floatingcloudsoverdawnskies

You're lucky. They have been brigading the bigger Lemmy instances, downvoting anyone who opposes them. I saw them do it with my own eyes. I wish all of the major instances would band together and just defederate from them and Lemmygrad; it would stop them from causing the trouble they do.

He's certainly dumb.

And then we have to deal with the community collectively adopting shitty or evil ideas and enforcing them, shutting down victims or anyone who opposes them. So who checks the community? Who protects the individual?

The whole point is that people can downvote you for any stupid reason and doesn't accurately reflect why a post is being rejected by the community. People will do it simply because they want to silence you.

And it causes issues with brigading, botnets, etc. It's why hexbear and lemmygrad are being defederated -- and their members are able to get around it simply by making accounts on other servers and going right back to the brigading. Removing the voting option and giving admins tools to IP ban everyone from an instance upon defederation would go a long way toward fixing the problem. Just putting the hurdle of needing a VPN to regain access alone will deter a lot of idiots.

Isn't that something that mods need to take care of though? Why should that burden be on the community members?

People can and will build botnets to artificially upvote their posts, and downvote opponents. It's too easily abused.