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.
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.
Okay, well that might be a good suggestion for /active/.
But in any case you already have your own tools for what you want.