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.
We don't need Reddit's power tripping back
Do you really expect the platform that lets anybody form their personal power tripping fiefdom to inexplicably not draw those people in? No centralization doesn't mean you're free of the particular flavor of power tripping you experienced, it means there are many cells of various levels of power tripping with little to no oversight.
The federative structure of the fediverse means that your average community moderator is way more accountable than a subreddit moderator is on reddit, to be fair.
In theory maybe, but have we actually seen a community migrate away from a sub or the admins step in because of power tripping?
Onehundredninetysix and the Trek meme split.
The 196 mitosis was due to mods literally closing the sub, what caused the trek split?
Actually, due to some mod shenanigans, they tried to close the community to move it to a less trans-friendly instance, where the use of neopronouns would not be enforced. The community said no and formed a new community on their original instance, got new mods, hookers, and blackjack.
https://lemmy.cafe/post/12094663
As for the Trek split, here's a long, detailed, long post about it...
My hope for the Fediverse is, sure. We can just allow people to be sad little kings of their sad little hills. If it's enough of a problem, everyone else can go to some other community, possibly on some other instance.
So it's literally just Elon.
That mod is also literally the only active user in that group. Your post is the most attention it's ever got.
And this is the second time in just over a day that I've seen moderators abusing the ability to monitor how people vote.
This behaviour undermines good faith participation. Users should not be afraid of copping bans for using the downvote button as they feel is appropriate.
This behaviour undermines good faith participation. Users should not be afraid of copping bans for using the downvote button as they feel is appropriate.
As a moderator, I can see who votes on what and how in my community. But it is not my job to really do anything with that information (except if I notice a brigading attack / vote manipulation, then I might keep an eye on users for that). So I don't even look at them. The community hasn't been brigaded yet, and since its a moderately low traffic community, it would be pretty obvious if that ever happened.
But votes are information that normal users should definitely not be able to see at all. Eventually, sooner than later most likely, it will lead to "User X voted 'wrong' on Y" posts. You and I both know Lemmy users cannot be trusted to be mature enough to not do that kind of Fecal Flinging, especially from the comfort of online anonymity, and once that starts it's not going to stop.
Users upvote or downvote posts for ten million different reasons. Nobody should feel like they can't vote how they want on a post for fear of a moderator ban or other users yelling at them. If they are engaging in vote manipulation, its a different story, but people doing that are not only using a single account, so they know what they are doing and should expect nevative consequences. I'm not disagreeing with what you're saying, just adding on that beyond a moderator's ethical duty regarding (not) taking action for vote activity, normal users should also be held to the same ethical duty.
But votes are information that normal users should definitely not be able to see at all.
Votes on Lemmy are public. lemvotes.org exists, and Friendica and mbin both expose votes, and then obviously it's decently simple (though not super-trivial like those three methods) to set up your own instance and look over all the votes.
You might feel that there should be a special category of "lesser" (you say normal) user that is unable to see votes, even though another category of user is able to. We could talk about that philosophically, but regardless, normal users can see votes. Vote accordingly. The error lies with the Lemmy UI being designed in a way that doesn't make it clear to people that their votes are not fully private.
Yes and no.
There are accounts who genuinely do go around downvoting en masse without any contributions. When I was growing my community, I caught about 5 accounts - some with no post history, and no contribution history on my community doing it. They also had a long mod log history of bans for doing it elsewhere.
So I banned them because they kept burying new posts. That is my right.
BRB, gonna downvote all his posts so I don't have to bother blocking that community.
(I also blocked it anyway.)
You’ve found Elons alt
I made the list!
I upvote most of threelonmusketeers' posts (voyager confirms my votes are net +44) , but my down vote finger gets itchy when I see a string of pro Elmo content.
Not sure about that specific case.
Rule #0.0
Don't hurt moddy-woddy's fee-fees.
this but as an actual legitimate rule, more explicit version of "don't be a dick"
Yeee, I’m in this pic and I like it! Good job me 🫶
Thanks for the heads up I'm gonna go get banned from a shitty elon musk fan community. Badge of honor as far as I'm concerned
Because mods can only mod a single community, right, and no-one makes it almost their entire personality of "being a mod"?
I've sometimes found I've been banned on the weirdest communities which I've ever even visited, because some dipshit Russian got mad at me for calling out their propaganda and then banned me from all the communities they could. Pretty common on Lemmy
THIS IS RIDICULOUS!
If you don't like a community's content, ignore/block it. Why are you downvoting a bunch of stuff?
because downvoting is one of the central actions pivotal to the kind of social media that Lemmy/piefed/reddit is.
The message is “If you disagree with me, you will be banned”
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.
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.
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.
Oh hi, this post is about me!
I'm experimenting with the moderation policy for niche communities described by @jet@hackertalks.com.
@TheDude@sh.itjust.works, do you have any issues with this?
Punishing users for their individual votes is mod abuse and vote manipulation. You are removing the voting rights of users who dislike your content.
The only acceptable grounds for banning a user based on their votes would be using a sock puppet to vote on a single post or comment multiple times.
If people think your posts are shit, they should be allowed to express that without fear of phantom banning. Suck it up, or delete your account.
The only acceptable grounds for banning a user based on their votes would be using a sock puppet to vote on a single post or comment multiple times.
What about if someone entered the community to mass downvote everything? Or did so every day?
If people think your posts are shit, they should be allowed to express that without fear of phantom banning. Suck it up, or delete your account.
If I made a metal music community, and an account came in every day to downvote every post because they don't like metal - would I be justified in banning them for that?
What about if someone entered the community to mass downvote everything? Or did so every day?
That's fine, if the post is legitimately popular, the upvotes will outweigh the downvotes. That's how all of this works, and how it has always worked.
If I made a metal music community, and an account came in every day to downvote every post because they don’t like metal - would I be justified in banning them for that?
No, that would be an abuse of your mod powers. Conversely, how many downvotes do you think a user should be allowed before you can ban them for disagreeing with you?
That's fine, if the post is legitimately popular, the upvotes will outweigh the downvotes. That's how all of this works, and how it has always worked.
No, this doesn't apply to small and growing communities. Or niche communities of specific interests. When I started up my community, many posts wouldn't get many votes - and an early downvote or two could easily sink a new post from trending at all, leaving it to languish to nowhere.
No, that would be an abuse of your mod powers.
Based on what?
Conversely, how many downvotes do you think a user should be allowed before you can ban them for disagreeing with you?
It's not about numbers specifically. People downvote in my community now - and I see the same names whenever I check from time to time, but they also upvote and contribute - so I am not that bothered. I have only banned a handful of users for this behaviour since I started. Each one of them did nothing but downvote everything, and never contributed at all to the community.
Each one of them did nothing but downvote everything, and never contributed at all to the community.
Downvotes are a contribution, they are just the kind of contribution you don't like. based on this, I don't think you area good fit for modding; you should probably look to pass your role on to someone who can moderate responsibly.
Downvotes are a contribution, they are just the kind of contribution you don't like.
I fail to see the valuable contribution of an account that has literally never posted on the community they are downvoting in, never even posted on the fediverse, quietly downvoting every single post in a community. It is nothing but vandalism that hurts the growth of new communities.
based on this, I don't think you area good fit for modding; you should probably look to pass your role on to someone who can moderate responsibly.
By your logic almost every single community moderator on the fediverse is not a "good fit for modding" because they too, will ban accounts for spam-downvoting on their communities.
Replying here as it's higher the thread , but the other person you were replying to just seems to be sealioning.
Also, a 3 months old account with 3 posts, 2 about moderation issues, seems like an alt looking to stir up drama.
Home of the sh.itjust.works instance.
