Council would like to present to the court our findings in relation to user blindkermit@lemmy.dbzer0.com who has accumulated an astounding 16427 downvotes compared to 222 upvotes.

With an account that's been live for three years, we, the prosecution, are at our wit's end trying to determine what, if anything, this user truly enjoys. Perhaps this extended self-flaggelation in the form of content consumption is a punishment, either for them or for the users of our dear platform. Who can say?

What we can say is that this egregious crime deserves no less than the maximum sentence for this class of offence, and strongly encourage the court to agree.

Hear ye! Hear ye! This Court is hereby called back to order!

Having recently returned from my self-imposed exile in the Mediterranean, an exile brought on almost entirely by watching far too many episodes of Below Deck Mediterranean, I have resumed my rightful place upon the bench.

Technically, I never went to the Mediterranean. But spiritually, I have spent several weeks off the coast of Croatia.

And apparently, Lemmy has been very, very bad while I was gone.

The downvoters have become more aggressive. More persistent. More annoying. They skulk from post to post, clicking their little arrows and trying to make decent people cry into their keyboards.

I don't like schoolyard bullies. I didn't like them in school, and I especially don't like them now that the schoolyard has been replaced by approximately 13 people arguing across 900 federated servers about Linux.

The defendant has spoken.

Therefore, I and my assembled judicial cohorts shall carefully review his testimony while eating Cheez-Its and watching a Below Deck: Down Under marathon on a Peacock account whose legal ownership is currently being disputed by three households and a man named Dennis in Nebraska.

But I warn the defendant: Your words will have to sway this Court considerably, because I am in a foul judicial mood today. You see, I recently discovered that traveling through the Mediterranean aboard a superyacht apparently costs money.

Nobody told me this.

I made several perfectly reasonable offers. My final offer was $43.50 USD, two unopened packets of Taco Bell Fire Sauce, and partial ownership of a ceramic frog that may have belonged to my aunt.

Not one yacht owner accepted. One of them didn't even answer me. Another had his people use the phrase “security concern.”

Snobs. All of them!

After considerable reflection, I have determined that these yacht-owning elitists are almost certainly the same people coming onto Lemmy and downvoting perfectly respectable posts about beans, used electronics, municipal infrastructure, and occasionally anime pillows.

I cannot prove this.

Which, according to established Downvote Court precedent, makes it extremely suspicious.

Last night I drew several connecting lines between yacht ownership and unexplained downvotes on a paper plate. At approximately 2:17 a.m., the lines formed what appeared to be the face of Captain Stubing from The Love Boat.

The plate has since been admitted into evidence. This widespread downvoting is not merely rude. It is bad for morale.

And t is bad for justice!

And most importantly, it is bad for any community hoping to engage meaningfully with the other 13 people who know what Lemmy is.

What happens when we lose one of them? Twelve. Then eleven.

Eventually it's just me, one Finnish Linux administrator, two bots posting RSS feeds, and somebody on lemmy.ml explaining why my toaster is proprietary software.

Dark times indeed.

The Court shall now hear the matter.

Bring forth the defendant.

Bring forth the Cheez-Its.

And somebody turn the yacht show back on. I think they're about to fire the deckhand.