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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.
It used to be that votes were meant to be used as an indicator of the quality of the post according to the community guidelines, not how "agreeable" a comment or post is. This cultural change is one the most toxic behaviors that made Reddit such a crappy place for discussion.
This was already bad on Reddit, but at least there one could avoid this problem because people were used to browse only the subreddits they subscribed to, so niche subreddits could still have some semblance of "good" community participation. On Lemmy, most people browse by /all and lots of them still treat the downvote button as a some mechanism to train an algorithm. These users are the worst.
In the beginning, I was actually sending DMs to people asking them to please not downvote something if they were not part of the community and their reaction was basically "I don't want to see this, so I will downvote to bury it" (completely ignoring the fact that they could simply hide the post or stop browsing by /all).
So, while "banning everyone who downvotes the post" might seem an overreaction, I could definitely see a moderator could flag a vote as coming from a non-community member and use that flag to ignore their votes in the ranking systems, and I would love to have a bot that auto-messages every clueless downvoter explaining the proper netiquette around votes for non-community members.
I personally prefer to downvote what I don't agree with. Why would I want to promote a point of view I don't agree with?
Yeah, I mean it depends - doesn't it? If someone is expressing a text-based opinion post you dislike, I can see that. If you think the articles source is corrosive - I can see that. If you think its off-topic, I can see that.
But supposing someone found a metal music community, and downvoted everything there because they don't like metal - would that be reasonable?
That probably wouldn’t and would obviously be vote manipulation. This situation is pretty rare and is ignored, like on YouTube, because people get bored and most people wont go out of their way to do this
Problem is: Lemmy's algorithm is shit and doesn’t learn from our preferences. If it did, we would see less posts that we dislike
People just can’t stand being disliked. Should we ban people disliking crypto posts? Because damn most of my posts are disliked based on people hating and spreading lies about crypto just because they dislike it
People looking for stuff will find it if they want to, no matter the amount of dislikes
Piefed has keyword filters that can help with that issue.
Keywords filters are really basic. Most people don't want to bother with that, or risk hiding interesting posts
I filtered "musk", "trump", reduced the amount of US politics post tremendously
I might add "kirk" at some point, depending how much it's still discussed in the coming weeks
great way to avoid the drama, but there's a risk of false positives
I guess you don't mind it, probably not losing anything of value
I don't even live in the US, so indeed the risk of missing something relevant to me is quite low
Absolutely, it is rare. But people do it. As I've said before, I banned 5 people on the original !television@lemm.ee instance for just downvoting posts repeatedly. No pattern. None of the accounts were active on the community in terms of posting. Some of the accounts had never even posted on the fediverse - they were simply downvote accounts that purely existed to vote negatively on content.
Piefed has much more control here. People can easily just block communities though.