Yes, IMO you can and you should, though it’s been taken care of here. In this case, the comments were reported and the community mod, JonsJava, stepped up and banned them from the comm, and said they’d notify lemmy.world admins for instance-wide banning.

The first step is putting in a report on the affected comments; I usually use “vote manipulation, see thread” or something like that so the mod who responds can see the discussion. That’s also why I add screenshots in my related comments: while that’s not necessary, it presents the proof upfront and no one has to go looking for it. A community mod can then address it in the community itself, and they usually do.

The second step is letting the admins of both the originating instance and the community instance know what’s going on. Here, one of the affected persons posted a follow up saying they’d contacted the admin of the instance where the vote manipulation is coming from, lemmy.org, and the community mod added in his own follow up that he was notifying the admins of lemmy.world directly. Had I not seen that I would have emailed the admins of lemmy.world myself.

If you see it, I say point it out, no matter what. To me, and take it for what it’s worth, even if it doesn’t matter in terms of responsive mods or admins or actions taken, we guarantee that nothing will happen if we don’t report it. Maintaining a good community means that we all police ourselves to some extent; in this case it was in the form of comments and reports and contacting admins directly.

But no matter what, whether those reports get acted on or not, know that it absolutely matters to the people who put in a good-faith comment in the expectation that they were engaging with other human commenters on a relatively level playing field: it means something that someone else has their back when others are fucking around with their comment engagement.

They are not banned on Lemmy.world. Just on the news community. I have notified the admins, so they should receive the ban hammer soon.

Thank you for this.

Well this sucks to hear. Can’t say I’m surprised that a shitty instance carries an innocuous name, following L Ron’s playbook. I’ve checked comments as far back as a few days ago getting peppered with bot downvotes so maybe I rustled someone’s jimmies, idk

Lol, no. I do that shit manually. But reading that someone got botted, and seeing a screen shot of it with attached times and how directed and organized it all is, are two different experiences. I like people to know how prevalent it is becoming here. Apologies for fucking up the flow of the thread.