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...
Admins, not mods. Enormous distinction here. And I don't understand why that information can't be anonymized or attached to a user identifying number rather than username, but I will admit I'm not a develop not a sysadmin so I am a layman speaking outside my field here.
As anyone can spool up an instance and become admin there, this information is inadvertently available.
If it would be some anonymized information, it would make it more difficult to validate it. Again any server then could just toss around numbers without any meaning. If the numbers are static, it won't be too difficult to de-anonymize them.
I feel like this is a solution in search of a problem. Has faulty or malicious vote manipulation via instance federation actually been an issue before?
yup many times, sock puppets exist in abundance on dedicated instances or derelict instances. We have gone through many rounds of spam/vote manipulation cleaning at the admin level. This can be done through pinging the admins incase they missed it, or defederating from instances that are not behaving well.
The reason it doesn't seem so bad now is due to the attention the admins are paying to the blatant methods. (i.e. 300 votes from a instance in a minute from randomized user names)
Think of the most basic spam:
Advertising something, then give it a bunch of upvotes.
Alright, fair then. As a layman I am not privvy to that so I'm lacking that context in my understanding. I appreciate you sharing and will think on this more, thank you.
Lets ask the other way around: Has transparency over up- and downvotes actually been an issue before? It would require dedicated development effort to make this custom solution, that would require a rewriting of the activity pub protocol and a change to the philosophy of activity pub in general https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActivityPub
One could argue this very thread and similar anecdotes shared are the issues you're inquiring about.
And I'm not out here asking for Lemmy to be rewritten, I'm discussing the topic. It is my least favorite thing about Lemmy, yes, but that doesn't mean I'm disatisfied. I think mods seeing voting is less than ideal, but to be clear, I also think it's fine.
Nothing is perfect, and if that's the compromise for the benefits of Lemmy, it's an acceptable one.
Just before this turns into something where people think I'm outraged or calling for change.
We can discuss things in the abstract.
I appreciate your well-balanced tone and explanation. A rare thing on Lemmy lately.
That is kind of you to remark, thank you.