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".
In case the author of that bot ever reads this, can you just perma-ban me from any community that you are associated with? I don't want to be constantly dropping in and out of all sorts of communities I've literally never heard of based on one comment here or there that I made, or didn't make, or whatever. And I'd like to preserve the ability of the modlog to actually be functional, e.g. it currently shows (on my instance) that I've never been banned from any community ever, though a few extra entries in it won't be too damaging.
To everyone else, it sure would be nice if such practices were opt-in rather than have to go to great lengths (like DM a mod) to be able to opt-out. e.g., why not have an application process for people who want to subscribe, and then kick them out whenever they don't meet the criteria? This mass-banning of a significant fraction of the entire Fediverse (they admit that at one point they banned 3%, and iirc this was before more than doubling, almost tripling the score threshold to avoid that fate) just screams of self-important leeches who care about avoiding doing any manual efforts to moderate their community, at the expense of everyone else that they have decided to involve. Notably unwillingly bc nobody here seems to have offered CONSENT to be part of these experiments in artificial unintelligence.
If Trump was on Lemmy, this is exactly the type of thing he'd do. First divide everyone up into who is loyal to his brand or not, and second deny anyone the right to speak who does not fall into the former category. Which is... urg, fine, but don't pollute my ability to read my own modlog for the entire Fediverse in the process!!
If the mods are using one of those bots, then I think it's downvotes that you receive, not those that you offer. Reading that post, these people seem absolutely okay with even the most rushed of judgements, it's only the popularity contest's results inside what will fast become an echo chamber that seems to matter.
On the other hand, mods have also been known to mass-ban anyone who downvotes them personally, so maybe? Or perhaps they modified the Santa bot (I'm seriously not making that name up!!!:-P) to ban anyone who has ever downvoted anyone on any post (or certain posts that they liked) within that community. In a sense, it's their community so they can do as they please, but also... dayum.
Only if you get downvoted, even if only once (no, I'm seriously not kidding - the post I linked in my other comment admits that is how that particular bot works).
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!?
And his humility went a long way. He was a true journalist, even as and especially after journalism itself died, giving way to an exclusive focus on the profit-seeking motive.
Speaking more of his integrity, he wasn't afraid to take potentially unpopular stances. Calling for Biden to step down was not the first, and I hope not the last. His stance on cops being bad apples was breathtakingly beautiful imho: not "all cops are bad everywhere all the time", but rather "we support the true cops who protect & serve, and reject those who pervert that mantra".
He calls for peace rather than war, staying firm in the principle that the only thing we must not tolerate is intolerance, bc then we'll lose everything we have built up in civilization to date and revert instead to anarchy. And through that to totalitarianism by people who were just waiting for the organized defenses to be discarded (by idiots not even realizing that is what they are accomplishing by their actions) to move in and take it all for themselves.
Every army knows that you have to have accurate intelligence in order to accomplish anything at all - too bad popular journalism has died and the populace no longer has any clue what's going on anymore, a prerequisite to being able to vote on matters of substance. But anyway, as for Jon, he did all that he could to warn us as it was happening, so it's not his fault that nobody would do anything about it. He at least is basically a freaking hero.
His standups are funny, and reportedly after the show his Q&A sessions talking with the audience were razor-sharp. But yeah, behind the desk, he really just wasn't a good "fit". I would give some other show with him a solid chance though.
We are told to be angry, and that spills out in every possible way.
Wanting us to become fiscally responsible, like not get into new wars into we've paid off previous ones? i.e. pay less money to the rich via the Military Industrial complex?
Wanting to tax the wealthy?
Wanting to redistribute money to take care of the poor?
Yeah, obviously evil indeed 😂 (from the POV of "I got mine, now I'm pulling up the ladder🪜").
I hope this is not in poor taste, but it seemed to fit? :-P