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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.

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[-] QueenHawlSera@sh.itjust.works 159 points 1 month ago

We don't need Reddit's power tripping back

[-] ech@lemmy.ca 65 points 1 month ago

Do you really expect the platform that lets anybody form their personal power tripping fiefdom to inexplicably not draw those people in? No centralization doesn't mean you're free of the particular flavor of power tripping you experienced, it means there are many cells of various levels of power tripping with little to no oversight.

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[-] skisnow@lemmy.ca 119 points 1 month 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.world 84 points 1 month 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.

[-] RightHandOfIkaros@lemmy.world 25 points 1 month 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 15 points 1 month 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.

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[-] sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 21 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month 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.

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[-] miss_demeanour@lemmy.dbzer0.com 69 points 1 month ago

Rule #0.0
Don't hurt moddy-woddy's fee-fees.

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[-] vatlark@lemmy.world 58 points 1 month ago

I made the list!

I upvote most of threelonmusketeers' posts (voyager confirms my votes are net +44) , but my down vote finger gets itchy when I see a string of pro Elmo content.

Not sure about that specific case.

[-] alekwithak@lemmy.world 55 points 1 month ago

So it's literally just Elon.

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[-] magnetosphere@fedia.io 42 points 1 month ago

I hope that dipshit is reading this thread. Ban me, too!

[-] Hell_nah_brother@thelemmy.club 33 points 1 month ago

Yeee, I’m in this pic and I like it! Good job me 🫶

[-] kreskin@lemmy.world 29 points 1 month ago

kind of the dark side of the reddits/lemmys. Mods just doing whatever they like. btw, fuck Elon musk, that guy sucks. and fuck threelonmusketeers@sh.itjust.works. What a snowflake douchebag.

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[-] the_crotch@sh.itjust.works 28 points 1 month 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.

[-] Juice@midwest.social 25 points 1 month 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

[-] SethTaylor@lemmy.world 23 points 1 month ago

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

[-] descartador@lemmy.eco.br 17 points 1 month ago

Or maybe he is... No... It can't be... Elon?

[-] SethTaylor@lemmy.world 12 points 1 month ago

I wouldn't be shocked.

[-] technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com 21 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

What do you expect from the mod of a grifting comm?

You can't hang out in a shithole without getting a little shitty.

[-] remon@ani.social 20 points 1 month ago

Public votes are probably the dumbest lemmy "feature", so much unnecessary drama because of it.

[-] ech@lemmy.ca 22 points 1 month ago

There's not really a way to do votes privately on a federated system. Unless you're suggesting no votes at all, which could be interesting, but I'm not able to envision a functional way to do that.

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[-] Skavau@piefed.social 12 points 1 month ago

If you look at Reddit, most new posts on any given community get hit with a flurry of downvotes right out of assembly. Because it's all private.

Having upvotes and downvotes public keeps people, broadly, honest and fair minded in how they vote - and mitigates downvote trolls.

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[-] JackbyDev@programming.dev 16 points 1 month ago

Wow, not even making up a lie, just straight up saying they're banning for down voting.

[-] threelonmusketeers@sh.itjust.works 15 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Oh hi, this post is about me!

I'm experimenting with the moderation policy for niche communities described by @jet@hackertalks.com.

@TheDude@sh.itjust.works, do you have any issues with this?

[-] Coupable@lemmy.world 60 points 1 month ago

Punishing users for their individual votes is mod abuse and vote manipulation. You are removing the voting rights of users who dislike your content.

The only acceptable grounds for banning a user based on their votes would be using a sock puppet to vote on a single post or comment multiple times.

If people think your posts are shit, they should be allowed to express that without fear of phantom banning. Suck it up, or delete your account.

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[-] Warl0k3@lemmy.world 37 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

That is some total whackjob reasoning.

A community means EXCLUDING people who don’t share a interest.

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.

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[-] NaibofTabr@infosec.pub 31 points 1 month ago

moderation policy for niche communities

That's a whole lot of mental gymnastics to try to justify enforcing toxic positivity.

The coward's way: don't explain why you did what you did clearly, just obfuscate/point towards some "guideline". 🙄

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[-] jet@hackertalks.com 20 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Looking at your mod log in detail, here is some feedback:

  • Consider not banning on a single vote, look for intentionality (bad community fit)
    • Someone might have simply miss-swipped
  • lemvotes is a great tool to identify sockpuppet accounts
  • Publish in the community sidebar your policy (or just link to my post) and make it clear if people can request a unbanning (accidents happen)

Here is a great (trivial to identify) example of a sockpuppets being used on your community right now:

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You can be on topic and have the wrong take, so wrong that people simply think it's not productive to the conversation and as such the downvote is warranted. What are you doing, my guy?

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[-] samus12345@sh.itjust.works 15 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

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

(I also blocked it anyway.)

[-] ozymandias@lemmy.dbzer0.com 14 points 1 month ago

this is “downvote trolling”….
basically if you have a community that a lot of people hate, people will come in and downvote everything… some will even subscribe and downvote everything.
so, obviously “the boring company” will get a lot of musk hate (and i hate musk).
but yeah, if someone never participates in a comm and just shows up to downvote totally on-topic posts it makes sense to ban them….

i’ve been permanently shadowbanned from communities i totally liked and agreed with for making a comment that reasonably stated a disagreement with a post… banning for downvote trolling makes sense… even though i do hate Elon Musk….
(the whole boring company community should be deleted because it’s a company owned by a literal Nazi).

[-] Thorry@feddit.org 31 points 1 month ago

What are you talking about? Shows up in a community? People see Musk fellatio posts in their All feed and downvote it. Lemmy communities aren't a closed thing and banning people for voting is dumb.

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[-] rglullis@communick.news 13 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

The message is “If you disagree with me, you will be banned”

It used to be that votes were meant to be used as an indicator of the quality of the post according to the community guidelines, not how "agreeable" a comment or post is. This cultural change is one the most toxic behaviors that made Reddit such a crappy place for discussion.

This was already bad on Reddit, but at least there one could avoid this problem because people were used to browse only the subreddits they subscribed to, so niche subreddits could still have some semblance of "good" community participation. On Lemmy, most people browse by /all and lots of them still treat the downvote button as a some mechanism to train an algorithm. These users are the worst.

In the beginning, I was actually sending DMs to people asking them to please not downvote something if they were not part of the community and their reaction was basically "I don't want to see this, so I will downvote to bury it" (completely ignoring the fact that they could simply hide the post or stop browsing by /all).

So, while "banning everyone who downvotes the post" might seem an overreaction, I could definitely see a moderator could flag a vote as coming from a non-community member and use that flag to ignore their votes in the ranking systems, and I would love to have a bot that auto-messages every clueless downvoter explaining the proper netiquette around votes for non-community members.

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this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2025
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