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.
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.
What about if someone entered the community to mass downvote everything? Or did so every day?
If I made a metal music community, and an account came in every day to downvote every post because they don’t like metal - would I be justified in banning them for that?
That’s fine, if the post is legitimately popular, the upvotes will outweigh the downvotes. That’s how all of this works, and how it has always worked.
No, that would be an abuse of your mod powers. Conversely, how many downvotes do you think a user should be allowed before you can ban them for disagreeing with you?
No, this doesn’t apply to small and growing communities. Or niche communities of specific interests. When I started up my community, many posts wouldn’t get many votes - and an early downvote or two could easily sink a new post from trending at all, leaving it to languish to nowhere.
Based on what?
It’s not about numbers specifically. People downvote in my community now - and I see the same names whenever I check from time to time, but they also upvote and contribute - so I am not that bothered. I have only banned a handful of users for this behaviour since I started. Each one of them did nothing but downvote everything, and never contributed at all to the community.
Downvotes are a contribution, they are just the kind of contribution you don’t like. based on this, I don’t think you area good fit for modding; you should probably look to pass your role on to someone who can moderate responsibly.
I fail to see the valuable contribution of an account that has literally never posted on the community they are downvoting in, never even posted on the fediverse, quietly downvoting every single post in a community. It is nothing but vandalism that hurts the growth of new communities.
By your logic almost every single community moderator on the fediverse is not a “good fit for modding” because they too, will ban accounts for spam-downvoting on their communities.
Replying here as it’s higher the thread , but the other person you were replying to just seems to be sealioning.
Also, a 3 months old account with 3 posts, 2 about moderation issues, seems like an alt looking to stir up drama.
very much seems that way
You can express yourself. You can make a post in the community and engage in a dialogue. You can make a post another community, such as this one, complaining about the original community. You can make a new community where you just complain about the other community. You’re free to express yourself. But for people who want to participate in the community it should be for them