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.
You know you want to
There were more arguments for the anonymous votes to be abused for vote manipulation than power tripping mods
We’ve been over this before. I believe my ability to explicitly control how my information and privacy is handled on the fediverse is far more important than fake Internet points, especially when you can eliminate the impact of vote brigading by just reducing the impact of downvotes, or let a mod selectively wipe downvotes, or selectively make a post immune to downvotes. There are many ways to handle this which are better than the status quo. There’s absolutely no reason why every action I make on the fediverse ahould be saved in plaintext in a thousand different places so that a person can be protected from seeing a largely inconsequential negative number on a UI. It’s absolutely insane that so many people who are otherwise so concerned with privacy and cyber security even attempt to defend this.