This behaviour undermines good faith participation. Users should not be afraid of copping bans for using the downvote button as they feel is appropriate.

As a moderator, I can see who votes on what and how in my community. But it is not my job to really do anything with that information (except if I notice a brigading attack / vote manipulation, then I might keep an eye on users for that). So I don't even look at them. The community hasn't been brigaded yet, and since its a moderately low traffic community, it would be pretty obvious if that ever happened.

But votes are information that normal users should definitely not be able to see at all. Eventually, sooner than later most likely, it will lead to "User X voted 'wrong' on Y" posts. You and I both know Lemmy users cannot be trusted to be mature enough to not do that kind of Fecal Flinging, especially from the comfort of online anonymity, and once that starts it's not going to stop.

Users upvote or downvote posts for ten million different reasons. Nobody should feel like they can't vote how they want on a post for fear of a moderator ban or other users yelling at them. If they are engaging in vote manipulation, its a different story, but people doing that are not only using a single account, so they know what they are doing and should expect nevative consequences. I'm not disagreeing with what you're saying, just adding on that beyond a moderator's ethical duty regarding (not) taking action for vote activity, normal users should also be held to the same ethical duty.

Hey I just wanna pop in and say I crossposted your post about lemmyusa over to power tripping bastards on dbzero the other day, and we actually had a mod from there come on and discuss things.

I think its a bit more complex than just... them clearly doing mod abuse or manipulation.

From their POV, they were basically getting hit with a mass wave of downvotes, as well as some genuinely unnaceptable harassment... and they basically panicked and went into lockdown mode.

Maybe you would be interested in adding to that discussion?

https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/53271052

Also, just... in general, the whole point of the ye power trippin bastards comm is to report and discuss potential mod/admin abuse scenarios, in case you'd maybe like to post stuff there yourself...

You ... seem to be on something of a tear of call outs, so, maybe you'd be interested.

EDIT: There's... in theory at least, supposed to be more of a structured way of making such a report... which ironically i kinda sorta broke by doing a crosspost, but uh ... ???

Anyway, more specifically relevant to this threelon person... yeah i dont find this behavior surprising, they are obviously a massive elon stan and their personality is collapsing as it becomes harder and harder to deny that, even in just a purely technical sense, leaving politics as far aside as possible... yeah elon is actually just a con artist fradulent idiot.

It's also blatant vote manipulation in keeping their personal content from being lower on the front page. Ban all the downvoters and suddenly your posts look very popular!

And no real power either.

Not all mods are like that, of course. My instance admins had to ask me like three times to be a moderator for one of their communities because I refused them multiple times. I only said yes because it was an unmoderated/undermoderated (at the time), low traffic community, and felt bad that I had refused so many times.

I used to be a forum admin for a gaming/programming forum with what I would say is high traffic (1000+ active concurrent users daily), and moderating that felt like a full-time job, and I had appointed like 10 other moderators to help. I don't have time for that no more lol.