And the replies explained that to them. It sounds like they were actually about even on upvotes to downvotes, but it was enough for an automod to act. They got unbanned after a real mod intervened. It is a frustrating experience, but one that’s going to vary by instance and community. They mentioned in an edit that they might give it another shot.

The other post did have some legitimate complaints about lack of content, most activity being tech bros, far-left politics, and shitpost, cumbersome ui, bad moderation, and elitist users. All of these I agree with even if I think they were exaggerated considerably. But they have all gotten better over time or can be much mitigated with some effort on the user’s part.

Yeah no problem. It’s always nice to be able to discuss something with others and be respectful even if you don’t fully agree.

I understand where the protesters are coming from and the idea that doing anything sounds better than just allowing the world to deteriorate. But I genuinely believe the less dramatic strategies do work better, even if it’s hard to feel the effects. Not too long ago, the idea that the climate change was happening and that humans were to blame was largely ignored. Now, most people acknowledge that it’s the case, and it’s a matter of making it a priority. But that’s still meaningful progress.

Anyways, thanks for the conversation and being open to push back. It’s great to see in spaces that seem more divisive than ever.

The problem is that it doesn’t help their cause in the least. If anything, it damages it. To onlookers, it makes supporters of the cause look crazy and makes them easier to dismiss by opposition.

Climate change is a very serious problem that requires billions of people working together to solve. Culturally significant objects being vandalised is a much less serious problem but it also only requires a few individuals to not do what they have done to become a non-issue.

By all means, protest polluters, badger policymakers, and argue in forums. But if you start being annoying to people equally as powerless to effect meaningful change you’re only going to make people less likely to listen to you.

People already can block individuals easily though. But I agree on the problem with centralized control. Preemptively removing posts/comments should only be done for things that clearly violate rules or are such low quality that it is very likely seeing the content would be to the detriment of most viewers, such as spam or advertisements.

It would be interesting to be able to vote on tags that apply to content so you could ignore stuff that was political for example, but that would just be abused more than current systems.

Thank you for sharing this. Mod abuse is both important to call out and entertaining to see when drama unfolds.

But an upvote doesn’t mean “I like this”. It means you judge the post/comment to be high quality. There’s a correlation for sure, but quality is a holistic judgement based on context. It measured by the same spectrums as downvoting: to what extent is the post/comment relevant, original, funny, entertaining, informative, rule-abiding, respectful, etc. We don’t need separate buttons for all of these, the voting buttons just wear many hats. You’re generally going to think more highly of stuff you agree with or that makes you happy, but accurate bad news and unpopular opinions can still succeed score-wise despite these disadvantages.