Was recently banned from a whole bunch of DB0 communities for, as best as I can gather, downvoting once when I viewed by All (potentially accidentally while scrolling).

Important notes:

  1. I don’t use scripts.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. One of my bans reads “Appeal Granted, not a brigading member” but I’m still banned.
  6. I don’t troll.

WTF is going on here?

EDIT - Updated Info from the conversation below: In the initial image, you can see two “ban waves.”

The 10 bans three months ago stem from a single downvote in one Community. It was @[email protected] See here: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/34853477

I was called out by name for a single downvote and culled from a score of Communities I did not participate in by them.

The other bans from two months ago are from four total downvotes over a 10-month timeframe in one Community.

I have also stated in this thread that I don’t have issues with AI-gen images, but there are shoddy ones and well-done ones.

EDIT 2: Now unbanned from the ten Communities listed as “3 months ago” in my initial image, but have been banned from three more because of this thread with the reason given being “self-proclaimed anti-AI brigader” which are two things I didn’t claim to be. God dammit Lemmy…

  • Ace T'Ken@lemmy.caOP
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    3 months ago

    I don’t make it a habit of downvoting images simply because they’re AI-gen, but there are well-done ones and horrible ones just like any images. Do they really ban for simply downvoting ANY AI image? That’s… kind of a lot.

    • saltesc@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      I’m still trying to get my head around people giving votes that much attention. Maybe Lemmy has started getting refugees from other places that live and die by the arrows.

      Someone go in there and do the same thing and see what happens. I would but you’ve probably picked up on my apathy by this point.

      • snooggums@lemmy.worldBanned from community
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        3 months ago

        The mods that banned me for ‘systemic down voting’ and ‘anti-ai harassment’ because I down voted a few AI posts and didn’t feel bad also lectured me about how horrible down voting is and how much it hurts the fediverse.

        My upvote to down vote ratio is far better than either of those two mods.

        • TachyonTele@piefed.social
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          3 months ago

          I’ve seen quite a few people banned for downvotes in comms. It always makes me wonder what they think lurkers do.

            • TachyonTele@piefed.social
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              3 months ago

              Oh i know that. I’m saying it’s crazy because it just bans more lurkers than anyone. We’re probably on the same page.

              • snooggums@lemmy.worldBanned from community
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                3 months ago

                Yeah, the mods who are doing this appear to believe lurkers don’t exist and anyone who doesn’t make a comment but down votes is part of a brigade.

              • Skavau@piefed.social
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                3 months ago

                I just said to another here in this thread: Downvotes hurt visibility. Downvote trolls can be a problem for small communities trying to build up. I managed to discover the serial downvoters on my old lemm.ee comm and when I banned them (about 4 of them?) it had a huge impact. They didn’t all downvote /everything/ but they downvoted a lot of things, and no contribution. And if they got in early, they could sink new threads. Now, I wouldn’t just downvote randoms for occasional downvotes - but if I kept seeing the same names on threads (and they never actually engaged with the community) with no discernable patterns - I might.

                Made a huge difference.

            • Tollana1234567@lemmy.today
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              2 months ago

              that happens on reddit to, but with reporting. if you report when someone dint respond or you dint respond to them, the mods get mad enough to ban you, or if they feel like even if the report was report-worthy, the mods might not think so.

      • Deceptichum@quokk.au
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        3 months ago

        Because votes = views.

        If you make something and it instantly gets to -2 within seconds because of bot/trolls it means no one will ever see it.

        • Mac@mander.xyz
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          3 months ago

          Well luckily it was just AI slop and they didn’t actually make anything.

          • Deceptichum@quokk.au
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            3 months ago

            Creativity is in the idea.

            Drawing is dexterity not creativity.

            What is important is that what they made reflected what they wanted to, not that they used a pencil or a stylus.

