Will it be effective?
Spoiler
No, it was not very effective.
EDIT: The banning event continues. Please consult the modlog to observe.
https://lemmy.world/modlog?page=1&modId=7121342
If you scroll down to about a day ago, you might be able to observe an emerging behavior from this mod.
EDIT 2: The mod in question moderates a total of 108 Lemmy communities. How deep does this conspiracy run? Is this mod a lost Redditor? More to come!
EDIT 3: The mod has now removed my comment all together, one might assume because it was still receiving upvotes in the 2 hours following my ban. Are there similarities here to Watergate? You be the judge!
EDIT 4: The mod in question has now been removed as a mod of the [email protected] community, as a result of their abuse of power.
https://lemmy.world/post/19731457
This was their response:
EDIT 5: This will be my final update, since as far as I see it, the issue this thread focuses on has been resolved. To quote Beaver herself in a very ironic comment she made directed towards someone else:
Clearly this was all just a case of...
The mod isn't banning people for debating in the comments. A lot of people the mod is banning (myself included) are people who only downvoted posts. Considering that a large portion of the posts are blatantly antagonist things like this, it easy to see why they're getting downvoted. If you're going to insult 90% of the users on an instance, then you're going to get downvoted.
The mod could have made the community private so they could insult people without consequences, but instead, they decided to remain public while banning anyone who downvotes their insults. They want to continue to antagonize the instance while removing the instance'a ability to respond. They want to artificially lower the number of downvotes they get, so it doesn't look like their antagonistic bullshit is as unpopular as it is.
Everyone could block the community, and if you choose to do that, that's a reasonable response, but it shouldn't be the only response. We should be able to express our opinion about the content in our feeds, even if it's just downvoting it. Why should an entire instance be expected to hide from one abusive community?