Context: PugJesus often spams low quality posts across the dozen or so communities they mod, apparently downvoting low effort spam on my frontpage is trolling. The only other action in the modlog is a different ban for 74 years for “Mass downvoting innocuous content,” so it definitely seems they are just banning people that dislike their spam. Glad we’re not missing out on the reddit mod experience here.
Obviously banning people who don’t vote at all, if you could see that data would be absurd because most people won’t be upvoting or downvoting a given post.
All of this is context-based. I can only tell you my experience, when I was growing [email protected] before lemm.ee shut down, the community collected about 5 frequent downvoters. None of these accounts ever upvoted. They never participated by posting or commenting. In a few cases, two of the accounts had no posting history on the fediverse at all. They existed purely to downvote. Whether because they didn’t like television as a topic, or hated news articles being posted - I don’t know. But they would, between them, always downvote posts and sometimes do so early - deprecating their visibility.
I think it’s reasonable for a community moderator to decide that these accounts are unwelcome and ban them.
Rip lemm.ee, I really liked it there.
I think that in such cases, a few downvotes, the visibility should not be affected (like it is) bcs that’s still engagement & it’s to early to tell by the votes if it’s a good or a bad post - so more of a systemic problem than user problem (unless that was very targeted, then bannaning them is good too).
All of the users in this case that I banned had a history of doing it in many communities. They were all just serial downvoters.