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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.
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.
I'd rather have the "downvote trolls" than abusive mods with a stalking tool.
I banned 5 accounts from my community who were downvoting, between them, every single post. Sometimes straight out of the box. Should I not do that?
Also users profiles are already viewable and usable as a "stalking tool" by the same logic. Do you also object to that?
This is why it would be good to limit downvoting to subscribers only
It should absolutely be an option (it is on Piefed) - not mandatory, but anyone could subscribe to downvote anyway - and doing so would also in itself be harmful for small communities trying to gain new users as they wouldn't have enough subscribers to upvote content posted on the community.
I think upvoting would be allowed even if you are not a subscriber. Only downvoting would be limited in that way. And yes you could get around it, but small obstacles are surprisingly effective because people are lazy (ever try to get someone to switch to the Fediverse? Lol)
Oh, I was just saying how it works on Piefed right now.
It should be an option anyway for communities to implement that if they want.
No, I don't think you should ban people for voting and mods shouldn't even have that info. In extreme cases it is something admins should deal with ... but 5 accounts seems hardly worth bothering over.
No, they are different. Comments are primarily about expressing your opinion, wouldn't make sense for them to not be public (that would just be 4chan). Votes don't need that.
5 accounts who between them downvoted everything I posted. 3 of them literally had no post history, and had multiple bans from other communities for the same behaviour. They were literally just doing the equivalent of vandalism.
They hurt the growth of my community and offered it nothing.
Yes, I understand your situation. It's a price I'm willing to pay for private votes.
I think it would be long term corrosive to the honesty of the fediverse, and fall into the same trapping as reddit.
I think the same way about public votes. It is one of the few things reddit did right (compared to other platforms with "likes" and such).
I truly don't see how. If you just mean mod abuse, mods will always abuse their power on any site - and the structure of the fediverse makes any mod anywhere more accountable than they are on reddit for bad faith moderating.
It's not just about that. It's also an important metric to gauge how the bigger "hivemind" is feeling about something, without having to fear that people will self-censor. Especially on lemmy with it's extremely narrow filter bubbles. Voting is effectively obsolete if every niche community can pretend to be "popular" by banning everyone that downvotes their stuff.
Niche communities who might be targeted by disproportionate amounts of downvoting are unlikely to surge into /all/ just because they ban people who downvote everything from there. The topic would still be niche.
People still downvote in a specific sense all across the fediverse. It is almost always mass downvoters who get banned by community moderators for that conduct, not people who upvote or downvote selectively in good faith based on specific grievances with the content of the post.
Right and that's exactly why I think it should be private. Because it shouldn't be up to moderators to decide what "good faith" is. If someone wants to just have lurker account and downvote stuff on /all all day ... that's legitimate use of the feature.
If you are one person with one account, you should be able to vote however you like without repercussions.
I disagree. Mods can make these decisions, the modlogs are public and accountable (I'm for accountability in both ways) and the community - and instance admins can intervene if they think the moderators themselves are responding in bad faith. Private voting across the fediverse, where plenty of users have multiple accounts spread out across the fediverse on different instances would invite a ton of mass-downvoting as it could be done with relative ease.
And it's my legitimate use as a moderator to determine that someone who does that is not part of any community I am building, and is actively vandalous towards it.
If it is proper coordinated or autmated mass-downvoting campaign that should be a job for the admins.
Yes, that's how it currently works. I'm arguing it shouldn't work like this for votes.
It would just be one person. But it wouldn't even necessarily be noticed to be reported to the admins.
Oh well. It's been like this for years now and I think broadly speaking, it has majority approval because of how it cultivates a high-trust culture.