AceTKen

Just FYI, I'm not downvoting you.

The bad faith actors should be somewhat easy to pick out. They are in my Community anyway. They often have scads of downvotes they throw out in a short time, not a few over the course of months. Dunno if you are, but if you're using automation to ban, you may just want to tune it to be a little more lenient.

Maybe. Just I case, I wouldn't interact. I would report it to an Admin most likely.

From what I've seen, most Admins will either not let that stand or sadly lead the charge on the psycho shit.

If it's the first, you're good. It'll be gone soon.

If it's the latter, get the hell outta that instance and block it.

It's perfectly distinguishable unless you're trying real hard to misinterpret what I said. As a Mod of a small Community myself, here's the difference in downvotes:

1. Bad Faith Actor: Sees a post or a whole Community they don't like. Goes in and systematically downvotes a bunch of stuff on purpose. Topics, responses... everything. Downvotes because they hate the community and everything it stands for. See 50 downvotes in your Community in one day? That's these fuckers. Ban them. They are assholes and are vote manipulating. Probably ban them from related Communities for vote manipulation.

2. Normal User: (--> We are here) May or may not comment in YOUR Community, especially if it's image-based. Sees a single post that they don't like out of thousands they see daily and downvotes it. Several months later, it may happen again. This is expected behaviour and is how an upvote / downvote system functions. Don't ban these or you're the asshole.

3. Brigade Users: A coordinated attack to downvote or spam a Community stemming from some other place. They downvote everything and often post garbage. Ban these people. They are assholes and are vote manipulating. Probably ban them from related Communities for vote manipulation if not trying to seek an instance ban.

4. Lurker: (The overwhelming majority of users are this) Indistinguishable from a Normal user in votes, but may not comment. May be an alt or bot account. Be wary. Check their post history to see if they're real people. If real, leave 'em alone. If empty, use your discretion. Don't ban from related Communities.

5. Other: Downvotes accidentally when scrolling sometimes. These happen. May appear as a Lurker or a Normal User. Don't ban these or you're the asshole.

Hope that helps!

I don't understand the thought process here. Like many, I don't browse Communities individually, I browse /All and sort by New.

So I am required to see something I like and upvote or else I am not allowed to an express an opinion in the community (or any tangentially linked community)?

If I see something I don't like (which is what the voting system is for), I should go to the Community it's posted in and make sure to upvote things before I downvote? That's the expected order of operations?

If not... what if, while browsing /All /New nothing randomly appears that the viewer likes enough to upvote? Is that then somehow the fault of the viewer and they should then be banned?

Am I interpreting your rulings correctly? 4 downvotes in the span of 10 months (judging by the times on those posts you listed) is a bannable offence? Seems rather heavy-handed to me.

We found the answer (kinda)! It was @Draconic_NEO@lemmy.dbzer0.com 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.

Not doing either, actually. After the post was found it linked things up and, as I explained elsewhere, this still stems from one downvote on the thread you see above. "Create More Slop" is a message I disagree with. Slop is just garbage generated content, not even intentionally made stuff. Just... low-tier trash. Not really into destroying the planet for less-than-shitposting purposes.

Oh! That explains it! "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.

Snoogums is correct, there was one downvote in one of those Communities, not in multiple. It was not in any way vote manipulation or brigading. Apologies if you're reading something else, but I felt I was being quite clear with my wording.

How can you tell what you downvoted while scrolling through the all feed or your subscriptions 3 months ago?

By looking at the ban times and then comparing to the (very few) number of downvotes I made on my account in a range around that period.

But they could have based the decision on other behaviour or downvotes of yours.

I hadn't participated in those Communities outside that downvote whatsoever, so that would be doubtful.

There might be a misunderstanding... I only downvoted one post in one of those communities once. The others were untouched. As I said, some of them don't even have any posts to downvote.

Wouldn't one glance at my long-standing profile and the fact that it was only a single vote made out of the nearly a dozen communities that I was banned from indicate that I'm not part of a brigade?

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.