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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.
mods are fascinating specimen, no matter the platform
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.
Power hungry people seeking validation without real-world obligations.
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.
That's what I mean though, terminally online mods ruin it for a lot of us. No way in hell do I have an hour or more a day to commit to policing others, yet there are mods on all social media that love to do it for free. When it's free you get a selection bias for motive. Not dissimilar to real world police.
And no real power either.
They have the power to shape information.
It's frankly terrifying how Reddit is now both what the major LLMs are trained on and what most search engines return as the top result for a lot of searches, when you look at the degree with which arbitrary shadowbanning, bans for posting in the "wrong" other subs, flair requirements etc all come together to make these huge self-censoring subs where the manufactured consensus is controlled by a shadowy cabal with no real oversight.
Time was that you knew when you were in a bubble and what shape that bubble was; the left-wing subs were overtly left-wing and stated as much in their description, the right-wing subs were likewise explicitly right-wing, and the topic subs were explicitly about that topic. But nowadays you have subs that are ostensibly about personal finance or history or funny memes or whatever, where an outside reader looking in has literally no idea that anyone who's ever also made a post in r/politics gets their post automatically and silently hidden with no notification, and what they're reading is a secretly curated wall of propaganda.