User "threelonmusketeers@sh.itjust.works" is banning users for downvoting his posts.

We don't need Reddit's power tripping back

Do you really expect the platform that lets anybody form their personal power tripping fiefdom to inexplicably not draw those people in? No centralization doesn't mean you're free of the particular flavor of power tripping you experienced, it means there are many cells of various levels of power tripping with little to no oversight.
- The federative structure of the fediverse means that your average community moderator is way more accountable than a subreddit moderator is on reddit, to be fair.

That mod is also literally the only active user in that group. Your post is the most attention it's ever got.

And this is the second time in just over a day that I've seen moderators abusing the ability to monitor how people vote.
This behaviour undermines good faith participation. Users should not be afraid of copping bans for using the downvote button as they feel is appropriate.
- This behaviour undermines good faith participation. Users should not be afraid of copping bans for using the downvote button as they feel is appropriate.
  As a moderator, I can see who votes on what and how in my community. But it is not my job to really do anything with that information (except if I notice a brigading attack / vote manipulation, then I might keep an eye on users for that). So I don't even look at them. The community hasn't been brigaded yet, and since its a moderately low traffic community, it would be pretty obvious if that ever happened.
  But votes are information that normal users should definitely not be able to see at all. Eventually, sooner than later most likely, it will lead to "User X voted 'wrong' on Y" posts. You and I both know Lemmy users cannot be trusted to be mature enough to not do that kind of Fecal Flinging, especially from the comfort of online anonymity, and once that starts it's not going to stop.
  Users upvote or downvote posts for ten million different reasons. Nobody should feel like they can't vote how they want on a post for fear of a moderator ban or other users yelling at them. If they are engaging in vote manipulation, its a different story, but people doing that are not only using a single account, so they know what they are doing and should expect nevative consequences. I'm not disagreeing with what you're saying, just adding on that beyond a moderator's ethical duty regarding (not) taking action for vote activity, normal users should also be held to the same ethical duty.
- Hey I just wanna pop in and say I crossposted your post about lemmyusa over to power tripping bastards on dbzero the other day, and we actually had a mod from there come on and discuss things.
  I think its a bit more complex than just... them clearly doing mod abuse or manipulation.
  From their POV, they were basically getting hit with a mass wave of downvotes, as well as some genuinely unnaceptable harassment... and they basically panicked and went into lockdown mode.
  Maybe you would be interested in adding to that discussion?
  https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/53271052
  Also, just... in general, the whole point of the ye power trippin bastards comm is to report and discuss potential mod/admin abuse scenarios, in case you'd maybe like to post stuff there yourself...
  You ... seem to be on something of a tear of call outs, so, maybe you'd be interested.
  EDIT: There's... in theory at least, supposed to be more of a structured way of making such a report... which ironically i kinda sorta broke by doing a crosspost, but uh ... ???
  Anyway, more specifically relevant to this threelon person... yeah i dont find this behavior surprising, they are obviously a massive elon stan and their personality is collapsing as it becomes harder and harder to deny that, even in just a purely technical sense, leaving politics as far aside as possible... yeah elon is actually just a con artist fradulent idiot.
- It's also blatant vote manipulation in keeping their personal content from being lower on the front page. Ban all the downvoters and suddenly your posts look very popular!
- Yeah on closer look it seems like this particular baby strawberry is also a mod on nearly 50 other groups across more than 10 instances. Not good.

Power hungry people seeking validation without real-world obligations.
- And no real power either.
- Not all mods are like that, of course. My instance admins had to ask me like three times to be a moderator for one of their communities because I refused them multiple times. I only said yes because it was an unmoderated/undermoderated (at the time), low traffic community, and felt bad that I had refused so many times.
  I used to be a forum admin for a gaming/programming forum with what I would say is high traffic (1000+ active concurrent users daily), and moderating that felt like a full-time job, and I had appointed like 10 other moderators to help. I don't have time for that no more lol.
People with a very high sense of responsability towards others generally avoid taking on responsabilities were their own mistakes might cause problems to others - for them such positions are a "weight on their shoulders".
People who seek power, on the other hand, generally tend to do it because of perceived social prestige or what they can do with that power. The less they feel that sense of responsabiliy to offset such attractive elements in having power the more they want power.
This is a well known phenomenon: for example there are tons of sayings about how (political) power should be given to those who do not want it not those who want it, and there's actually a Harvard Business Review article from over a decade ago about how they investigated this in companies and found that companies where the CEO unexpectedly got the position rather than seek it, in average outperformed the rest of their industry.

