Was recently banned from a whole bunch of DB0 communities for, as best as I can gather, downvoting once when I viewed by All (potentially accidentally while scrolling).
Important notes:
- I don’t use scripts.
- I don’t mass-downvote Communities. If I see a post I generally don’t like when browsing All, I may downvote one post, block the Community and move on.
- Some of the communities I was banned from don’t have any posts in them so I wouldn’t have been able to downvote anything.
- Of all of these Communities, in my history I downvoted one post in one of them. Voting in this manner is not vote manipulation. It’s quite literally a feature of the platform and as a mod of another Community, I would consider it pretty good etiquette.
- One of my bans reads “Appeal Granted, not a brigading member” but I’m still banned.
- I don’t troll.
WTF is going on here?
EDIT - Updated Info from the conversation below: In the initial image, you can see two “ban waves.”
The 10 bans three months ago stem from a single downvote in one Community. It was @[email protected] See here: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/34853477
I was called out by name for a single downvote and culled from a score of Communities I did not participate in by them.
The other bans from two months ago are from four total downvotes over a 10-month timeframe in one Community.
I have also stated in this thread that I don’t have issues with AI-gen images, but there are shoddy ones and well-done ones.
EDIT 2: Now unbanned from the ten Communities listed as “3 months ago” in my initial image, but have been banned from three more because of this thread with the reason given being “self-proclaimed anti-AI brigader” which are two things I didn’t claim to be. God dammit Lemmy…
I’m a moderator on [email protected], where you’ve never upvoted once, but you have downvoted multiple posts over months instead of blocking the community. This down-ranks submissions, adversely affecting the visibility of the community for subscribers, which is why you were banned.
https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/28218497
https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/35031819
I don’t understand the thought process here. Like many, I don’t browse Communities individually, I browse /All and sort by New.
So I am required to see something I like and upvote or else I am not allowed to an express an opinion in the community (or any tangentially linked community)?
If I see something I don’t like (which is what the voting system is for), I should go to the Community it’s posted in and make sure to upvote things before I downvote? That’s the expected order of operations?
If not… what if, while browsing /All /New nothing randomly appears that the viewer likes enough to upvote? Is that then somehow the fault of the viewer and they should then be banned?
Am I interpreting your rulings correctly? 4 downvotes in the span of 10 months (judging by the times on those posts you listed) is a bannable offence? Seems rather heavy-handed to me.
If I see something I don’t like (which is what the voting system is for), I should go to the Community it’s posted in and make sure to upvote things before I downvote? That’s the expected order of operations?
If the community is about something you dislike (which seems to be the case here), why would you not just block them from your feed instead of downvoting?
Maybe I’m indifferent to the majority of the content they spew but there is one really shitty post that I down vote that isn’t worth blocking the feed over.
Keep in mind that the pattern that resulted in the OP being banned from over a dozen communities was down voting a single post. That would be triggered if the one post they down voted was literal spam or racist or sexist or any other terrible subject.
Or someone accidentally clicks on the down vote button with their fat thumb unintentionally. The mod assumes malicious intent and overreacts.
I wonder if the “overreaction” was caused by the constant harassment from anti genAI trolls? You helped create this situation, the mods are simply trying to deal with it. Sometimes that’s unfortunately going to result in erroneous bans, which can usually be resolved by DMing the mod.
I have yet to see an example of any individual post getting more than a handful of downvotes, which is completely expected to happen when hundreds or thousands of users have the opportunity to come across the content. That isn’t harassment, and neither is people vocalizing their dislike of AI in comments.
If people are being harassed, then there should be moderation records, right? Are there dozens of people harassing people who like AI, or is the ‘constant harassment’ just disagreement that has been blown out of proportion by people who run communities that don’t get the attention they think they deserve?
My one vote per post or comment is jot part of any problem. That is how voting works. I don’t coordinate with anyone else, it is just me using a feature that exists the way I want to.
You don’t have to like anything, but consistent downvoting like this without any other kind of participation is indistinguishable from targeted downvote harassment, and isn’t consistent with your claims of blocking.
It’s perfectly distinguishable unless you’re trying real hard to misinterpret what I said. As a Mod of a small Community myself, here’s the difference in downvotes:
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Bad Faith Actor: Sees a post or a whole Community they don’t like. Goes in and systematically downvotes a bunch of stuff on purpose. Topics, responses… everything. Downvotes because they hate the community and everything it stands for. See 50 downvotes in your Community in one day? That’s these fuckers. Ban them. They are assholes and are vote manipulating. Probably ban them from related Communities for vote manipulation.
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Normal User: (–> We are here) May or may not comment in YOUR Community, especially if it’s image-based. Sees a single post that they don’t like out of thousands they see daily and downvotes it. Several months later, it may happen again. This is expected behaviour and is how an upvote / downvote system functions. Don’t ban these or you’re the asshole.
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Brigade Users: A coordinated attack to downvote or spam a Community stemming from some other place. They downvote everything and often post garbage. Ban these people. They are assholes and are vote manipulating. Probably ban them from related Communities for vote manipulation if not trying to seek an instance ban.
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Lurker: (The overwhelming majority of users are this) Indistinguishable from a Normal user in votes, but may not comment. May be an alt or bot account. Be wary. Check their post history to see if they’re real people. If real, leave 'em alone. If empty, use your discretion. Don’t ban from related Communities.
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Other: Downvotes accidentally when scrolling sometimes. These happen. May appear as a Lurker or a Normal User. Don’t ban these or you’re the asshole.
Hope that helps!
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I appreciate you sharing such a bonkers policy so plainly and candidly, but that makes it no less bonkers.
I’m open to feedback.
Stop doing your stupid policy because it is stupid.
Doing widespread bans and accusing people of ‘Vote Manipulation’ just because they down voted without joining or making a comment is making a mockery of the moderation process. Like maybe a few of the people you banned were doing that, but the vast majority were probably just served up the same post in All around the same time and decided it was slop and down voted it.
Why do those people care of they are banned from “Ai slop” comms then ?
If they weren’t putting accusations of vote manipulation and other ridiculous claims in the modlog it wouldn’t be nearly as annoying.
It also adds some annoying steps to the end user who would want to block those communities since banning means you can’t just click on the post and block the community in the default browser interface. Once banned it is necessary to go to setting and block the community manually.
Since they made a bunch of tiny, barely used communities it also means that they trickle into the feed and you have to block each one individually. They are spamming AI communities and then being dicks about it.
Then there is at least one that expands this to other communities they mod that don’t have anything to do with AI. I like the Dem TankieJerk, but got banned for not liking AI. Not harassing, just down voting one or two AI slop posts in some other community and not feeling bad about it.
At the end of the day it’s up to community mods how they want to moderate their communities. If they don’t want someone with a moderation history like yours in their communities then I can totally understand that. It’s not like db0 is the only instance where you’ve been banned for systematic down voting, now is it matey?
Acting like my moderation history is accurate when shitty mods treat a few downvotes as manipulation is the biggest part of the problem. You are taking their word for it that their moderation is accurate when it is not. The list is long because one mod did like a dozen of them at the same time.
That is the perfect example of why this is a problem!
The other one is jet at hackernews who has a bot that bans people for a single downvote and he has bragged about it right here in YPTB! Some of those bans are cross instance because they mod communities on multiple instances and banned all of them. It is the action of three or four ridiculously over the top mods.
It’s like talking to a wall.
