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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.
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. π€·
Having said that (and without knowing anything more about the situation): what a weird and most likely pathetic thing to do by that dude.
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.
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.
Doesn't seem sound like a major problem to me.
It is to growing communities. My community is large and not controversial enough to worry about that much now. But it was not always like that
I feel like it is to a certain degree, to discourage trigger-happy voting behaviour that pushes the masses one way or another... this dude is just a clown.
But these clowns are surprisingly common and much more of a problem than some trigger happy votes.
Then power-hungry moderators who behave like this can sully their reputation, risk the ire of the instance admin who may remove them over this, and if not - also risk the ire of the fediverse who might just recreate their community on another instance and supplant them.
And it's a lot easier to notice and act on bad behavior when activity is public. Maybe on a centralized service that can afford full time moderation staff, you could restrict that information more effectively, but considering the fediverse is community driven, I think this is an effective choice
You're probably right about that.