Rule #0.0
Don't hurt moddy-woddy's fee-fees.

This is a certified True and Real rule. I checked.

I made the list!

I upvote most of threelonmusketeers' posts (voyager confirms my votes are net +44) , but my down vote finger gets itchy when I see a string of pro Elmo content.

Not sure about that specific case.

You’ve found Elons alt

I doubt he'd bother w/ Lemmy. If he did, he'd just pay someone to do it, just like he does w/ video games.

So it's literally just Elon.

I don't know if this is even about Elon any more, it's grown so much. Like a mushroom on a cow patty.
Going by the name, three Elons in a cassock.

I hope that dipshit is reading this thread. Ban me, too!

Yeee, I’m in this pic and I like it! Good job me 🫶

kind of the dark side of the reddits/lemmys. Mods just doing whatever they like. btw, fuck Elon musk, that guy sucks. and fuck threelonmusketeers@sh.itjust.works. What a snowflake douchebag.

Vote visibility is off by default (IIRC) on reddit so at least there folks wouldn't be banned just for downvoting someone.
- Votes are visible to mods for at least six months

90% of my downvotes are unintentional. The other 10% are for people who use alternating case. I have half a mind to go downvote everything in this boring company community though, just for laughs.

Thanks for the heads up I'm gonna go get banned from a shitty elon musk fan community. Badge of honor as far as I'm concerned

I don't get it. Is he like... doing an Elon Musk impression...? Is this performance art...? I don't get it

Or maybe he is... No... It can't be... Elon?
- I wouldn't be shocked.

What do you expect from the mod of a grifting comm?

You can't hang out in a shithole without getting a little shitty.

Public votes are probably the dumbest lemmy "feature", so much unnecessary drama because of it.

There's not really a way to do votes privately on a federated system. Unless you're suggesting no votes at all, which could be interesting, but I'm not able to envision a functional way to do that.
- There’s not really a way to do votes privately on a federated system.
  It's a minor technical problem.
- didn't piefed or some other alternative to lemmy add that feature
- Thinking out loud, one way hashes would work as a way to keep the id of user votes secret whilst avoiding vote duplication.
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.
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. 🤷
Having said that (and without knowing anything more about the situation): what a weird and most likely pathetic thing to do by that dude.
- IMO, it enforces some sort of accountability to people’s voting behaviour.
  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.
For what its worth before hexbear disabled downvotes they looked at who had been systematically downvoting trans peoples posts and a couple transphobes got purged.
Also any drama is around downvoting, no cries about systematic upvoting. Seems like any drama can be avoided if downvoting is just disabled.
- Also any drama is around downvoting, no cries about systematic upvoting.
  Vote manipulation using alt accounts also get dealt with: https://lemmy.ca/post/50545875?scrollToComments=true
Maybe votes are stupid to start with, a feelgood up or down vote that does nothing for the conversation.
/Rant I remember when you typed out what you liked or disliked. Before the stupid Facebook thumbs-up. It was better before. /Rant off
- Votes on sites like this are an algorithm by way of the masses, rather than what you'd find on centralized sites like yt or the like. It's how the front page gets curated to presumably interesting posts instead of being a random spew of every post made.
- Perhaps for some posts / comments. But definitely not for all of them. Votes can often be more useful than just feel good or feel bad. Very busy posts often have hundreds of comments. While certainly silly memes and the like may get upvoted there, often relevant or helpful comments do too, with unhelpful or toxic comments generally getting downvoted. Without that system in place I would have to scroll through those hundreds of comments just to find relevant or helpful info instead of not being at the top because the community provided feedback.
- Yeah, I remember dozens of "me too" and "+1" comments after posts people agreed with. It was annoying.
- Agreed. I mean, the chans are like that: if you have something to say, you say it, you can't just e-nod/e-shake your head. And if the forum allows for it, then that should be visible to everyone.
We literally had this discussion yesterday...
- I missed that post, thanks
I'm glad more people are starting to come around on this. Maybe rimu will resurrect voting agents for piefed if the sentiment becomes common enough.
- 👀

