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.
BRB, gonna downvote all his posts so I don’t have to bother blocking that community.
(I also blocked it anyway.)
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
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
I don’t get it. Is he like… doing an Elon Musk impression…? Is this performance art…? I don’t get it
Or maybe he is… No… It can’t be… Elon?
I wouldn’t be shocked.
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.
Vote visibility is off by default (IIRC) on reddit so at least there folks wouldn’t be banned just for downvoting someone.
Votes are visible to mods for at least six months
If that’s the case on reddit it must be pretty recent because I don’t recall it from my time there.
Wow, not even making up a lie, just straight up saying they’re banning for down voting.
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.
If your posts turn up in /c/all they’re going to get treated accordingly.
And this is fine. /c/all should let users downvote posts they don’t like so popular stuff can rise to the top. That’s what makes /c/all sometimes worth looking at.
Otherwise, it’ll just fill up with all sorts of crap from communities with no downvoting rules, including edgy borderline racist stuff that’s not quite bad enough to get banned, or just shitty positivity memes copied from somewhere else.
Your problem is that you can’t delist your community from /c/all. That sucks, but right now your posts are turning up in two different communities with different expectations and you just need to deal with that.
Your problem is that you can’t delist your community from /c/all.
Your admin can, that’s a more effective way to deal with that than downvoting
And this is fine. /c/all should let users downvote posts they don’t like so popular stuff can rise to the top. That’s what makes /c/all sometimes worth looking at.
Yeah, but community moderators also have the ability to look at those downvotes and react accordingly.
Your problem is that you can’t delist your community from /c/all. That sucks, but right now your posts are turning up in two different communities with different expectations and you just need to deal with that.
Sure. I don’t want to delist /my/ community from /all/ but if someone did downvote every post on the community made in the last day, I might consider that mass-downvoting from someone who doesn’t like the topic and react accordingly.
Otherwise, it’ll just fill up with all sorts of crap from communities with no downvoting rules, including edgy borderline racist stuff that’s not quite bad enough to get banned.
I may be wrong, but admins will be able to configure what communities should be visible in the public view. So your instance would not show on their frontpage things that are not representative of the instance
For users themselves who are browsing by /all and feel justified in downvoting because they don’t like what they see, it’s a different story. If a community is (in their view) problematic, they can simply block it. Downvoting has no place in their curation.
While that was the intent of upvote/downvote in some places early on, virtually nobody has actually done that to a sufficient degree for it to not be agree/disagree.
I guess I’m one of those old dinosaur users that still tries and mostly adheres to that old unwritten rule but the lines of inflammatory BS, rampant strawman, whatboutism with disagreements has made it so much harder.
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.
Never was. It was a wish by some but not it was always an impossible one.
My Reddit account is from 2006. I joined it when Aaron Swartz was still working there.
In the very early days, it was like that. Even it was an unwritten rule, people expected to see disagreement in a conversation, not in a vote count. Only spammers would get mass-downvotes.
It used to be that the best posts would have hundreds of upvotes and hundreds of down votes. They showed +100/-98 and you did mediately knew this was an interesting comment.
Then they stopped showing both up and down, and only showed the summation. 100 upvotes and 98 down votes is now +2, and this comment is now lurking among all the other +2 comments.
Showing the total instead of the ratio was the end of reddiquette, and the earliest Reddit enshittification that I can point to.
It was gone by '09 when i made my account at least, the good old days when their where still site wide mod drama like this one :D
I personally prefer to downvote what I don’t agree with. Why would I want to promote a point of view I don’t agree with?
Yeah, I mean it depends - doesn’t it? If someone is expressing a text-based opinion post you dislike, I can see that. If you think the articles source is corrosive - I can see that. If you think its off-topic, I can see that.
But supposing someone found a metal music community, and downvoted everything there because they don’t like metal - would that be reasonable?
That probably wouldn’t and would obviously be vote manipulation. This situation is pretty rare and is ignored, like on YouTube, because people get bored and most people wont go out of their way to do this
Problem is: Lemmy’s algorithm is shit and doesn’t learn from our preferences. If it did, we would see less posts that we dislike
People just can’t stand being disliked. Should we ban people disliking crypto posts? Because damn most of my posts are disliked based on people hating and spreading lies about crypto just because they dislike it
People looking for stuff will find it if they want to, no matter the amount of dislikes
That probably wouldn’t and would obviously be vote manipulation. This situation is pretty rare and is ignored, like on YouTube, because people get bored and most people wont go out of their way to do this
Absolutely, it is rare. But people do it. As I’ve said before, I banned 5 people on the original !television@lemm.ee instance for just downvoting posts repeatedly. No pattern. None of the accounts were active on the community in terms of posting. Some of the accounts had never even posted on the fediverse - they were simply downvote accounts that purely existed to vote negatively on content.
