Since a moderator can kill an entire post, nullifying "the only control that a user has over content" anyway, is it really going out on that big of a limb to allow moderators to ban people who, say, upvoted child porn to the top of r/politics?
But we both know that your fanciful hypothetical is not how that tool will be used in over 99.999% of cases, because that kind of thing almost never happens, while moderator abuse often does.
Just because there are cases where a tool can be used well doesn't mean that introducing it in to a system rampant with corruption and abuse won't make things worse.
Moderators can't disappear posts outright, they can only remove the links from their respective communities. If someone has the link, it still can be interacted with in the usual way.
The hypothetical you chose is disgusting, unnecessary, and impossible in the real world.
Arguments to child porn I think are the modern equivalent of godwin's law - the moment it gets brought up, all productive discussion stops and is replaced by emotion.
Moderators can ban people for posting things. OP was talking about banning people for upvoting things. Your point about the link being removed vs the content doesn't fit. Let's say it just partially bans them and still lets them post stuff that won't make it to the actual page, but if anyone has the link they can see it. Is that really a meaningful distinction?
Yes, because the latter doesn't stifle discussions already in progress. It's the difference between saying "you can't talk about this here" and "you can't talk about this at all".
That doesnt seem meaningful, if a mod happens to catch it fast no one sees it, if she catches it slow, people can begin and continue a discussion. If it was based on any kind of fundamental right of discussion, it is hard to imagine moderator attention and reflex speed factoring in to the underlying principles.
Plus, moderators already use bots to instantly pre-ban things things and then go through and manually whitelist them.
The distinction is between banning for posting vs banning for upvoting. One reasonable argument I can see is that Reddit goes to some length to hide what you up and down vote in every other context, and people might be able to use the ban tool to dox people who thought votes, as opposed to submissions, were wholely anonymous.
I don't see why the mods ever have to know the names of those who upvoted (or downvoted) to be able to ban them. A message would be sent out to those who were banned, letting them know why, and if they choose to reveal themselves as having made the bad vote... no one's doxxing them except themselves.