Wow, not even making up a lie, just straight up saying they're banning for down voting.

Oh hi, this post is about me!

I'm experimenting with the moderation policy for niche communities described by @jet@hackertalks.com.

@TheDude@sh.itjust.works, do you have any issues with this?

Punishing users for their individual votes is mod abuse and vote manipulation. You are removing the voting rights of users who dislike your content.
The only acceptable grounds for banning a user based on their votes would be using a sock puppet to vote on a single post or comment multiple times.
If people think your posts are shit, they should be allowed to express that without fear of phantom banning. Suck it up, or delete your account.
- The only acceptable grounds for banning a user based on their votes would be using a sock puppet to vote on a single post or comment multiple times.
  What about if someone entered the community to mass downvote everything? Or did so every day?
  If people think your posts are shit, they should be allowed to express that without fear of phantom banning. Suck it up, or delete your account.
  If I made a metal music community, and an account came in every day to downvote every post because they don't like metal - would I be justified in banning them for that?
- You can express yourself. You can make a post in the community and engage in a dialogue. You can make a post another community, such as this one, complaining about the original community. You can make a new community where you just complain about the other community. You're free to express yourself. But for people who want to participate in the community it should be for them
- hear hear
That is some total whackjob reasoning.
A community means EXCLUDING people who don’t share a interest.
The actual fuck? This is the dumbest take I've seen in a while (yeah, including all the commentary around the Charlie Kirk shooting), and they try to justify it as being a rephrasing of "A community is for people who share an interest"?
This is just an unhinged way of justifying isolationism and silencing critics. It reads like it was written by the mods of r/conservative. Go touch some fuckin' grass, dude.
- Hi I'm the wackjob, communities are places around the topic, and they're focused on people who want to talk about that topic. If you go to the chess club and you want to talk about motorsports, it's not going to be great for people. You be asked to leave eventually. Especially if you keep revving your bike in the chess club.
- The actual fuck? This is the dumbest take I've seen in a while (yeah, including all the commentary around the Charlie Kirk shooting), a
  So trans communities should keep TERFs around ?
- Not speaking to the particular community in the OP, but this can be valid in non-political contexts. If I made a metal music community, and an account came in every day to downvote every post because they don't like metal - would I be justified in banning them for that?
  Would it be fair minded to downvote like that?
moderation policy for niche communities
That's a whole lot of mental gymnastics to try to justify enforcing toxic positivity.
- The coward's way: don't explain why you did what you did clearly, just obfuscate/point towards some "guideline". 🙄
Looking at your mod log in detail, here is some feedback:
Consider not banning on a single vote, look for intentionality (bad community fit)
Someone might have simply miss-swipped
lemvotes is a great tool to identify sockpuppet accounts
Publish in the community sidebar your policy (or just link to my post) and make it clear if people can request a unbanning (accidents happen)
Here is a great (trivial to identify) example of a sockpuppets being used on your community right now:
https://lemvotes.org/user/deadcream@sopuli.xyz
https://lemvotes.org/user/Aedis@lemmy.world
- Hi Jet, thanks for the feedback.
  Publish in the community sidebar your policy (or just link to my post) and make it clear if people can request a unbanning (accidents happen)
  Done.
  look for intentionality (bad community fit)
  What would you recommend for "drive-by" downvotes from /all? Does it always make sense to "wait for the second downvote" from a given account? On a practical level, this is difficult to keep track of as a moderator.
  lemvotes is a great tool to identify sockpuppet accounts
  Thanks for the tip. Is there a way to filter an account's votes by community?
You can be on topic and have the wrong take, so wrong that people simply think it's not productive to the conversation and as such the downvote is warranted. What are you doing, my guy?
Everyone has issues with it. You're abusing the concept of the fediverse with such power tripping
hi i love this idea and have a niche community on lemmy.world that id like to remove the phantom downvoters from. I see under each post where it says Show Votes and i click it and get this. heres an example.
but if i touch a person it just brings me to their account.
If someone has never said anything in the community, how can I block them from that community? thank you!
- I don't think you can do it from the standard Lemmy UI, but you can use Tesseract front-end (tesh.itjust.works) to ban/unban a user by searching for their username.
cool idea :)
From your link:
Shielding members of a community from external forces that would diminish or prevent free expression in that community is one of the major responsibilities of a community runner.
This is a noble intention and not without merit. However it completely falls apart when it's YOUR posts that you're banning people for downvoting.
- it completely falls apart when it’s YOUR posts
  For many niche communities, the moderator is very often the sole poster as well. While I can see the perceived conflict of interest, kickstarting niche communities is challenging.

