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.

  • samus12345@sh.itjust.works
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    14
    ·
    edit-2
    9 hours ago

    BRB, gonna downvote all his posts so I don’t have to bother blocking that community.

    (I also blocked it anyway.)

  • Juice@midwest.social
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    22
    ·
    16 hours ago

    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

    • Dasus@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      5
      ·
      9 hours ago

      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

  • Seth Taylor@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    21
    ·
    22 hours ago

    I don’t get it. Is he like… doing an Elon Musk impression…? Is this performance art…? I don’t get it

    • Stern@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      6
      ·
      23 hours ago

      Vote visibility is off by default (IIRC) on reddit so at least there folks wouldn’t be banned just for downvoting someone.

  • harrys_balzac@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    8
    ·
    1 day ago

    I remember blocking this account on my personal feed and wondering if I did so prematurely. I’m thinking I made the right decision at the right time.

  • the_crotch@sh.itjust.works
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    28
    ·
    1 day ago

    90% of my downvotes are unintentional. The other 10% are for people who use alternating case. I have half a mind to go downvote everything in this boring company community though, just for laughs.

    • Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      21
      ·
      edit-2
      2 days ago

      People with a very high sense of responsability towards others generally avoid taking on responsabilities were their own mistakes might cause problems to others - for them such positions are a “weight on their shoulders”.

      People who seek power, on the other hand, generally tend to do it because of perceived social prestige or what they can do with that power. The less they feel that sense of responsabiliy to offset such attractive elements in having power the more they want power.

      This is a well known phenomenon: for example there are tons of sayings about how (political) power should be given to those who do not want it not those who want it, and there’s actually a Harvard Business Review article from over a decade ago about how they investigated this in companies and found that companies where the CEO unexpectedly got the position rather than seek it, in average outperformed the rest of their industry.

      • RightHandOfIkaros@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        7
        ·
        1 day ago

        Not all mods are like that, of course. My instance admins had to ask me like three times to be a moderator for one of their communities because I refused them multiple times. I only said yes because it was an unmoderated/undermoderated (at the time), low traffic community, and felt bad that I had refused so many times.

        I used to be a forum admin for a gaming/programming forum with what I would say is high traffic (1000+ active concurrent users daily), and moderating that felt like a full-time job, and I had appointed like 10 other moderators to help. I don’t have time for that no more lol.

          • skisnow@lemmy.ca
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            3
            ·
            1 day ago

            It’s frankly terrifying how Reddit is now both what the major LLMs are trained on and what most search engines return as the top result for a lot of searches, when you look at the degree with which arbitrary shadowbanning, bans for posting in the “wrong” other subs, flair requirements etc all come together to make these huge self-censoring subs where the manufactured consensus is controlled by a shadowy cabal with no real oversight.

            Time was that you knew when you were in a bubble and what shape that bubble was; the left-wing subs were overtly left-wing and stated as much in their description, the right-wing subs were likewise explicitly right-wing, and the topic subs were explicitly about that topic. But nowadays you have subs that are ostensibly about personal finance or history or funny memes or whatever, where an outside reader looking in has literally no idea that anyone who’s ever also made a post in r/politics gets their post automatically and silently hidden with no notification, and what they’re reading is a secretly curated wall of propaganda.

  • skisnow@lemmy.ca
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    122
    ·
    2 days ago

    That mod is also literally the only active user in that group. Your post is the most attention it’s ever got.

    • Coupable@lemmy.worldOP
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      86
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      2 days ago

      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.

      • skisnow@lemmy.ca
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        4
        ·
        21 hours ago

        Yeah on closer look it seems like this particular baby strawberry is also a mod on nearly 50 other groups across more than 10 instances. Not good.

      • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        21
        ·
        edit-2
        2 days ago

        Hey I just wanna pop in and say I crossposted your post about lemmyusa over to power tripping bastards on dbzero the other day, and we actually had a mod from there come on and discuss things.

        I think its a bit more complex than just… them clearly doing mod abuse or manipulation.

        From their POV, they were basically getting hit with a mass wave of downvotes, as well as some genuinely unnaceptable harassment… and they basically panicked and went into lockdown mode.

        Maybe you would be interested in adding to that discussion?

        https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/53271052

        Also, just… in general, the whole point of the ye power trippin bastards comm is to report and discuss potential mod/admin abuse scenarios, in case you’d maybe like to post stuff there yourself…

        You … seem to be on something of a tear of call outs, so, maybe you’d be interested.

        EDIT: There’s… in theory at least, supposed to be more of a structured way of making such a report… which ironically i kinda sorta broke by doing a crosspost, but uh … ???

        Anyway, more specifically relevant to this threelon person… yeah i dont find this behavior surprising, they are obviously a massive elon stan and their personality is collapsing as it becomes harder and harder to deny that, even in just a purely technical sense, leaving politics as far aside as possible… yeah elon is actually just a con artist fradulent idiot.

        • verity_kindle@sh.itjust.works
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          7
          ·
          2 days ago

          Thanks for the context and for cross posting, this is turning into an interesting discussion across a wider variety of skill sets. Skill sets, as in the following: power users, people who don’t like mods and have done it before, people who have never modded but know exactly how it should be done, basic end users who are former mods.

          • Coupable@lemmy.worldOP
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            2
            arrow-down
            1
            ·
            1 day ago

            Hey Verity, I support your right to do this (note: those are all my comments), even if you don’t!

            Have a great day, and don’t shy away from that downvote button <3

            • verity_kindle@sh.itjust.works
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              6
              arrow-down
              2
              ·
              1 day ago

              Wow, you’re calling me out too and I’m not even a mod any more. Keep that powdered wig high and lice-free, Robespierre.

              • Coupable@lemmy.worldOP
                link
                fedilink
                arrow-up
                4
                arrow-down
                3
                ·
                1 day ago

                hah ‘Robespierre’ - Good one, probably.

                Just funny you are serial downvoting in defence of banning people for serial downvoting :D

                Let me guess, hypocrisy is only cool when you do it.

                • Skavau@piefed.social
                  link
                  fedilink
                  English
                  arrow-up
                  7
                  arrow-down
                  2
                  ·
                  1 day ago

                  That’s not hypocrisy. People who support moderators rights to ban people from their community for mass downvoting aren’t saying no-one should ever downvote, and that all bans for downvoting are automatically justified.

      • RightHandOfIkaros@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        25
        ·
        2 days ago

        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.

        • Skavau@piefed.social
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          14
          arrow-down
          2
          ·
          2 days ago

          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.

            • Skavau@piefed.social
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              3
              ·
              17 hours ago

              You tell me. I mean I think the accounts I’m referring to here had been downvoting all over the place, not just my community.

      • Ech@lemmy.ca
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        7
        ·
        2 days ago

        It’s also blatant vote manipulation in keeping their personal content from being lower on the front page. Ban all the downvoters and suddenly your posts look very popular!