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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's frankly terrifying how Reddit is now both what the major LLMs are trained on and what most search engines return as the top result for a lot of searches, when you look at the degree with which arbitrary shadowbanning, bans for posting in the "wrong" other subs, flair requirements etc all come together to make these huge self-censoring subs where the manufactured consensus is controlled by a shadowy cabal with no real oversight.
Time was that you knew when you were in a bubble and what shape that bubble was; the left-wing subs were overtly left-wing and stated as much in their description, the right-wing subs were likewise explicitly right-wing, and the topic subs were explicitly about that topic. But nowadays you have subs that are ostensibly about personal finance or history or funny memes or whatever, where an outside reader looking in has literally no idea that anyone who's ever also made a post in r/politics gets their post automatically and silently hidden with no notification, and what they're reading is a secretly curated wall of propaganda.