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.
i mean, that’s a bit of a power trip though ain’t it?
Not really. Hypothetical: If someone who doesn’t like metal music enters [email protected] and downvotes every post there - and commits themselves to doing it to every new post, this hurts their visibility across the Fediverse. Would you not say its reasonable, in this specific hypothetical, for the community owner to ban a user who does that?
that’s true but that’s a very specific hypothetical i’m not sure happens that much.
Well I’ll give you my own 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.
Since moving to piefed after lemm.ee shut down, I’ve only had to do it again twice.
I think it’s reasonable for a community moderator to decide that these accounts are unwelcome and ban them.
you are right, i don’t think that’s op’s case though. do you think these accounts you describe might be just bots instead?
Some of them did interact on the fediverse (although not on television). The ones with no posting/comment activity? No idea.
The point is that people really do behave like this.