First ban on my new account! Once again for voting "wrong"...in the "voting community" 😑

Downvoting aside, not actually giving a reason for a ban is really stupid and comes across as being done in bad faith, imo. That alone makes this feel unjust to me.

Regarding downvotes, can someone explain to me why it's bad or wrong? I've posted my drawings before and they were downvoted. While that stung a little, isn't this just the nature of the internet?

There are bot accounts who will down vote everything either specific user or community.
That's how it started but like everything else we got zealots doing a witch hunt because modding is just pre text for censorship
Fedi doesn't get enough bad behaviour so they are harassing random people
Regarding downvotes, can someone explain to me why it’s bad or wrong? I’ve posted my drawings before and they were downvoted.
Now imagine you had your own community centered around your art. And instead of someone just not liking your work, there's this one person who goes out of their way to downvote everything you post, no matter what it is. He doesn’t block your community. He actually waits around just to downvote your stuff.
Now let’s say you have another community. Not art-related at all. It’s about pears. That’s right, just pears. Poems about pears, pictures of pears, pear facts. Suddenly, every single post gets downvoted.
And guess what? It’s the same guy.
Sounds weird, right? Like what kind of person follows you around the platform just to downvote everything?
Let’s take it a step further. You look up the guy’s profile and realize he’s never posted anything. No comments. Nothing. Out of curiosity, you check his voting history and it turns out all he does on Lemmy is downvote every new post he sees.
Creepy, right? But also way more common than you’d think. That’s why you keep seeing this topic pop up.
Everything I described has happened to me. Sometimes all of it, sometimes just parts. But I’ve definitely run into people on Lemmy who downvote just because they think it’s funny. For me, some people just downvote my shit because of my name and the fact they don't like me. And they have been very open about it.
One guy even said about me, "I can't help it. I see Universal Monk's name. I downvote."
Lemmy seems to attract folks who are a little more extreme in their obsessive behavior than other platforms. Sure, a few users have been wrongly banned here and there for downvoting. But the number of serial downvoters here is ridiculous, especially the extreme political types or the hardcore anti-AI crowd.
I had someone downvote some stories I posted the other day. In a pattern that seemed to imply he didn't actually read them. But he let me know that it's because he didn't like the cover art or the story subject (Trump, hamsters, vampire nuns with strap-ons, and nutraloaf).
That kind of downvoting is fine and what the button is for. But it's not like he went in and downvoted everything.
And since he didn't like my writing style, he blocked the community so he doesn't have to see my posts there (I post a lot). That's how Lemmy should work.
And of course I didn't ban him; he didn't do anything wrong.
- You are in too deep.

I've been banned from a community that I wasn't part of just because, while browsing /all, a post with some stupid take came up and I downvoted it. I rarely downvote and I only do when it's really an awful take or harmful content but apparently, the mod didn't like that.

The smell of freedom can be felt from miles when a sub includes a rule of "no downvoting"

Only toxic positivity in the building!
- But onky the kind that the komisar approves
A long time ago I downvoted a bunch of posts from a person spamming and got banned from a half dozen unrelated communities for being a "mass downvoter"
Technically true, I've probably downvoted more posts than upvoted. But to ban someone for using fediverse features as designed? I dunno
- I'm not a serial downvoter. I maybe downvote around 10% of what I upvote, and that's considering that I regularly browse /all and find spam that I downvote and report, so I wouldn't call myself a "mass downvoter". It was also the first (and only) time I downvoted in that community. Some mods really don't like disent. But it's fine, I only found out because I went to the modlog to check something else and found out that I was banned. I suppose if I didn't even notice that I was banned, it means I'll be able to survive the experience.

PTB. If that's their position, they should be using an instance that disables downvotes.

It's worse than that. The community is one where voting, either up or down, is the primary intended form of interaction. Well, at least that's what they say.
Edit: Ah, actually, maybe I misunderstood that. I read the message that each post has and took it as voting voting, but it could mean text voting.
Or they can just ban blanket downvoting dicks.
- 3 is not a blanket

Also! We still can't block communities we've been banned from? Wtf?

The more I use this software the more problems I see, not surprising given the developers. Hopefully Piefed can keep up with quality control over time.

