I tend to browse /All and by New on Lemmy. I went to respond on a thread on !vegan@lemmy.world to thank someone for a recipe that looked good, and found out I had been banned.

Odd, considering I hadn't posted to that sub at any point in the past. I checked the modlog to find that "Mod" had banned a bunch of people citing "Rule 5."

Their Rule 5 states: Bad-faith carnist rhetoric & anti-veganism are not allowed, as this is not a space to debate the merits of veganism. Anyone is welcome here, however, and so good-faith efforts to ask questions about veganism may be given their own weekly stickied post in the future (see current stickied discussion).

I (and hundreds of others) seemingly broke rule 5 of this community without ever posting there. What is going on?

And my apologies if this isn't the place for this, but I had no idea where else to post the question.

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[–] OpenStars@discuss.online 26 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (14 children)

This post may be relevant: https://slrpnk.net/post/11069853, i.e. perhaps one of those mods is using this same bot. So yeah, you seriously and literally might have been banned bc of a couple of downvotes in some totally unrelated community!?!? As that post says:

even a single downvoted comment could result in a ban.

e.g. I just found out that I've been banned from a community that I've literally never heard about, on an instance I rarely visit, as a result of this bot. Though I never got a message about it, nor does the modlog give a length of time for it? (Nor can I even see the ban in several different modlogs on instances other than Lemmy.World - so there may be issues with federating this action? The community seems to be new, created in the last month, and filled with a deluge of posts from the same few people - so very likely nobody from my instances has subscribed to it yet, and perhaps that caused the ban for it to also not be propagated? I dunno. It's odd to not see a length of time for it though - does it look different to someone who has an account on Lemmy.World, like with an expiration that somehow wouldn't show for someone not logged in?)

And even there, aside from how that post calls us "jerks", and the community too (thereby exposing hypocrisy - bc everyone that they don't like are labeled as "jerks", while they rise above us all, by their own way of thinking...bc they are never downvoted?) it seems to be malfunctioning, bc I most definitely don't have more downvotes than upvotes, either overall or it mentions over the past month - not that we are even allowed to see those? Perhaps it is counting per-community somehow? I do have this comment in !lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world that people seemed to dislike greatly. Probably I was too serious, in a community dedicated to shitposting? :-P And now therefore I banned from this community that I, and probably mostly all of us, have never so much as heard of?

Summary: some children are attempting to play around with what they seem to think is AI, and are now weaponizing downvoting in an attempt to cheap out on modding effort. Not only that, but they are using my data without my consent, or apparently much thought into it at all. And to top it all off, they call anyone they want to as "jerks" - bc obviously anyone who ever receives downvotes, even once, even on a single comment, in an entirely unrelated community, qualifies for that label, don't you agree? /s I think you should form your own opinion though, as to who may be acting like jerks here:-).

Edit: the bot post has a spoiler tag at at the end, but with nothing inside except a horizontal line? i.e., they don't seem very experienced with markup, and presumably therefore with actual coding as well?

Edit 2: omg reading through those comments - it just keeps getting better and better! Especially how readily they take to criticism, but this comment also caught my eye:

Some people were getting banned just because of a single downvote from one of the admins, applied to a reasonable comment, outweighed the whole community’s consensus.

Wow, just wow. The author also did not seem to care about the load this will put onto the instance servers, to be federating hundreds or thousands of community bans, and then lifting them, and then reapplying them again later, however often this bot will be ran. More to the point, modlogs seem like they will become no longer human-readable? (unless perhaps you could filter out all actions taken by these bot accounts - which I can't see how to do) As such, I wonder if this will be treated by other instance admins as an attack against the Fediverse? What would the limit be, I can only guess - 100 community bans per account per day? 1k? 10k? We might soon find out, whether we want to or not!?

[–] ech@lemm.ee 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

This is such a bad idea. Voting already achieves what they are doing - increasing the visibility of "good" content and minimizing the visibility of "bad" content through crowd sourcing. 1) Banning people for using that system is seriously off base, and 2) turning that system into outright bans from interacting at all is way too far.

This is an automatic system to rigidly create and maintain echo chambers. Really hoping this doesn't spread.

*Also also - administering bans based on how and where people interact with content, even as mild as up or down voting, is a dangerous choice. Utilizing a purity test of who's allowed to interact where isn't going to make Lemmy a better place.

[–] OpenStars@discuss.online 11 points 1 year ago

The author of the bot has already been challenged. It looks like (although I'm no admin so I cannot confirm) they simply downvoted that dissenting opinion, responding with derision (this we all of us can read since it's public, note no /s tag either, though sarcasm heavily layered on), and proceeded to do whatever they wanted regardless of consent, by anyone.

i.e. they aren't simply turning away applications to join a community, that's 100% within their rights, although even that would be more than a little weird to scrape through every single downvote from every community across the entire Fediverse in order to make that determination. But even so, at least the applicant would be asking for it (hopefully with appropriate informed consent). Instead, they seem to be proactively judging the entire population present across the entire Fediverse, regardless of whether we've ever so much as even heard of their own community, and then filling up our modlogs with the manifestation of their disapproval. Like okay Karen, I don't need you spamming my (public!) inbox with every thought that crosses your mind, that my post history happens to remind you of! :-P

I noted elsewhere that this is exactly what Trump supporters have talked about wanting to do, both online but also even irl as in Project 2025. However, the cat is out of the bag - we are not offered the choice to avoid this occurrence altogether, our only choice now is how we will respond to these attacks on the principles of freedom of expression, and also the ability to preserve the modlogs to be human-readable rather than continually polluted with bot actions, taken by every community that we have zero interest in to begin with, until they wormed their way to becoming the center of attention (Karen) with their expressions (Karen) of what they (Karen) seem to think of us, at every given moment that they decide is right for them to divulge that "information".

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