Problem is: Lemmy’s algorithm is shit and doesn’t learn from our preferences. If it did, we would see less posts that we dislike
Piefed has much more control here. People can easily just block communities though.
Problem is: Lemmy’s algorithm is shit and doesn’t learn from our preferences. If it did, we would see less posts that we dislike
Piefed has keyword filters that can help with that issue.
Why would I want to promote a point of view I don’t agree with?
Because you also wouldn’t like those that disagree with you to essentially censor you. I.e. the golden rule, do unto others as you would have them do to you. If you don’t want to be censored because of your personal opinion, maybe don’t do the same to others either.
Now a downvote is not really “censorship”, but still, I would say you should still have respect for an opinion that is different from your own (provided it’s not a completely unreasonable opinion). That respect should be enough to prevent you from downvoting such an opinion, I feel.
I am free to disrespect them (not voicing it) or their opinion, but I respect their freedom of speech
Everyone is free to downvote me. This is not Reddit, having a lot of downvotes doesn’t ban you, unless you’re in a shitty instance
Downvotes are not censorship in any sense of the term.
They certainly are censorship in the sense that it reduces other people’s ability to see that content.
Can you blame censorship when you’ve voluntarily decided to participate in a network that has a voting for visibility system?
I’m not blaming anyone I’m just saying it meets the definition of censorship.
That is not at all a reasonable definition of censorship.
Censorship is “the suppression or prohibition of [media] that is considered obscene, politically unacceptable or a threat to security” according to Oxford dictionary.
How is downvoting content with the intent to make it less visible to other users not a form of suppression?
Because that’s social media we’re talking about. It’s an algorithm. There’s no central authority. The visibility of a post is chosen democratically and freely.
Censorship is removing and banning content. Censorship isn’t bad anyways when there’s a good reason (ex: hate speech)
Anyone that wants to see said content can still freely do it. Censorship would be abusive moderation, like banning someone because they don’t agree with you, essentially removing their freedom of speech. Or actively removing political opponents like lemmy.ml, blahaj…
But why does a platform have logins, persistent identity, and voting if the users aren’t intended to use that to moderate the conversation and push comments that they feel don’t belong in the discussion to the bottom of the thread and ultimately hide them? Why not present threads in bump order with users identified with a single thread ID inside threads?
I personally don’t see votes as a way to moderate, they mean much more to me
This is so revealing, I always thought “why not engage with an opinion I disagree with?” Now I see that engaging with it might bring attention to it, even if it were to help us learn and teach.
Instead people want to push the punish button, to be a nameless and unidentifiable avatar of hegemony. Our role in history is to suppress the ideas of others and boost those ideas which we’ve adopted. Hide what we are uncomfortable looking at, even if it is only an opinion, and let the people who control our own opinions continue to push their own agenda without obstacles.
People actually want to remain ignorant, and not develop discourse; people want a closed discourse away from disagreement. When we create our logins, our online identities, we want to remain anonymous and detached from reality. We don’t want those who disagree with us to be considered human with differing opinions, because we don’t see our own opinions as human.
Every interaction is a conflict, and conflict is hard, so I’ll punish this other person. I’ll play my part as a silent executioner, murdering ideas by consensus without a thought as to why I disagree, or why the other person disagrees with me. I’m powerless but at least I can take away someone else’s power.
I prefer platforms without voting buttons for this reason. People are treating the up and down arrows like “punish buttons” because of the result of pushing the button. Older forum and imageboard style platforms did not have voting. You couldn’t just push a button to register your disagreement, you had to actually make a comment if you didn’t like something, and other users could judge the quality of your response.
In addition, your identity was often only relevant to a single thread, which was on a single topic, so your opinions weren’t portable or traceable. There were no profiles, so other users weren’t able to use your comments on different threads to try to accuse you of intellectual inconsistency. This led to more complex discussions because people are complex.
