a moderator could flag a vote as coming from a non-community member and use that flag to ignore their votes in the ranking systems, and I would love to have a bot that auto-messages every clueless downvoter explaining the proper netiquette around votes for non-community members.
Never was. It was a wish by some but not it was always an impossible one.
My Reddit account is from 2006. I joined it when Aaron Swartz was still working there.
In the very early days, it was like that. Even it was an unwritten rule, people expected to see disagreement in a conversation, not in a vote count. Only spammers would get mass-downvotes.
It used to be that the best posts would have hundreds of upvotes and hundreds of down votes. They showed +100/-98 and you did mediately knew this was an interesting comment.
Then they stopped showing both up and down, and only showed the summation. 100 upvotes and 98 down votes is now +2, and this comment is now lurking among all the other +2 comments.
Showing the total instead of the ratio was the end of reddiquette, and the earliest Reddit enshittification that I can point to.