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
Please follow this comm guidelines. Your post is too vague. Post the modlog so people understand what you’re talking about at least.
The modlog is on the picture? Should I have linked to it? I’ll edit to add that.
edit: Oops is there no picture?
No picture that I can see
I’m using Boost, for some reason the picture didn’t post.
“Vote manipulation” is the wrong term, really. It means that you were identified as bloc downvoting in specific communities, usually with no contribution either.
I usually surf /All, block communities I don’t want to see anymore, and just vote to remove a post from my feed. I will downvote posts like a Youtube video post with no description, or the 4th and 5th duplicate post sent to multiple communities.
and just vote to remove a post from my feed.
But do you realize that downvoting a post counts as a downvote, which can lower its visibilty across all of Lemmy in certain cases?
Downvoting just because you don’t want to see something in your feed isn’t a great use of the downvote button on this platform. If you do that a lot to posts from one specific community, the mod there might notice a pattern of downvotes coming from your account with zero comments or other interaction. It can look targeted serial downvoting, which some label as vote manipulation.
Lemmy has quite a few people who go around mass-downvoting every post in certain communities simply because they hate the topic, a particular poster, or the whole place (trust me, I know this all to well!). They’re basically serial downvoters, and it’s a real problem on here.
You don’t come across as one of those guys, but that’s probably why you’re getting mistaken for one. It’d be way better if there was just a simple “hide” button so you could remove stuff from your view without tanking the post’s score, but that’s a different topic.
And honestly, if you don’t like any of the posts in a community anyway, getting banned from it shouldn’t bother you much. You can just block the community or the user and move on.
You could probably appeal to the admin or the mod, explain the misunderstanding, and get the ban reversed.
It’s been used as a catch all by mods and instance admins to describe all forms of malicious voting.
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.
I’ve not dug through it, nor have I picked a side, but I figured I would share that a users votes are public
…So… Someone looked through my vote history and decided they didn’t like the way I voted?
Edit… It won’t load for me completely, but I have over 100,000 upvotes, and 2,000 downvotes. Someone might be overreacting.
More likely they looked through your interactions with their communities and saw you didnt contribute and only downvoted.
Have your tried appealing to the mods and admins?
No, I noticed a couple weeks ago, and didn’t really care. But I tried posting to an Elder Scrolls comm this morning and was reminded.
That’s my guess, but I have no info to prove it.
If you look at my modlog and voting record, you will see a very similar story as yours. With the exact same ban messages regarding “systemic downvoting” months apart, but with “different” moderators.
Some people create instances or communities with the explicit goal of creating an echo chamber for their opinions. These modlogs reflect much more upon them than the people they ban.
