As far as I’m aware, mods can only access banning functionality on user comments.
If someone in a community keeps pestering mods with BS reports, but that user has not posted a comment in the community, is there a way to ban that person?
I can’t seem to find anything in the UI to handle this use case.
The new hobby of mods chasing people for not voting the way they like is nasty
That’s what you get when you allow moderators to see what people up/downvote. Unfortunately, this is simply human behavior - and you have to implement things with the expectation that they are going to be abused.
At this moment, only admins can, no? I’m a mod and unable to see votes
I don’t think it is malicious, it was sign of bot activity that some account only down voted or up voted lots of posts in a short time.
But yeh most of the post in this community are meh at best so it is understandable that someone do it legitimately.
No, I’m increasingly reading reports of actual people getting banned for downvoting a comment or a post, without even having said anything.
Like, you just casually browse, see something you feel is irrelevant or of bad quality, downvote it, and move on.
The mod notices the downvote, looks it up, and then just bans the user out of spite.
Do you have such examples? Seems wild
How do mods look it up when only admins can see votes?
Perhaps in the cases I saw described, it’s an admin mod
Gotcha
I regularly implement “Never attribute to malice, what could easily explained by stupidity”. It doesn’t sound like it was an “ooops, I accidentally banned this person!” type of situation.
Givesome pointed out that it looks like their mod log is full of bans of people who aren’t subscribed in the first place.
Does lemmy show vote history?
Not directly but since it’s federated information it would be trivial to extract or view such as running a 1 user instance and viewing the sql database, and theres likely tools now to automate that
Some people put in the legwork.
There is a very active account that mods a couple big communities. I saw them acting like a jackass and down voted like 4-5 of their comments in a chain, got a DM “informing” me that he could see votes…
They’re not an admin, just a mod and on a normal instance.
I legitimately don’t know why admins are cool with him, but they are. So I just blocked him.
They probably asked admins
Yes but only to admins. They must be an admin with an alt account
It might not be malicious. If a moderator is trying to cultivate a new community and wants certain type of content, one of the things they need to control is the rating of that content.
Imo that’s malicious.
They are using their position to influence the trajectory and visibility of posts. The motivation doesn’t matter