It’s not so much the banning I’m worried about as the brigading. If someone develops some mod tool that starts tracking downvotes in your community user by user, they could then essentially assign some sort of social credit score to people and harass them out in the wild.

People can be creeps online, too. I’ve seen more than one situation on Reddit before where people end up getting stalked by other users who harass them anywhere they see them. You say the right thing in front of the wrong person on the wrong day and they can just snap, becoming way too obsessive.

If some troglodyte spams hate speech that ends up in my All feed and I downvote them because that stuff deserves to be buried, I don’t want to have to worry about being potentially stalked and singled out by a weirdo who can connect their downvotes to me because they posted everything in their self-moderated community. Votes suck and internet points are dumb, but the system serves its purpose of providing an anonymous way to direct content and conversations in productive directions. Good stuff is elevated, bad stuff is buried.