You can block communities you're banned from, just not from the sidebar.
But if you go to your settings -> blocks you can add it.
- Thanks for pointing this out!
Its the first time Im hearing about this problem. If no one reports it on the issue tracker we cant fix it.
Edit: You can block a community that banned you under /settings, but not directly on the community page. Issue link
Didn't piefed came with built-in echo chamber features, hiding downvoted comments by default and marking people who get downvotes with special marks?
I think in that scenario bans because downvoting patterns would be far more aggressive
- Yes, and maybe, plus no.
  When individual users have more tools to work with, the mods don't have to be as authoritarian. e.g. if a bunch of people complain to a mod of a European community that there are too many posts mentioning Donald Trump and Elon Musk, then with PieFed the individual users can use the keyword filtering tools to tailor their personal view of the shared community content to accomplish that end (best of all there, the options include not only All and None but to filter Some of the content).
  Another example is that by labeling highly contentious users, e.g. those who receive >10x more downvotes than upvotes, the users themselves can make the choice as to whether to engage or simply keep scrolling, i.e. providing additional options beyond simply block vs. allow. People that would otherwise be blocked will likely have their content be more exposed rather than less using this tool - or at least that's one possiblity, which Lemmy did not allow or provide for (offering only Block vs. not, with nothing whatsoever in-between).
  Still another example are people who post 10x more often than comment - a potential unregistered bot account, where I guess commenting on their posts could be a waste of time if many people block that account and thus a reply on those posts is unlikely to ever be seen by an actual human?
  And still another example is new accounts, less than a couple weeks old, so that your reply may be different to them than an established user.
  Yes PieFed can also automatically collapse or hide content based on downvotes received. I have these features turned off but if someone wants them on, then such a person might be better off to use them, rather than feel tempted to downvote or comment on such controversial content? (Edit: imagine a world where instead of comments like "this take is disgusting, you should be ashamed of yourself for not thinking precisely as I personally do myself!", those who don't want to see such things do not have to, while those that do can have a genuine back-and-forth discussion without such noise. Good fences make good neighbors? This seems the polar opposite of an echo chamber where everyone simply MUST view the same content in one of the same identical manner of options provided, because those are the only options that the developers have deigned to allow for.)
  A CRUCIAL difference here is that all of these features above are implemented at the level of individual users, making their own personal choices about what they want to see or not see. Lemmy mainly provides features to instance admins and community mods, but by shifting the choices downwards to the user level, it's a whole new era in content management, having democratized the process, or at least allowing more for that, rather than leaving all the capabilities - along with all the responsibilities - in the hands of the authority figures higher up in the hierarchy?
  I will leave it as an exercise to prove whether putting power into the hands of the people rather than concentrating it into the hands of a few is "good" or not (my personal opinion is that it's great!), but objectively PieFed seems to offer far more "freedom" to end-users than Lemmy, as I understand it. (Edit: I guess I am saying that if Lemmy is akin to Windows where Big Daddy is always right, not only but especially when he is wrong:-P, because that is simply the only option made available to people - to either stay or go, fully block or fully allow, nothing in-between is provided for - then PieFed is Linux leaving it up to the user to decide individually what is right for them, by tailoring their customization options to suit their desires. Yes that theoretically could lead to an echo chamber where everyone must use a wide variety of flavors of Linux, in which case yes some could make the "wrong" choice - although I would argue there, why is it wrong if that is what they desire? - but don't forget that the alternative is somehow even more of an echo chamber where everyone must use Windows, so I for one don't see the addition of these new features as a bad thing? I suppose time will tell.)
- Anything which will cause users of an instance I block to actually be hidden from comment sections I read will be a massive improvement over Lemmy.
  When I block .world, it's because I don't wish to continue being exposed to .world style takes from .world users. Not sure why this is so hard for the devs of Lemmy to understand.

Hhmmmm yeas. Very wise.

Another day, another reason why the fediverse needs private voting. It's a shame rimu gave into politics and killed the feature from piefed the moment it became a slightly sticky issue.

