To be fair, I think their actual national pastime is Cricket, which is significantly more boring.

I’ve never had them, so I can’t comment on their taste, but aesthetically, it looks like a dish you’d be served in a Soviet prison.

I mean, yeah, but that’s so much better. Sure, our food sucks, but it sucks in such an elevated way that it’s almost an art form. British food seems like it was made by a guy desperately trying to put together a meal from ingredients he bought at a gas station. American cuisine seems like it was made by a chef who is losing his sanity to Lovecraftian horrors beyond our comprehension. The world looks at beans and toast and laughs at how pathetic it is.They look upon the Cool Ranch Doritos Locos Taco and weep, for they now know there is no God.

I look at the form of downvoting you’re conducting as a form of vote brigading

You’re welcome to look on that however you like, but that’s not what brigading is; actual brigading is a coordinated attack by a group of accounts to affect the vote count of a specific community or user. That’s why it’s called brigading; you’re supposed to be part of a brigade.

It’s great that you only downvote things taken out of context or misinformation, but it’s not abnormal to use voting to express approval or disapproval for opinions. The vote counts on this thread show that most people are using voting this way.

More or less. A quick skim of the comments shows that there’s going to be some internal fighting over this, but I don’t really care. As long as it banning people for downvotes doesn’t become normalized by Lemmy Mods, this doesn’t affect me.

It could be, but it’s really not. This community posts shit insulting, “carnists,” all the time, then suddenly claims they’re getting attacked or brigaded when these posts get negative responses. I get not wanting to have to debate random assholes every time you share an article about veganism; I even get banning people for being hostile to your insulting memes; but banning people for downvoting a meme is messed up, which is why the other mods on /c/Vegan just removed Mod the responsible for this..

We insult the rich and powerful etc, what class of protection are you proposing to secure? The omnivores? Who’s going to police what’s hostile or insulting? I don’t understand what this call to action is trying to implement or suggest besides outside policing of communities which is one of the reasons the fediverse was made to combat that type of control.

What the ever-loving fuck are you talking about? No one’s asking for anyone to police the Vegan community. They’re free to post as many obnoxious memes as they like, it’s just fucked up to block people for a downvote. Yeah, a lot of Linux communities post shit about Apple or Windows users, but if the mods start combing through the downvotes to ban anyone who disagrees with them, I’d like to think we’d recognize that as an abnormal behavior. What is so hard about this?

Edit: It looks like the other mods on /c/Vegan have chosen to remove the Mod responsible for this ban wave, so hopefully we’re all on the same page that this is abnormal behavior, and not how mods are meant to operate.

You’re actually acknowledging you’ve “downvoted a lot of their memes” because of previous un-related content

No I’m not. I could see how you could choose to misinterpret what I said like that, but I didn’t say that, and I’ll rephrase it so that there is no question as to what I’m saying; they share self-righteous, antagonistic memes, and when those memes wind up in my feed, I downvote them. There are also plenty of neutral posts (articles, etc.) from that community that I don’t downvote, but when shit like this, and this, and this ends up in my feed, I downvote it.

I could block the instance, but I see absolutely no reason to silence myself and allow their shitty opinions to go unchallenged. Why should I hide from their content and allow their community to insult me freely? I’m using the downvote button, the most passive way to express displeasure online, to respond to someone who is insulting me for my lifestyle. Why the fuck is the appropriate answer supposedly, “well, you should instead just hide from the people insulting you.” Why isn’t the response to the community, “Yeah, if you insult a lot of people, you get a lot of downvotes, maybe stop posting such hostile shit.”

Since I wrote this, things have changed a bit. The mod in question seems to have become extremely unpopular, even in her own community, and she’s gone on posting spree on /c/vegan that’s getting downvoted. I still think you can demonstrate that she was trying to manipulate the downvote numbers, but it the evidence is less clear.

I’ve never posted in that sub either, but I was banned today, and the only possible explanation is that it was for downvoting. A lot of their posts are self-righteous and needlessly confrontational, so I’ve downvoted a lot of their memes when they wind up in my feed, but I’ve never commented on any of them.

This moderator isn’t trying to remove hostile comments or stop rule violations; they’re trying to artificially lower the number of downvotes their content gets to make the community look less unpopular. You can actually sort posts by recent and see how the percentage of downvotes suddenly dropped off after the ban spree. This is a blatant attempt to manufacture consent for their community by gaming the system.

Eh, maybe, but he still lost that debate pretty hard.

Oh Christ, earpiece truthers. This shit’s been around since Bush/Kerry.

From where I was sitting, it seemed like Harris beat the ever-loving-shit out him. He took every piece of bait she laid out. I’m not the target though, so I hope undecideds saw what I saw.

It is truly insane to me that the one party in this country has moved into straight-up holocaust denial, but the only thing that will get you labeled an antisemite by either party is suggesting we politely ask Israel to do a little less genocide with the weapons we give them.

This article is fucking absurd. It holds up the primary as a paragon if the democratic process, even though Biden was the only candidate to have universal ballot access, and ignores the fact that two-thirds of Democratic didn’t want him to run. It compares the Drop-Biden advocates to the January 6th protesters, even though they’re advocating for a contested convention, which is the same process that was used until 1970. And to top it all off, it’s written by Stuart Stevens, AKA Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign strategist. Why should the Democrats be taking advice from a Republican strategist, especially one that’s already botched a presidential campaign?