this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2025
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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.

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[–] remon@ani.social 9 points 2 months ago (8 children)

Public votes are probably the dumbest lemmy "feature", so much unnecessary drama because of it.

[–] ech@lemmy.ca 21 points 2 months ago (4 children)

There's not really a way to do votes privately on a federated system. Unless you're suggesting no votes at all, which could be interesting, but I'm not able to envision a functional way to do that.

[–] jbk@discuss.tchncs.de 4 points 2 months ago (3 children)

didn't piefed or some other alternative to lemmy add that feature

[–] teft@piefed.social 7 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Kbin shows votes i believe. Piefed doesn’t show you who voted. It does show users “attitude” which is a ratio of upvotes to downvotes that the user has given but it isn’t granular to show what they’ve voted on.

[–] AwesomeLowlander@sh.itjust.works 4 points 2 months ago

Piefed implemented it, but it didn't work out for some reason and they ended up having to remove it.

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[–] remon@ani.social 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

There’s not really a way to do votes privately on a federated system.

It's a minor technical problem.

[–] moseschrute@lemmy.world 6 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

How should it work in your opinion? Like technically, how would you federate but also vote privately?

[–] remon@ani.social 7 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

You use a one-way hash instead of the current identifiable key that is used to store the vote value.

[–] jet@hackertalks.com 7 points 2 months ago (6 children)
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[–] Skavau@piefed.social 13 points 2 months ago (19 children)

If you look at Reddit, most new posts on any given community get hit with a flurry of downvotes right out of assembly. Because it's all private.

Having upvotes and downvotes public keeps people, broadly, honest and fair minded in how they vote - and mitigates downvote trolls.

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[–] Valmond@lemmy.world 6 points 2 months ago (4 children)

Maybe votes are stupid to start with, a feelgood up or down vote that does nothing for the conversation.

/Rant I remember when you typed out what you liked or disliked. Before the stupid Facebook thumbs-up. It was better before. /Rant off

[–] ech@lemmy.ca 13 points 2 months ago

Votes on sites like this are an algorithm by way of the masses, rather than what you'd find on centralized sites like yt or the like. It's how the front page gets curated to presumably interesting posts instead of being a random spew of every post made.

[–] kautau@lemmy.world 7 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Perhaps for some posts / comments. But definitely not for all of them. Votes can often be more useful than just feel good or feel bad. Very busy posts often have hundreds of comments. While certainly silly memes and the like may get upvoted there, often relevant or helpful comments do too, with unhelpful or toxic comments generally getting downvoted. Without that system in place I would have to scroll through those hundreds of comments just to find relevant or helpful info instead of not being at the top because the community provided feedback.

[–] atzanteol@sh.itjust.works 4 points 2 months ago

Yeah, I remember dozens of "me too" and "+1" comments after posts people agreed with. It was annoying.

[–] ArgumentativeMonotheist@lemmy.world 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

Agreed. I mean, the chans are like that: if you have something to say, you say it, you can't just e-nod/e-shake your head. And if the forum allows for it, then that should be visible to everyone.

[–] Skavau@piefed.social 2 points 2 months ago (2 children)

The chans also have no quality filter because of this.

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[–] carrylex@lemmy.world 5 points 2 months ago (1 children)
[–] Blaze@lemmy.zip 2 points 2 months ago

I missed that post, thanks

[–] mathemachristian@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

For what its worth before hexbear disabled downvotes they looked at who had been systematically downvoting trans peoples posts and a couple transphobes got purged.

Also any drama is around downvoting, no cries about systematic upvoting. Seems like any drama can be avoided if downvoting is just disabled.

[–] Blaze@lemmy.zip 9 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Also any drama is around downvoting, no cries about systematic upvoting.

Vote manipulation using alt accounts also get dealt with: https://lemmy.ca/post/50545875?scrollToComments=true

[–] socsa@piefed.social 3 points 2 months ago (16 children)

I'm glad more people are starting to come around on this. Maybe rimu will resurrect voting agents for piefed if the sentiment becomes common enough.

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[–] ArgumentativeMonotheist@lemmy.world 3 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

IMO, it enforces some sort of accountability to people's voting behaviour. Some of the online forums I frequent have it by default and I've never had any problems with it, as I can back my downvotes and sad/clown emojis (should be added to Lemmy IMO, makes convos way more fun, lol) with arguments if I'm asked to. 🤷

Having said that (and without knowing anything more about the situation): what a weird and most likely pathetic thing to do by that dude.

[–] remon@ani.social 17 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (6 children)

IMO, it enforces some sort of accountability to people’s voting behaviour.

But that was never something that was needed.

Instead now you get mods like this going around banning people for votes, which is intimidating people from voting and is removing the communities ability to hold bad posts accountable.

[–] Skavau@piefed.social 7 points 2 months ago (2 children)

As I said in this thread to someone else.

There are accounts who genuinely do go around downvoting en masse without any contributions. When I was growing my community, I caught about 5 accounts - some with no post history, and no contribution history on my community doing it. They also had a long mod log history of bans for doing it elsewhere.

So I banned them because they kept burying new posts.

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[–] vga@sopuli.xyz 2 points 2 months ago

At least they can be hidden unlike on some other reddit