Private voting will open the door to massive astroturfing
- I care about that far less than I care about not having every vote I cast recorded forever by anyone subscribed to the fediverse feed. I care about that far less than power tripping mods and admins being terminally online and using that vote for censorship purposes.
  At the end of the day, brigading is mostly an ego thing anyway. If you just stop caring about votes then they can't hurt you.
  Having votes be public doesn't actually fix the astroturfing problem anyway since it's still possible to just create sockpuppet accounts anyway. To a bad actors, it doesn't matter if that sockpuppet is voting from the plaintext user string, or an agent pseudonym. Someone who wants to bot farm the fediverse will still make it happen.
  If anything, public votes will make the inevitable enshitification of the fediverse worse, because it will give the viral marketing and political sockpuppet accounts more engagement to parse.
- Pretty sure it's already here
I disagree. That some community owners are petty about it doesn't mean that it doesn't cultivate a wider high-trust community.
Private things just don't mesh with the fediverse, tech wise. Your dms aren't actually private fyi

We still can’t block communities we’ve been banned from?

It seems like at least ten times a week in this community we have to tell people that yes, you can block communities you are banned from so they don’t show up in All.

Yeah, it's so obvious from the completely blocked out sidebar 🙄
Also, the dev of Lemmy didn't know it was an issue, so maybe give regular users a break, yeah? https://lemmy.ca/post/48869739/18052704
- Use. Your. Settings. Page.

For those curious, it was @pelespirit@sh.itjust.works

Is wiseposting supposed to be ironic? Cause that might explain it. Or maybe the goal is to spur discussion instead of simple votes. I dunno I'm too tired and lazy to go check the community right now.

Did you do anything else in the community in question apart from downvoting? Posts, upvotes?

My app lets me block any community.

https://lemvotes.org/user/ech@lemmy.ca

List of votes for ech@lemmy.ca:
Total post upvotes: 28
Total post downvotes: 68
Total comment upvotes: 532
Total comment downvotes: 333

And your old lemm.ee account

https://lemvotes.org/user/ech@lemm.ee
Total post upvotes: 165
Total post downvotes: 905
Total comment upvotes: 4848
Total comment downvotes: 3841

Out of curiosity, what was your motivation for posting this?
- The OP made a post about their own voting behavior being a issue a moderator banned them for. Looking at their voting record is part of evaluating the the amount of Power Tripping Bastard the moderator is. OP is inviting us to examine their situation to render a judgement.
  Their extreme preference for downvoting is a factor here, it is illustrated by their voting record.
Those are rookie ratios, gotta pump those numbers up.
I'm sure mine is much worse because I think this place is full x with idiots and bad opinions.
- List of votes for bananaisaberrylemmy.zip:
  Total post upvotes: 8
  Total post downvotes: 15
  Total comment upvotes: 107
  Total comment downvotes: 90
  Not bad, not bad!
Interesting data
Damn. I'm a really apathetic voter.
- I upvote way more than I expected to. It feels like all I do is downvote, but my ratio is a bit less than 2:1 in favor of upvotes.
What a creepy thing to post.
- Only if it demonstrates a creep.
Ooo! Someone is triggered. The sockpuppets are coming out to vote on this comment....
https://lemvotes.org/user/giacomo@lemmy.dbzer0.com
I don't have a dog in this fight, the data is the data, the data says what it says. I didn't provide any spin. If you don't like the data, be different.
- Is it really that easy to pretend all downvotes are from puppet accounts in order to protect your own beliefs?
- It's almost like some people have a vested interest in wanting to downvote "anonymously" while preventing others from being able to do anything about the result? :-P

Down voting small communities can drown out constructive conversation, and if you down voted the top 3 posts in a community you probably should have blocked it instead.

If the community likes stuff you dislike, it's probably not the right place for you

Lemmy doesn't yet support hiding communities from the "all" list from non subscribers (you'd have to use search to find such communities) so you'll see stuff from communities that are intended for a specific audience, use the block function

Probably not a good place for those communities yet then.

I downvote a lot and no one has fucked with me for it yet

I know. I've been the target of your serial downvoting before. But at the time I didn't know how to ban for it. lol

for using the functions of the website

This talking point is a huge red flag of a shit stirrer. Please provide an example of a mod action taken against anything other than using functions of the website.

Yea this gave me the “I’ll never do anything but downvote because it’s my right” feeling.