What is Vote Manipulation? I’ve never posted on most of these communities, but I seem to be banned on all of lemmy.zip, and now some sci-fi communities on a Star Trek server.
edit: added modlog https://lemmy.zip/modlog?page=1&actionType=All&userId=1813065
It’s likely that a mod or admin looked at and saw you downvoting in communities without participation and/or downvoting a lot in those communities without contributing anything back. And banned you from all their communities or instance banned you completely (Lemmy instance bans apply community bans to any community you participated in on the instance to allow federated content removal).
These types of patterns are generally not welcome on Lemmy because communities here are smaller and people systemically downvoting hurts community reach, and because there are already a lot of people who do it on Lemmy, many mods and admins just aren’t having it, and I don’t blame them. Lemmy has the most robust community blocking system out there for a reason. They want you to use it to filter out communities from your feed. If you don’t wish to block a whole community then hiding posts is an option too. Blocking users is an option if you hate what they post and can’t be bothered to ignore them.
Unless it’s the downvote circlejerks they are in on, Funny how normal users have to go through exceptional means to find out who is upvoting and downvoting while mods and admins clearly aren’t subjectively performing on the feature. Sounds to me like the worse pattern is excluding someone from entirely unrelated communities, and that modlog hardly offers an explanation.
How much do you want to bet the powermod/admin saw their comments downvoted and that was basically what fueled their ban rage moment? And how much do you want to bet that that user probably has an alt user to do the same, with several months between any actual comments but a daily tabulation of upvotes and downvotes, just to avoid the same scrutiny?
This doesn’t need to be justified, if downvotes are a problem then they should be particularly addressed in the platform (and they are, and sites like reddit have already done so for years), besides the obvious of making them as easy to see as they are to mods or admins. By all means allow communities to vote neuter non-active participants.
Lemmy has a “robust” “community” blocking system (that is easily circumvented by alts - and I’ve even seen admins encourage this over just working out issues and retaining that bit of traceability to an actual person) because users are forced to leave their “communities”, they can’t just choose to switch to a moderation team for the same community. And yes, only a very small portion of most “communities” ever care that deeply about any particular mods, which ironically they would actually do if they had a choice between competing moderating teams instead of the community dramas we’ve had as a result of this “robust” system.
Incidentally, regarding the whole blocking thing, you’ve got a post on Ye Power Trippin’ Bastards that does not make your own moderation look good FYI.