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.

Holy hell! It's over 19 pages long, and that's over the past day. They even went as far as trying to ban admins.

Edit: it looks like they only tried to ban one admin. I thought I had saw more, but I guess not. But damn, talk about sour grapes.

From what I’ve been told there is a rift between mods of the community.

I had the same issue as you and contacted the mod team no understand how I violated rule 5. One of the mods confirmed I hadn’t violated rule 5 and unbanned me. I was then immediately rebanned again by the original mod.

There was another conversation about it on /c/unpopularopinion and it looks like people were getting banned simply for downvoting one of the mods.

Pretty sure i heard they are banning people based on the downvotes/ upvotes. If you downvote a vegan or upvote a non- vegan then you get banhammered.

That community is a joke though and i refuse to participate (as a vegan).

For a community that just tries to exist peacefully and gets brigaded by “jerks” all the time, they sure are weirdly fixated on becoming the centre of attention every single week.

You should not feed the troll, but it’s too fascinating not to look at it. Like a pack of chimpanzees flinging their doodoo at the glass walls.

Mods abusing power, is just a normal day on social media. Power always corrupts.

I'm also banned because I believe cats cannot be healthy vegans.

The Vegan Community Mod vs Admin drama aside they're probably in the process of transferring to an instance where animal cruelty is explicitly allowed, so I wouldn't expect them to be very welcoming on the current instance.

This post may be relevant: https://slrpnk.net/post/11069853, i.e. perhaps one of those mods is using this same bot. So yeah, you seriously and literally might have been banned bc of a couple of downvotes in some totally unrelated community!?!? As that post says:

even a single downvoted comment could result in a ban.

e.g. I just found out that I've been banned from a community that I've literally never heard about, on an instance I rarely visit, as a result of this bot. Though I never got a message about it, nor does the modlog give a length of time for it? (Nor can I even see the ban in several different modlogs on instances other than Lemmy.World - so there may be issues with federating this action? The community seems to be new, created in the last month, and filled with a deluge of posts from the same few people - so very likely nobody from my instances has subscribed to it yet, and perhaps that caused the ban for it to also not be propagated? I dunno. It's odd to not see a length of time for it though - does it look different to someone who has an account on Lemmy.World, like with an expiration that somehow wouldn't show for someone not logged in?)

And even there, aside from how that post calls us "jerks", and the community too (thereby exposing hypocrisy - bc everyone that they don't like are labeled as "jerks", while they rise above us all, by their own way of thinking...bc they are never downvoted?) it seems to be malfunctioning, bc I most definitely don't have more downvotes than upvotes, either overall or it mentions over the past month - not that we are even allowed to see those? Perhaps it is counting per-community somehow? I do have this comment in !lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world that people seemed to dislike greatly. Probably I was too serious, in a community dedicated to shitposting? :-P And now therefore I banned from this community that I, and probably mostly all of us, have never so much as heard of?

Summary: some children are attempting to play around with what they seem to think is AI, and are now weaponizing downvoting in an attempt to cheap out on modding effort. Not only that, but they are using my data without my consent, or apparently much thought into it at all. And to top it all off, they call anyone they want to as "jerks" - bc obviously anyone who ever receives downvotes, even once, even on a single comment, in an entirely unrelated community, qualifies for that label, don't you agree? /s I think you should form your own opinion though, as to who may be acting like jerks here:-).

Edit: the bot post has a spoiler tag at at the end, but with nothing inside except a horizontal line? i.e., they don't seem very experienced with markup, and presumably therefore with actual coding as well?

Edit 2: omg reading through those comments - it just keeps getting better and better! Especially how readily they take to criticism, but this comment also caught my eye:

Some people were getting banned just because of a single downvote from one of the admins, applied to a reasonable comment, outweighed the whole community’s consensus.

Wow, just wow. The author also did not seem to care about the load this will put onto the instance servers, to be federating hundreds or thousands of community bans, and then lifting them, and then reapplying them again later, however often this bot will be ran. More to the point, modlogs seem like they will become no longer human-readable? (unless perhaps you could filter out all actions taken by these bot accounts - which I can't see how to do) As such, I wonder if this will be treated by other instance admins as an attack against the Fediverse? What would the limit be, I can only guess - 100 community bans per account per day? 1k? 10k? We might soon find out, whether we want to or not!?

I love the irony of a vegan community eating themselves

How utterly bizarre and yet entirely predictable based on recent events.

I think they're trying to damage the vegan brand by being as excluding as possible.

I don't mind vegans, I really dislike this type of treachery giving any group a bad name.

I'm so tired of hearing about this community. They should change their name to ShittyAntiCarnivoreMemes and move to .ml.