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.
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.