VPNs and TOR are not illegal in the UK

Who cares? I use VPNs to access lemmy.zip.

Are they? Lemm.ee shut down months ago.

Also, this seems to be from lemm.ee. This happened months ago.

Yes, this is the result of a lemmy.world instance decision.

Do users come in and downvote stuff there because its about Taylor Swift?

He wasn’t moderating any large communities.

The difference here is that if this was Reddit, an out-of-control community moderator would be untouchable and they’d have a monopoly on the community name. This doesn’t happen on the Fediverse.

True, but Reddit let this problem fester for a long time.

What’s interesting to me here regarding this, is Reddits current preparation timescale. This isn’t going to be enforced until March 31st, 2026. This tells me that Reddit would have been unprepared for a complete mass-walkout of community moderators during the 2023 Reddit API strikes. A large chunk of Reddit during that period was genuinely inaccessible. But after a few token gestures and a few examples made of some especially rebellious mod-teams, most of the striking moderators returned.

A huge opportunity was missed by people running major communities to functionally degrade Reddit in at least the medium-term as a website. You can’t just hastily promote random people to replace moderators Reddit is either forced to remove or who leave voluntarily. The average person is likely too lazy, too arbitrary and too corrupt to effectively oversee communities of notable sizes.

There are accounts who genuinely do go around downvoting en masse without any contributions. When I was growing my community, I caught about 5 accounts - some with no post history, and no contribution history on my community doing it. They also had a long mod log history of bans for doing it elsewhere.

So I banned them because they kept burying new posts. That is my right.

Disagree. If I run a metal music community, and someone who doesn’t like metal continually goes in there and downvotes everything because, well, they don’t like metal music. What use are they to it? Why wouldn’t I ban them? All they’re doing is hurting the visibility of the community. This is the context in which I would ban downvoters from my community. Serial mass downvoting by people who never otherwise engage with the community, don’t like the topic of the community, and in some cases - the accounts have zero comment history and purely exist to downvote.

I think this is quite different to just ‘wanting an echo-chamber’.

In this case I’m referring to the hypothetical of a single account, consistently downvoting almost every post on a community with zero interaction history. And they keep doing it.

I can’t speak for whatever you’ve done or been accused of, but those accounts do exist and it’s completely justifiable that some community owners ban them.

You mean “dozens of downvotes” specifically directed at a single community?

And how would content be organised and curated?