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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.
I've seen a lot of discussion on this scattered around. I don't sense popular support across the fediverse for going to anonymous voting.
Downvote noise from random accounts isn't a problem for 90% of communities most of the time - either they don't have anyone like that, or they're simply too big for them to have any impact. I sense the most obvious problem is when you're growing a community and a handful of downvoters latch on, for want of a better word and continually downvote posts - as I did on my community. Until I removed them.
What plugin could you do more damage with?
Having a single voting agent per user doesn't change that though. If you've got downvote trolls you can just ban the voting agent just like you could otherwise ban the sockpuppet. All it does it allow actual users to have a small but important layer of privacy which allows them to vote on content they might not otherwise choose to comment on. The Charlie Kirk thing is an absolutely perfect example of a scenario where one might want to upvote a meme without taking the risk of joining the conversation. Having that vote registered as xxyyttrreedd instead of "socsa" makes it a lot harder for someone to come back a month or a year later and say "wow, I saw my coworker's account name over their shoulder and I can't believe they voted on this meme."
Sorry, so you mean obfuscating identities of voters but they could still be seen as separate 'agents'? So in that way a community owner could ban downvoters, they just wouldn't know who got banned?
Yes, that is exactly how the original piefed implementation worked, which was a fantastic compromise between true anonymous voting and the need for community management. But this wasn't enough for a small subset of admins and mods who did not actually think the issue through, and took offense under the guise of "vote brigading."
I don't recall piefed showing you any voter details before Rimu changed it. I recall it being completely anonymous, and only deweighting downvoters if they did X downvotes in a row (meaning their downvote wouldn't count locally). Then he changed it, and added non-federated voting.
But supposing we had a sort of proxy voting system, whereby a downvote by you is identified under a proxy name - if you got banned by a community moderator for voting like that, wouldn't they instantly see who you were by checking the community ban list?
The way it was implemented was that a user was basically two accounts - one voted, one commented. You could ban either one without knowing the other. The point being that if the issue was vote manipulation, you could ban the voting agent and be done with it. If the issue was as content violation then you could ban the other account and be done with it. It was literally just like having an app where you can log in with two accounts at once and choose which one to use to vote vs comment.
What would "banning the voting agent" look like exactly if it didn't impact the account that triggered the voting agent? Just muted their downvoting? I assume this wouldn't federate out, so wouldn't impact the negative impact of potentially unwelcome and malicious downvoting from that account across the fediverse.