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.
I banned 5 accounts from my community who were downvoting, between them, every single post. Sometimes straight out of the box. Should I not do that?
Also users profiles are already viewable and usable as a “stalking tool” by the same logic. Do you also object to that?
This is why it would be good to limit downvoting to subscribers only
No, I don’t think you should ban people for voting and mods shouldn’t even have that info. In extreme cases it is something admins should deal with … but 5 accounts seems hardly worth bothering over.
No, they are different. Comments are primarily about expressing your opinion, wouldn’t make sense for them to not be public (that would just be 4chan). Votes don’t need that.
5 accounts who between them downvoted everything I posted. 3 of them literally had no post history, and had multiple bans from other communities for the same behaviour. They were literally just doing the equivalent of vandalism.
They hurt the growth of my community and offered it nothing.
Yes, I understand your situation. It’s a price I’m willing to pay for private votes.
I think it would be long term corrosive to the honesty of the fediverse, and fall into the same trapping as reddit.
I think the same way about public votes. It is one of the few things reddit did right (compared to other platforms with “likes” and such).
I truly don’t see how. If you just mean mod abuse, mods will always abuse their power on any site - and the structure of the fediverse makes any mod anywhere more accountable than they are on reddit for bad faith moderating.
It’s not just about that. It’s also an important metric to gauge how the bigger “hivemind” is feeling about something, without having to fear that people will self-censor. Especially on lemmy with it’s extremely narrow filter bubbles. Voting is effectively obsolete if every niche community can pretend to be “popular” by banning everyone that downvotes their stuff.
Niche communities who might be targeted by disproportionate amounts of downvoting are unlikely to surge into /all/ just because they ban people who downvote everything from there. The topic would still be niche.
People still downvote in a specific sense all across the fediverse. It is almost always mass downvoters who get banned by community moderators for that conduct, not people who upvote or downvote selectively in good faith based on specific grievances with the content of the post.