Was recently banned from a whole bunch of DB0 communities for, as best as I can gather, downvoting once when I viewed by All (potentially accidentally while scrolling).
Important notes:
- I don't use scripts.
- I don't mass-downvote Communities. If I see a post I generally don't like when browsing All, I may downvote one post, block the Community and move on.
- Some of the communities I was banned from don't have any posts in them so I wouldn't have been able to downvote anything.
- Of all of these Communities, in my history I downvoted one post in one of them. Voting in this manner is not vote manipulation. It's quite literally a feature of the platform and as a mod of another Community, I would consider it pretty good etiquette.
- One of my bans reads "Appeal Granted, not a brigading member" but I'm still banned.
- I don't troll.
WTF is going on here?
EDIT - Updated Info from the conversation below: In the initial image, you can see two "ban waves."
The 10 bans three months ago stem from a single downvote in one Community. It was @Draconic_NEO@lemmy.dbzer0.com See here: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/34853477
I was called out by name for a single downvote and culled from a score of Communities I did not participate in by them.
The other bans from two months ago are from four total downvotes over a 10-month timeframe in one Community.
I have also stated in this thread that I don't have issues with AI-gen images, but there are shoddy ones and well-done ones.
EDIT 2: Now unbanned from the ten Communities listed as "3 months ago" in my initial image, but have been banned from three more because of this thread with the reason given being "self-proclaimed anti-AI brigader" which are two things I didn't claim to be. God dammit Lemmy...

All downvotes in our own conversation do indicate a clear pattern, though.
You need to take into consideration those are small communities, post per month may not be that high, and post may not get a lot of engagement. If you are a mod of a small community I can see why you should check and worry about even little things. Size of the community and the threats they usually endure make it relevant I think.
After reading more of the OP I'm inclined to think that the mod actions were overly cautious. Probably they should step down a little. I'm a big fan of mods issuing warnings before a permanent ban (and with small communities it's possible to do without getting overwhelmed). I'm starting to think that they should just message OP stating that they have seen that they had only issue downvotes in the communities and that they will need to take actions if nothing changes in the future, or something like that. Anyway, I'm thinking that ban was not justified.
Still think that people tend to be too happy with the downvote button. It has its uses, but systematic downvoting without good reasons it's not good lemmy etiquette I think.
Disengage