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.
i usually read all and i’ve never seen a boring company comm on my front page….
but “the lemmy way” is supposed to be: downvote if off-topic, spam or trolling, or some such, up vote if you like it…
not downvote if you disagree… lemmy is just too small for that at this point.
there are a lot of unpopular communities that deserve to exist that would be obliterated if everyone that hates them voted their posts down.
If you hate a community that shows up, just block that one community and it’s gone for you.
you can block entire instances for yourself….
i don’t think it should be allowed to exist at all, as the owner did the whole sieg heil salute and a bunch of other nazi stuff… but that’s an issue to take up with the instance, and i encourage you to do so and i’ll write them myself….
but in general, banning someone who only downvotes, downvotes “good” posts that should be on the community, makes complete sense.
Funny, about a year ago, I remember commenting downvotes should be noise filters, not “disagree” buttons.
I got downvoted.
i’ve seen a bunch of stuff about how that’s the way it’s supposed to be on Lemmy, but obviously people aren’t doing that…
really if that was the official original intention, it’s a UI issue…
something like Up Arrow and Poop Emoji instead of down arrow… or maybe more buttons, eg:
up, down, poop, or asparagus emoji… and various sorting options based on that….