Context: I started !norway@sopuli.xyz to be an English-language comm for Norway. There’s an existing Norway comm which focuses on Norwegian-language content and discourages too much English in the comm. I posted a simple “Hey I’m starting this comm” post, because obviously relevant. The mod took down my post without any comment, reply, or reason. Now they lurk in my English version comm, and downvote like half the posts. They’ve never actually upvoted a thing.
Oh, they also reported one of my posts as ‘Not relevant to community’.
Talk about petty. They didn’t even start the comm themselves, they took it over a few months ago because it was abandoned, and have done pretty much nothing to drive activity in it since taking it over. I decided to post here instead of YPTB because I don’t feel like it crosses the line into mod abuse, it’s just annoyingly petty.
At programming.dev “vote manipulation” is against out Code of Conduct and we would send the user a warning to stop. I’m sure your instance has something similar written down.
Does this count as vote manipulation? It’s not multiple accounts at work.
Depends on your instance’s definition. We define it as:
3.6. Vote Manipulation: Attempts to manipulate the voting system is not tolerated including the usage of sock puppet accounts, target voting someone for who they are rather than their content, and mass downvoting posts.
We once banned a few accounts for mass down voting, i.e. their (total downvotes - total upvotes) were over 6 000. One account had downvoted more than 10 000 times in a single community.