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...

the whole "if you don't like the content, don't downvote, but just ignore / block it" is really cringe
It depends. If there's certain types of content you don't like that a community mostly deals in, you downvoting it effectively means you're downvoting almost everything on there - and at that point, it's just little more than a very crude attempt at community vandalism.
Your voice matters. Downvoting can be useful to prevent echo chambers (ex: downvoting lemmy.ml bs)
Now if the thing is just not fundamentally wrong like it’s just subjective and you don’t like it, yea it could harm, but the most likely is that less people will do it than people liking this type of content will upvote
Its only really problematic on smaller instances or if you do it continuously for every single post without a good valid reason
And that's closer to what I am referring to. If someone just hates movies or TV and doesn't want to see it on their feed, they should block it rather than downvote every post from movies and television communities. They aren't somehow mitigating an echo chamber by signifying how they hate movies and TV content. They're just vandalising it.
Yea for sure
I believe most "vote manipulation" bans aren’t really on that case though
It’s mostly "you strongly disagree with us? Fuck you!"
Yeah, I mean I wouldn't call it "manipulation". Just vandalism in this case.