If you scroll down to about a day ago, you might be able to observe an emerging behavior from this mod.
EDIT 2: The mod in question moderates a total of 108 Lemmy communities. How deep does this conspiracy run? Is this mod a lost Redditor? More to come!
EDIT 3: The mod has now removed my comment all together, one might assume because it was still receiving upvotes in the 2 hours following my ban. Are there similarities here to Watergate? You be the judge!
EDIT 4: The mod in question has now been removed as a mod of the !vegan@lemmy.world community, as a result of their abuse of power.
EDIT 5: This will be my final update, since as far as I see it, the issue this thread focuses on has been resolved. To quote Beaver herself in a very ironic comment she made directed towards someone else:
It's not the vegan posts people are down voting, but there's been a huge amount of "memes" that do not contribute to the vegan discussion but just try to divide the community
They are probably trying to identify people who would rather downvote or post cheeky comments (see OP) rather than block the community, or not interact with it
Most people only interact with votes; not comments. If the rule is “No downvoting” make it an official rule and stop banning people under the pretense of breaking rule 5.
With the current thread on !unpopularopinion@lemmy.world how "communities should allow everyone to interact if they are not private", the likelihood of someone else creating the same thread as this one with "look at those authoritarian mods who ban everyone" is quite high
Do you have examples? That modlog is a bit busy as you know, I'm not going to go through it
And what’s the problem with voting on public posts on a public forum?
What's the problem with banning on a public forum?
There was a post yesterday about vote manipulation by bots (https://feddit.org/post/2795018 ), if people just downvote the vegan content without contributing, it's not that far from that.
Or maybe it just comes from them seeing downvotes as "non relevant to the community" and not "disagree", hence getting rid of people who use it the other way.
I'm really not sure to get why it's such a big deal. You got banned from a small community on Lemmy.
Were you going to participate to this type of community? Then create another one and post there, if yours is better moderated, people will come to yours (my experience in the past on a different topic)
Were you not going to engage with that type of content? Then move on. I'm not interested in US politics, if all the US politics communities would ban me that would be fine, I would just move on.
It's one of those things where once you go full jerk, it gets attention. Unavoidable really, unless instance admins want to totally ban "drama" communities, which would just end up as posts on instances that don't ban drama communities :)
Preemptive banning is a perfect example of prime drama.
The memes we're referring to seem to have resulted in an increase in moderation action. Is this inadvertent, or were the posts intended to drive up or surface critical commentary?
I mean, it is a valid point to be brought up. A year ago when I joined Lemmy, one of the first advices I've read for new people starting out is to block communities they don't want to see posts from - for whatever reason it may be.
What happened to that stance? I feel like if it were any other subject than veganism, people wouldn't bat an eye. I'm not out here arguing that being vegan is like being part of a minority, but there sure as hell is a lot of vegan bashing on reddit. On Lemmy too, it seems
There's also voting to voice what you want to see in a community. If you block every community that has content you don't like, there won't be anything left.
I see what you mean. However, I think downvoting to curate a community's contents shows that you are an active participant in the community which many of the people who drive-by downvote usually aren't
I wanna add that I like your community, I like how you stood up to that rogue admin, I like when you annoy carnists, I like your ban of OP, and I also like that c/fediverselore has posts like this. This community is a tool for calling out mod decisions, and some of those decisions will be good ones that don't need calling out. It's still better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it.
For the record, I think you contribute a lot to Lemmy, and I really appreciate it. OP's being melodramatic because blocking a community chock full of content they'd rather not see on their personalized feed (and isn't hateful, illegal, etc.) isn't good enough for them. I guess they also need to troll and police different perspectives and how many posts they comprise on this great fedi platform. That's good for Lemmy /s. Someone should post a PSA about blocking communities that don't break rules but just aren't one's cup of tea. The behaviour helps Lemmy grow and stay diverse. For similar reasons, lemmynsfw (ie, the main porn/adult instance) removed downvotes: because minority communities (eg, rarer kinks) were being downvoted into oblivion - stifling growth and frustrating community members and mods - by people downvoting stuff they didn't like on their feed versus blocking it