My Reddit account is from 2006. I joined it when Aaron Swartz was still working there.
In the very early days, it was like that. Even it was an unwritten rule, people expected to see disagreement in a conversation, not in a vote count. Only spammers would get mass-downvotes.
And you are describing people using their single votes as they see fit as “authoritarian”
No, I'm talking about individuals that feel justifying in imposing their worldviews on minority/dissenting groups.
Go and wave your impotent rage in someone else’s face.
Projecting, much? I'm not the one saying that it's a good use of my time to be shouting at everything I don't like, and a quick look at your profile shows nothing but you being upset at other people.
Cool, I will take this repeated strawman as as a sign that you simply can not address the discussion at hand, and that each of your responses is making the case for anonymous voting harder to support.
The more you try to dismiss questions that challenge your worldview, the less sympathy I have for you being banned from that community.
You are being given all the chances possible to show that you can engage in productive conversation, yet here you are showing how much you care about nothing but yourself.
If you feel compelled to try to silence people and try to justify yourself based on your value system, yes, you are being authoritarian.
Also, it's curious that you only managed to resort to a strawman as a response for me calling you out on your behavior. Surely you can do better than that...
How many people did you get to change their point of view and/or behavior after being downvoted into oblivion?
There’s absolutely no reason why every action I make on the fediverse ahould be saved in plaintext in a thousand different places so that a person can be protected from seeing a largely inconsequential negative number on a UI.
Extend this logic to actual comments and ask yourself how quickly this would descend into 4chan.
Whether you like it or not, a vote is a much expression as any type of reply. Why is it that a button that says "I dislike this post" should be protected while a comment saying the exact same thing should not?
Downvoting a toxic community is also a valid use of your downvote.
No, it's not. You can flag/report/block the author of any posts in the community if you want, but downvoting will not achieve anything of value except of a dopamine rush.
Votes are (or were) only meant to work as a signal of what the community thinks to be relevant. This is especially important for niche communities. You are being borderline authoritarian when you are not part of a community and you still think that the whole site needs to have a say in their discussion.
The message is “If you disagree with me, you will be banned”
It used to be that votes were meant to be used as an indicator of the quality of the post according to the community guidelines, not how "agreeable" a comment or post is. This cultural change is one the most toxic behaviors that made Reddit such a crappy place for discussion.
This was already bad on Reddit, but at least there one could avoid this problem because people were used to browse only the subreddits they subscribed to, so niche subreddits could still have some semblance of "good" community participation. On Lemmy, most people browse by /all and lots of them still treat the downvote button as a some mechanism to train an algorithm. These users are the worst.
In the beginning, I was actually sending DMs to people asking them to please not downvote something if they were not part of the community and their reaction was basically "I don't want to see this, so I will downvote to bury it" (completely ignoring the fact that they could simply hide the post or stop browsing by /all).
So, while "banning everyone who downvotes the post" might seem an overreaction, I could definitely see a moderator could flag a vote as coming from a non-community member and use that flag to ignore their votes in the ranking systems, and I would love to have a bot that auto-messages every clueless downvoter explaining the proper netiquette around votes for non-community members.
Yeah, USD.
What "power" does the mod have if the community doesn't have other members?