Furthermore, on a platform like the one we’re on, if enough people click the “punish button” then the platform makes the comment less visible, requiring an extra step to be able to see it. The purpose of voting buttons is to shape discourse into what’s most agreeable, and homogenize it into what’s agreeable to the most people. Complaining about users “misusing” the voting buttons is something that happened a lot on reddit in the early years. People didn’t realize that they were working as designed.
I see where you are coming from now, I misunderstood your intent. I took what you meant as “its good to use these buttons because that’s why the platform has them,” which I disagree with every which way!
But you were actually saying the design of the platform causes the behavior, the platforms hurt discourse more than individual users who’s understanding (or misunderstanding) of how a vote button is supposed to be used is an ambiguity that is inherent to the platform. Which, yes I agree with that also, and it is a better point to make than which user is vicious or virtuous in using the platform.
I make similar criticisms often about structural basis for social movements, but admittedly I have a blind spot for tech platforms. Not because I’m bad with tech, but because I’m pretty good with it. I do tend to think of these platforms as neutral, but that’s more of a bias than a product of analysis. I’d like to unlearn the bias.
You seem pretty advanced in your understanding, is this something that you’ve just thought about, or are you in community, or educating yourself by other means? I could use a little of that in my own work, as I am aware of this bias but still wasting time and energy because of it
Anyway, holy shit its a conversation if either of us had the attitude of “downvote and go” then I’d have missed your actual intention. Another tendency of online discourse is for people to take the dimmest possible interpretation of others opinions. I guess I also fall in this trap, at least around certain topics
I think really most folks don’t realize how easy it is to design a platform that provokes real discussions and engages users but nobody would go there. Casual users are coming here for enjoyment, not engagement, and they don’t want to see anything that rubs them the wrong way. And we aren’t even talking about algorithmically driven feeds which learn from your behavior and give you content that you’re most likely to interact with, like Facebook, which can actually be dangerous.
These are just my observations. I was here before the internet talking on BBSs. I don’t know why all these people are here, to be honest. When I started out it was just nerds talking to each other. I wonder if people would participate in a discussion board that held all posts and responses for 24 hours before making them public to give people time to reflect on what they just said.
We don’t see each other as people anymore. This is complicated by advanced AI enabled LLMs driven by commercial and political interests, so you don’t even know at this point whether you’re talking to an actual person. But this is what we have now so this is what I use. Listservs were the first great platform I remember enjoying, and I wouldn’t mind going back to that. Usenet was also good.
I just think the days of the average person being able to go on the internet and just say whatever they want, relatively anonymously and with no real oversight and no consequences or accountability for what happens afterwards are coming to an end. At that point hopefully we’ll see less inflammatory politics and engagement bait as more and more people move on, and go back to whatever they were doing before they started doing this, maybe watching cable TV or going to sporting events.
You are intended to moderate via votes. But I hope you don’t feel that something you disagree with needs to be “moderated”. Other people are allowed to disagree with you, it doesn’t require moderation.
Right that’s what I’m saying, I don’t understand why voting buttons are there except for users to use them to moderate each other. I don’t feel like they’re necessary at all. I participated in online discussions for 25 years before reddit showed up. We didn’t need voting buttons at all and the presence of those buttons removes nuance and complexity from the conversation.
They’re there so the frontpage isn’t a disordered mess where nonsense posts aren’t given equal weight to meaningful news stories.
You can do this by displaying the threads in the order they were last bumped and pruning / deleting them by the last time they were bumped (age) or thread limit per board, in other words, based on participation. …you don’t need voting buttons.
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.
So it’s literally just Elon.
Going by the name, three Elons in a cassock.
I don’t know if this is even about Elon any more, it’s grown so much. Like a mushroom on a cow patty.
deleted by creator
Ngl seems like a boring community
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.
I hope that dipshit is reading this thread. Ban me, too!
Yeee, I’m in this pic and I like it! Good job me 🫶
mods are fascinating specimen, no matter the platform
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.
Power hungry people seeking validation without real-world obligations.
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.
That’s what I mean though, terminally online mods ruin it for a lot of us. No way in hell do I have an hour or more a day to commit to policing others, yet there are mods on all social media that love to do it for free. When it’s free you get a selection bias for motive. Not dissimilar to real world police.
And no real power either.
They have the power to shape information.
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.
You’ve found Elons alt
I doubt he’d bother w/ Lemmy. If he did, he’d just pay someone to do it, just like he does w/ video games.
