Was recently banned from a whole bunch of DB0 communities for, as best as I can gather, downvoting once when I viewed by All.
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?
Eh. I see arguments both ways. Public votes makes it easier to catch bad faith (downvote bots) and manipulation. However, it allows abuse from touchy or unscrupulous mods. TBH, I’m personally more concerned with the bots. Everything is federated to one can pickup and move elsewhere of they’re on the receiving end of such a mod.
If one becomes active on another instance with the same name it is highly likely the same mods will just ban the other user account too, so moving isn’t helpful.
Oh, I meant that one can start a new community on the new instance to remove the problematic mod from the picture. Not that one should try to engage in ban evasion.