BRB, gonna downvote all his posts so I don't have to bother blocking that community.

(I also blocked it anyway.)

this is “downvote trolling”….
basically if you have a community that a lot of people hate, people will come in and downvote everything… some will even subscribe and downvote everything.
so, obviously “the boring company” will get a lot of musk hate (and i hate musk).
but yeah, if someone never participates in a comm and just shows up to downvote totally on-topic posts it makes sense to ban them….
…
i’ve been permanently shadowbanned from communities i totally liked and agreed with for making a comment that reasonably stated a disagreement with a post… banning for downvote trolling makes sense… even though i do hate Elon Musk….
(the whole boring company community should be deleted because it’s a company owned by a literal Nazi).

What are you talking about? Shows up in a community? People see Musk fellatio posts in their All feed and downvote it. Lemmy communities aren't a closed thing and banning people for voting is dumb.
- i usually read all and i’ve never seen a boring company comm on my front page….
  but “the lemmy way” is supposed to be: downvote if off-topic, spam or trolling, or some such, up vote if you like it…
  not downvote if you disagree… lemmy is just too small for that at this point.
  there are a lot of unpopular communities that deserve to exist that would be obliterated if everyone that hates them voted their posts down.
  If you hate a community that shows up, just block that one community and it’s gone for you.
  you can block entire instances for yourself….
  i don’t think it should be allowed to exist at all, as the owner did the whole sieg heil salute and a bunch of other nazi stuff… but that’s an issue to take up with the instance, and i encourage you to do so and i’ll write them myself….
  but in general, banning someone who only downvotes, downvotes “good” posts that should be on the community, makes complete sense.
- I mean, the result would be the content you downvote whenever you see it no longer showing up in your feed, so it kinda makes sense?
  I'm pretty sure I'm banned from a few AI slop communities for the same reason, and I don't really have a problem with it XD

The message is “If you disagree with me, you will be banned”

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.

