this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2025
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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.

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[–] remon@ani.social 9 points 2 weeks ago (8 children)

Public votes are probably the dumbest lemmy "feature", so much unnecessary drama because of it.

[–] ech@lemmy.ca 21 points 2 weeks ago (4 children)

There's not really a way to do votes privately on a federated system. Unless you're suggesting no votes at all, which could be interesting, but I'm not able to envision a functional way to do that.

[–] jbk@discuss.tchncs.de 4 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

didn't piefed or some other alternative to lemmy add that feature

[–] teft@piefed.social 7 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

Kbin shows votes i believe. Piefed doesn’t show you who voted. It does show users “attitude” which is a ratio of upvotes to downvotes that the user has given but it isn’t granular to show what they’ve voted on.

Piefed implemented it, but it didn't work out for some reason and they ended up having to remove it.

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[–] remon@ani.social 3 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

There’s not really a way to do votes privately on a federated system.

It's a minor technical problem.

[–] moseschrute@lemmy.world 6 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

How should it work in your opinion? Like technically, how would you federate but also vote privately?

[–] remon@ani.social 7 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

You use a one-way hash instead of the current identifiable key that is used to store the vote value.

[–] jet@hackertalks.com 7 points 2 weeks ago (6 children)
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[–] Skavau@piefed.social 13 points 2 weeks ago (19 children)

If you look at Reddit, most new posts on any given community get hit with a flurry of downvotes right out of assembly. Because it's all private.

Having upvotes and downvotes public keeps people, broadly, honest and fair minded in how they vote - and mitigates downvote trolls.

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[–] Valmond@lemmy.world 6 points 2 weeks ago (4 children)

Maybe votes are stupid to start with, a feelgood up or down vote that does nothing for the conversation.

/Rant I remember when you typed out what you liked or disliked. Before the stupid Facebook thumbs-up. It was better before. /Rant off

[–] ech@lemmy.ca 13 points 2 weeks ago

Votes on sites like this are an algorithm by way of the masses, rather than what you'd find on centralized sites like yt or the like. It's how the front page gets curated to presumably interesting posts instead of being a random spew of every post made.

[–] kautau@lemmy.world 7 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

Perhaps for some posts / comments. But definitely not for all of them. Votes can often be more useful than just feel good or feel bad. Very busy posts often have hundreds of comments. While certainly silly memes and the like may get upvoted there, often relevant or helpful comments do too, with unhelpful or toxic comments generally getting downvoted. Without that system in place I would have to scroll through those hundreds of comments just to find relevant or helpful info instead of not being at the top because the community provided feedback.

[–] atzanteol@sh.itjust.works 4 points 2 weeks ago

Yeah, I remember dozens of "me too" and "+1" comments after posts people agreed with. It was annoying.

[–] ArgumentativeMonotheist@lemmy.world 2 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

Agreed. I mean, the chans are like that: if you have something to say, you say it, you can't just e-nod/e-shake your head. And if the forum allows for it, then that should be visible to everyone.

[–] Skavau@piefed.social 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

The chans also have no quality filter because of this.

[–] ArgumentativeMonotheist@lemmy.world 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

You don't get banned for words in most boards (all?, I haven't been there in a decade), but you can't post CP (and maybe high level gore, again, I don't recall much) and definitely can't post anything NSFW in blue boards. For me, that's enough, as I can deal with words.

[–] Skavau@piefed.social 2 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

Well no I meant purely about the lack of upvotes and downvotes. Obviously yes, the Fediverse also has more rules than than 4chan too.

[–] mathemachristian@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

For what its worth before hexbear disabled downvotes they looked at who had been systematically downvoting trans peoples posts and a couple transphobes got purged.

Also any drama is around downvoting, no cries about systematic upvoting. Seems like any drama can be avoided if downvoting is just disabled.

[–] Blaze@lemmy.zip 9 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

Also any drama is around downvoting, no cries about systematic upvoting.

Vote manipulation using alt accounts also get dealt with: https://lemmy.ca/post/50545875?scrollToComments=true

[–] ArgumentativeMonotheist@lemmy.world 3 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

IMO, it enforces some sort of accountability to people's voting behaviour. Some of the online forums I frequent have it by default and I've never had any problems with it, as I can back my downvotes and sad/clown emojis (should be added to Lemmy IMO, makes convos way more fun, lol) with arguments if I'm asked to. 🤷

Having said that (and without knowing anything more about the situation): what a weird and most likely pathetic thing to do by that dude.

[–] remon@ani.social 17 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (2 children)

IMO, it enforces some sort of accountability to people’s voting behaviour.

But that was never something that was needed.

Instead now you get mods like this going around banning people for votes, which is intimidating people from voting and is removing the communities ability to hold bad posts accountable.

[–] Skavau@piefed.social 7 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

As I said in this thread to someone else.

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.

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[–] ArgumentativeMonotheist@lemmy.world 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I feel like it is to a certain degree, to discourage trigger-happy voting behaviour that pushes the masses one way or another... this dude is just a clown.

[–] remon@ani.social 11 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

But these clowns are surprisingly common and much more of a problem than some trigger happy votes.

[–] subignition@fedia.io 8 points 2 weeks ago

And it's a lot easier to notice and act on bad behavior when activity is public. Maybe on a centralized service that can afford full time moderation staff, you could restrict that information more effectively, but considering the fediverse is community driven, I think this is an effective choice

[–] Skavau@piefed.social 5 points 2 weeks ago

Then power-hungry moderators who behave like this can sully their reputation, risk the ire of the instance admin who may remove them over this, and if not - also risk the ire of the fediverse who might just recreate their community on another instance and supplant them.

You're probably right about that.

[–] socsa@piefed.social 3 points 2 weeks ago (16 children)

I'm glad more people are starting to come around on this. Maybe rimu will resurrect voting agents for piefed if the sentiment becomes common enough.

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[–] vga@sopuli.xyz 2 points 2 weeks ago

At least they can be hidden unlike on some other reddit