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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.
That is some total whackjob reasoning.
The actual fuck? This is the dumbest take I've seen in a while (yeah, including all the commentary around the Charlie Kirk shooting), and they try to justify it as being a rephrasing of "A community is for people who share an interest"?
This is just an unhinged way of justifying isolationism and silencing critics. It reads like it was written by the mods of r/conservative. Go touch some fuckin' grass, dude.
Hi I'm the wackjob, communities are places around the topic, and they're focused on people who want to talk about that topic. If you go to the chess club and you want to talk about motorsports, it's not going to be great for people. You be asked to leave eventually. Especially if you keep revving your bike in the chess club.
Hey. Just wanted to say that you banned me from a number of communities I only voted on with no notification. I only found out because I randomly checked the mod log one day. Trying to police participation by bans via voting behavior puts a chilling effect on the greater Lemmy community and creates an echo chamber with no critical examination of what is being posted. Also, it's a pretty cowardly way to mod.
Were any of those communities you were interested in having a positive interaction with?
I honestly don't remember. But I shouldn't have my voice censored simply for disagreeing with something that was posted. The entire point of the voting system is so that quality content reaches the widest audience.
Also, how do you define a "positive interaction?" If I disagree with what's posted but provide polite criticism, is that a positive or negative interaction? IMO, if I'm not flinging shit at the walls and insulting users, or otherwise violating the rules of said community, that feels like a positive interaction to me.
Yeah, i would broadly agree, polite criticism is the bulwark of a good discussion forum and positive.
What if i go to a motorsport club, but someone is revving is bike in the middle of a public speech, covering what they are saying? I should be able to downvote the revvig guy because I don't like his 'posts'.
With your logic, the moron should keep disturbing the speech and i would get booted off the club because I disliked his behavior.
Nobody's forcing you to go to communities you don't like. You can block them. In fact moderators of those communities are working hard to provide content. If you only want to be negative with that content it sounds like it's a perfect idea to block it.
If you very much want to rage against content, you're welcome to repost it someplace else and then have your say in a different community. But you don't have the right to use the original community. If you behave well you're welcome to most communities to participate. If you don't behave well you're not. It's very simple
Downvoting something you disagree with is not behaving badly. Banning people without knowing their motivation for a downvote is ridiculous.
On a single downvote? Sure. If someone comes into a community and downvotes the entire page, and they've never interacted on the community - I think thats different.
Agree.
You don't understand. In my example, i WANT to be in that community, but a single actor is being a jerk, so i let him know he's a jerk.
What you're demanding is that everyone interact with your community "appropriately" and on your terms, but that your interaction with the larger community yours is a part of is not allowed to be questioned or criticized in the way all other communities are. That's some one-sided bs.
Yes one side of the door is for the community members, the other side of the door is for everyone else.
I've explained my philosophy comprehensively here: https://hackertalks.com/post/13884733
If you can find something inconsistent in that i'm happy to hear about it.
I read it. It's not good and neither are your analogies. There is no "door" if your community is on the front page of lemmy at large. You are taking advantage of the open nature of the service to openly publish your content while pretending that it's "only for you" and demanding that anyone that sees it outside of your community abide by your personal rules. If that's what you want, then a platform like lemmy is the wrong one for your community.
I respectfully disagree, allowing a tyranny of negativity to rein simply because people have a niche belief - like AI, or diets, or religion, or politics isn't good for lemmy. It stifles the growth of lemmy, because everyone has some niche interest that should be part of the fediverse.
If every single part of the fediverse is for open referendum, that's going to chill lots of participation; it's much easier to hate many things, then to be so interested in something that you stick your neck out and brave the negativity.
If you really want to rage against some content, cross post it and have at it.
It is not reasonable to demand that every user that disagrees with a post publish their own counter-post. It's excessive, inefficient, and is antithetical to how the fediverse functions. Post voting is the bare minimum of participation. If that's still too "chilling", this is simply the wrong forum for what you're looking for, and trying to force the whole platform to bend to what you want it to be is just selfish.