If your posts turn up in /c/all they're going to get treated accordingly.
And this is fine. /c/all should let users downvote posts they don't like so popular stuff can rise to the top. That's what makes /c/all sometimes worth looking at.
Otherwise, it'll just fill up with all sorts of crap from communities with no downvoting rules, including edgy borderline racist stuff that's not quite bad enough to get banned, or just shitty positivity memes copied from somewhere else.
Your problem is that you can't delist your community from /c/all. That sucks, but right now your posts are turning up in two different communities with different expectations and you just need to deal with that.
- Your problem is that you can’t delist your community from /c/all.
  Your admin can, that's a more effective way to deal with that than downvoting
- Otherwise, it’ll just fill up with all sorts of crap from communities with no downvoting rules, including edgy borderline racist stuff that’s not quite bad enough to get banned.
  I may be wrong, but admins will be able to configure what communities should be visible in the public view. So your instance would not show on their frontpage things that are not representative of the instance
  For users themselves who are browsing by /all and feel justified in downvoting because they don't like what they see, it's a different story. If a community is (in their view) problematic, they can simply block it. Downvoting has no place in their curation.
- And this is fine. /c/all should let users downvote posts they don't like so popular stuff can rise to the top. That's what makes /c/all sometimes worth looking at.
  Yeah, but community moderators also have the ability to look at those downvotes and react accordingly.
  Your problem is that you can't delist your community from /c/all. That sucks, but right now your posts are turning up in two different communities with different expectations and you just need to deal with that.
  Sure. I don't want to delist /my/ community from /all/ but if someone did downvote every post on the community made in the last day, I might consider that mass-downvoting from someone who doesn't like the topic and react accordingly.
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?
- Why would I want to promote a point of view I don’t agree with?
  Because you also wouldn't like those that disagree with you to essentially censor you. I.e. the golden rule, do unto others as you would have them do to you. If you don't want to be censored because of your personal opinion, maybe don't do the same to others either.
  Now a downvote is not really "censorship", but still, I would say you should still have respect for an opinion that is different from your own (provided it's not a completely unreasonable opinion). That respect should be enough to prevent you from downvoting such an opinion, I feel.
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.
Never was. It was a wish by some but not it was always an impossible one.
- My Reddit account is from 2006. I joined it when Aaron Swartz was still working there.
  In the very early days, it was like that. Even it was an unwritten rule, people expected to see disagreement in a conversation, not in a vote count. Only spammers would get mass-downvotes.
While that was the intent of upvote/downvote in some places early on, virtually nobody has actually done that to a sufficient degree for it to not be agree/disagree.
- I guess I'm one of those old dinosaur users that still tries and mostly adheres to that old unwritten rule but the lines of inflammatory BS, rampant strawman, whatboutism with disagreements has made it so much harder.

This is something that would definitely be better to message the instance admins directly over, and not turn into a public Tomato Toss. I don't know the specifics, but there could be a reason for this (potentially Anti-Vote Brigading). When in doubt, contact the instance admins, and if they don't respond or don't do anything, then create a new account on a different home instance. That is the point of the fediverse.

If you don't like a community's content, ignore/block it. Why are you downvoting a bunch of stuff?

because downvoting is one of the central actions pivotal to the kind of social media that Lemmy/piefed/reddit is.
- Yeah, that's great for flagging spam or stuff that's not relevant to the community it's posted in. Downvoting content that's good for a community just because you don't like the community is like the godbotherers that yell at people about sin during pride celebrations. Don't be like them.
- Votes are (or were) only meant to work as a signal of what the community thinks to be relevant. This is especially important for niche communities. You are being borderline authoritarian when you are not part of a community and you still think that the whole site needs to have a say in their discussion.
- For real. What they're missing is that Lemmy/Reddit display posts outside of their community, aggregating every post to an "/all" feed, and up/downvotes help sort the posts by Hot, Top and such.

I remember blocking this account on my personal feed and wondering if I did so prematurely. I'm thinking I made the right decision at the right time.

How do they even know you downvoted? I was banned from a carnivore's communities once and can't say I'd ever even seen them. Claimed I was committing "systemic downvoting." Even if I had, how would they know? I started some tiny little communities on another instance, just to learn really, ~~and I have no such privied data available to me as a mod (at least not that I know of so far)~~. I should have posted that weirdo.

I should have posted that weirdo.
Please do, holding people accountable is half the fun of lemmy.
- Now that I understand the mechanics of it all slightly better, I wouldn't let that happen again.
Because community moderators can see upvotes and downvotes of comments and posts on their community. Anyone can as well with Lemvotes.
- We can see exactly how each person votes? I'm on piefed.social too and must be staring right at the thing but not recognizing it.
- Today I learned! I'm surprised, knowing what I know now, that I haven't been banned from more sublemmys. Ah, well. The day is young.
FWIW the account you are using now hasn't been banned from anything.
- Thanks. Good to know. My account on this instance is pretty new. If I remember correctly, those bans happened to my piefed account.

Ngl seems like a boring community