I tend to browse /All and by New on Lemmy. I went to respond on a thread on !vegan@lemmy.world to thank someone for a recipe that looked good, and found out I had been banned.
Odd, considering I hadn’t posted to that sub at any point in the past. I checked the modlog to find that “Mod” had banned a bunch of people citing “Rule 5.”
Their Rule 5 states: Bad-faith carnist rhetoric & anti-veganism are not allowed, as this is not a space to debate the merits of veganism. Anyone is welcome here, however, and so good-faith efforts to ask questions about veganism may be given their own weekly stickied post in the future (see current stickied discussion).
I (and hundreds of others) seemingly broke rule 5 of this community without ever posting there. What is going on?
And my apologies if this isn’t the place for this, but I had no idea where else to post the question.
You can actually sort posts by recent and see how the percentage of downvotes suddenly dropped off after the ban spree. This is a blatant attempt to manufacture consent for their community by gaming the system.
That would violate lemmy.world’s terms of service, specially 3. (system disruption) and 5.1 (community manipulation).
Perhaps you guys could/should elevate this issue to the lemmy.world admin team.
That was kind of what I was attempting to do here. Is there another way to do that?
I suggest you (or anyone else here, really) to direct message !lwreport@lemmy.world, the account is a relay to the admin team. Be sure to mention:
- The issue (they’re banning people left and right)
- Concerns (e.g. they might be gaming the system),
- This thread (to show that it isn’t just your personal pet peeve, plenty people are pissed.)
Since I wrote this, things have changed a bit. The mod in question seems to have become extremely unpopular, even in her own community, and she’s gone on posting spree on /c/vegan that’s getting downvoted. I still think you can demonstrate that she was trying to manipulate the downvote numbers, but it the evidence is less clear.
