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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.
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.
Yes and no.
There are accounts who genuinely do go around downvoting en masse without any contributions. When I was growing my community, I caught about 5 accounts - some with no post history, and no contribution history on my community doing it. They also had a long mod log history of bans for doing it elsewhere.
So I banned them because they kept burying new posts. That is my right.
That's weird, what topic is so controversial someone would put in that kind of effort?
You tell me. I mean I think the accounts I'm referring to here had been downvoting all over the place, not just my community.