I think our schism is philosophically intractable. I don't see the fediverse as one single homogeneous space. I see it as many small pools of heterogeneous activities and people. That can cross pollinate, cross communicate, and cross collaborate.
You're also asking the entire platform to bend to your will, to allow you to express your negativity wherever you like. I don't think that's sustainable for Lemmy either.
I agree that's how the fediverse should operate, and you're explicitly arguing to disallow this at your lone discretion. Your entire ethos that you're touting is about excluding those not part of your personal group. That's the exact opposite of open and collaborative.
No, I'm saying mods like you shouldn't be allowed to abuse the openness of the fediverse while refusing to be subject to the same system everyone else is.
The public votes on the content of the forum. If that's unacceptable to you, then that's on you, not the forum.
Excluding those who don't positively engage with the community. Only downvoting isn't positive engagement. If every post to cars is downvoted by people of fuckcars, and every post to fuckcars is downvoted by people of cars... what does lemmy gain? They know they don't like each other, no need for throwing hostility at each other.
A forum composed of people sharing a interest, I agree. But to use the cars illustrative example again, there is no value in having every cars post downvoted by the fuck cars people.... it's just noise, the members of the cars community are not served by it.
Update - I should add the moderators of small communities work hard to provide content, just letting negativity flow at them discourages lemmy from growing as every community starts small.
No. Don't twist my words. I mean the fediverse is the forum. Your community is part of that forum, and is subject to the same public overview as every other community and post here. Demanding to be an exception is unacceptable. Regarding your example, if two communities are so hostile to one another that they can't coexist in reasonable peace, then they should be excised from the platform, not given free reign to punish any perceived slight to wall off their club from the space they have been given access to.
Additionally, downvoting is absolutely positive engagement. It is the balancing hand in the user-based algorithm sites like this rely on. It is the low-demand option for users to interact without having to further mentally drain themselves by engaging with next iteration of the internet's endless supply of trolls and bigots. Dissent is a critical part of collective conversations, and downvotes are a clean and efficient way to facilitate that.
We wont have much left to talk about.
The key word here, which i agree with, is CONVERSATIONS. downvotes are not a conversation, they are just negativity.
Anyway, we are talking in circles - I'm going to keep growing my communities which means weeding them of uninterested interlopers. I welcome you to spin up duplicates of any of my communities and grow real conversational engagement.
Conversation is more than your requirement arguments and discussion. It includes the ebb and flow of topics, memes, userbase, and, despite your refusal to accept it, up and down votes.
And I'll say again since it bears repeating - you and your communities should still be answerable to the platform you are a part of. To demand special treatment and one-way isolation spits in the face of the rest of the platform.
we fundamentally disagree on what a community is and the value of having safe spaces for niche interests.
Your idea of a "safe space" is parasitic and harmful to the very concept of federation, it's "value" just a mirage of toxic positivity.
I strongly disagree, your idea of engagement is just toxic toxicity inflicted on every niche interest and community.
So trans communities should keep TERFs around ?
That's not "not sharing an interest". That's being actively antagonistic and arguably harmful to those in the community. For at-risk communities, that's a hard line to parse sometimes and it's understandable for moderators to be less lenient in their decisions. A community about a money sink by the world's richest idiot doesn't really have the same concerns.
Not speaking to the particular community in the OP, but this can be valid in non-political contexts. 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?
Would it be fair minded to downvote like that?
Sure but that's not what's happening. The criticism isn't for banning sock puppets or banning accounts for brigading, it's for banning accounts that downvote "on-topic posts", evidently even a single time. What you're describing and what the mod in question is doing are distinct behaviors, as is what you're describing and the concepts laid down in Jet's "guidelines".
I'm not referring to the specific community here. Community moderators can justifiably and unjustifiably ban accounts for their voting behaviour. I was just asking if you think its ever appropriate to ban someone for their voting behaviour.
I think I've already answered that in the previous comment. I'm not really interested in debating broader topics in the middle of a discussion about a case of specific, contextual behavior.
Fair enough. It gets dodgy to me when the community is politically controversial (as the one in the OP is) rather than hobbyist. I certainly hold different standards there.
Okay.