      • Skavau@piefed.social
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        2 months ago

        Not related to the OP here, but downvote trolls can be a problem for small communities trying to build up. I managed to discover the serial downvoters on my old lemm.ee comm and when I banned them (about 4 of them?) it had a huge impact. They didn’t all downvote /everything/ but they downvoted a lot of things, and no contribution. And if they got in early, they could sink new threads. Now, I wouldn’t just ban randoms for occasional downvotes - but if I kept seeing the same names on threads (and they never actually engaged with the community) with no discernable patterns - I might.

        Made a huge difference.

        • snooggums@lemmy.worldBanned from community
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          3 months ago

          Thank you for limiting your bans to people who were actual serial down voters and not just someone who happened to down vote a single post.

        • saltesc@lemmy.world
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          2 months ago

          Fair enough. I tend to block before down voting and that’s rare. Haven’t thought of how much votes actually matter, but obviously it does on the smaller scale.

          • Skavau@piefed.social
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            2 months ago

            I should also add that 2 or the accounts I banned literally had no post or comment history despite being active for years. Their only purpose was to downvote.

      • Tollana1234567@lemmy.today
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        2 months ago

        reddit monitors upvotes/downvotes heavily, maybe they are coming from reddit, in addition reddit are using other nebelous reasons to ban people in a sub.

    • wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      3 months ago

      No, they don’t, at least not the site wide admins.

      This community is part of dbzer0, so if you were banned from the instance you wouldn’t be able to post here either.

      It looks like you pissed off on moderator of a bunch of comms and they banned you from all of theirs. Based off another commentor’s link, this seems to have happened when those comms were being hit by waves of drive by downvoting so you may have been caught in the cross fire.

        • faythofdragons@slrpnk.net
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          3 months ago

          People (or bots) who go through a thread or comm and just downvote everything without otherwise engaging with the thread or comm.

          It personally doesn’t bother me, but I can see why some find it distasteful.

      • Ace T'Ken@lemmy.caOP
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        3 months ago

        We found the answer (kinda)! It was @[email protected] See here: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/34853477

        I was called out by name for a single downvote and culled from a score of Communities I did not participate in by them.

        “Create more slop” is, in fact, a message I disagree with rather strongly and did downvote that (and only that) post. I PM’d the the mod in response to that post:

        Brigading is organized. I, a single person, downvoted one post I saw in /All because it is actively content with a message I do not care for or agree with. Bad form would be going through everything in the community and downvoting. I didn’t do that either. What I had done is called “using the platform as intended.” And you overreacted with a ban.

        So we’ve effectively solved the first part, but not the three Stable Diffusion parts… Those also seem to line up with another single downvote a month later. Again, hardly brigading or vote manipulation.

        EDIT: Huh. Looks like we had someone in this thread downvoting nearly every post in here.

        • TriflingToad@sh.itjust.works
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          2 months ago

          EDIT: Huh. Looks like we had someone in this thread downvoting nearly every post in here.

          if it is draconic who’s downvoting that would be a hilarious lack of self reflection. Is there any way to check?

    • snooggums@lemmy.worldBanned from community
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      3 months ago

      Yes, a few of the mods will ban anyone who downvotes AI or misinformation without making a comment or because you downvoted ‘too many times’ or some other bullshit. My ‘systemic downvoting’ and ‘anti-ai harassment’ community bans are for downvoting a few posts and not being sorry about it.

      • The Quuuuuill@slrpnk.net
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        3 months ago

        i discovered i have several community bans for being an anti-ai troll. i find that so odd because like… i’m not trolling, i genuinely have concerns about a litany of issues surrounding ai such as the environmental cost, the double standard of corporate theft being okay and piracy being a serious crime, the ways the ai corporation ceos want to use ai vs how any technology should benefit the populace. i have a viewpoint, not an agenda. i also think and post about a wide variety of other topics. that said, if an ai community wants to block me, that’s fine, i was probably going to block them too. not because i think they’re wrong to have their community, but because i have zero interest in engaging there. it’s like how i block all communities in languages i don’t speak. it’s not an act of me censoring or hating them. it’s just me cleaning up my feed because it doesn’t make sense to be there