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’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.
Right and that’s exactly why I think it should be private. Because it shouldn’t be up to moderators to decide what “good faith” is. If someone wants to just have lurker account and downvote stuff on /all all day … that’s legitimate use of the feature.
If you are one person with one account, you should be able to vote however you like without repercussions.
I disagree. Mods can make these decisions, the modlogs are public and accountable (I’m for accountability in both ways) and the community - and instance admins can intervene if they think the moderators themselves are responding in bad faith. Private voting across the fediverse, where plenty of users have multiple accounts spread out across the fediverse on different instances would invite a ton of mass-downvoting as it could be done with relative ease.
And it’s my legitimate use as a moderator to determine that someone who does that is not part of any community I am building, and is actively vandalous towards it.
If it is proper coordinated or autmated mass-downvoting campaign that should be a job for the admins.
Yes, that’s how it currently works. I’m arguing it shouldn’t work like this for votes.
It would just be one person. But it wouldn’t even necessarily be noticed to be reported to the admins.
Oh well. It’s been like this for years now and I think broadly speaking, it has majority approval because of how it cultivates a high-trust culture.