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.
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
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.
Piefed has much more control here. People can easily just block communities though.
Piefed has keyword filters that can help with that issue.
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?
The sine qua non of censorship is the authoritarian component missing from your definition. A moderator or administrator removing an article from a forum is censorship. A user demonstrating their disapproval of that article within the forum doesn’t qualify as censorship.
The Oxford definition is not wrong, just incomplete.
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…
Well, as I just showed in the definition, censorship can also be suppression of content without banning. If the government says, you can’t show X content before 9PM on television that is a form of censorship (even though anyone that wants to see that content can still freely see it)
Hate speech should be removed by mods or admins
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.
This does not work at all. There are many threads being participated in all the time on all kinds of communities. If we did it this way, we would get a new set of posts on the front page every time you refresh, simply because 20 comments had been posted in 20 threads that just happen to be the newest comments. This model of last bump only works if activity is fairly low.
That’s still disordered and just encourages people to bump their own threads.
The upvote/downvote system is foundational to sites like this. Short of a new, more advanced voting system (which is a long way out) it’s not going anywhere. If you don’t want to look at it like that, you can always default all of your own feeds and threads to /new/.
Not if posting in your own thread doesn’t bump it.