580
The mod banning these users is the same mod who made the posts they downvoted. This is mod abuse, turning the downvote button into an auto-self-ban button.
The message is "If you disagree with me, you will be banned"
Monitoring and banning users for using lemmy as intended to signal boost your opinion should be grounds to have all mod privileges removed. This behaviour undermines the integrity of the server and the wider fediverse.
Seems like an easy abuse case: once the threshold is known, people can create auto reports using puppet accounts, that can't be identified due to anonymous voting
The voting agents can still be identified and banned. As with all of these imagined issues, a single permanent voting agent introduces no actual vulnerability above normal sockpuppets without voting agents. Misbehave in the votes, ban the voting agent. Misbehave in the comments, ban the user. In terms of just vote manipulation, it literally does not reduce the effort of the troll or increase the work of the mod.
Doesn't that defeat the purpose of the agents?
IIRC @[email protected] also showed that it was trivial to map the voting agents with the user based on the comments
If you can't change your agent, then a patched version of lemvotes can do that mapping
If you can change your agent, you have puppet accounts on steroids
the implementation that piefed used to use made it trivial to link them to the original users, yes. this was an implementation flaw that could easily be addressed, which would make it less trivial to do so, mostly turning it into a probability assessment when correlating with other activity, provided that the pseudonymous identity is permanently tied to the real user.
The next step is for people who don't want anonymous proxy voting in their community to simply ban every proxy voting account. This is the approach dubvee.org used.