How should Lemmy & Piefed handle voting activity from banned/deleted accounts?
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Vote manipulation is getting more common. Some recent examples:
While the accounts were banned, the malicious voting activity stuck around.
Should admins have the ability to discard votes, and if so, which admins? Should community mods have that ability? Can you think of any ways that tools like this could be abused?
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Vote manipulation is getting more common. Some recent examples:
While the accounts were banned, the malicious voting activity stuck around.
Should admins have the ability to discard votes, and if so, which admins? Should community mods have that ability? Can you think of any ways that tools like this could be abused?
@[email protected] @[email protected] a good topic to developp

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Vote manipulation is getting more common. Some recent examples:
While the accounts were banned, the malicious voting activity stuck around.
Should admins have the ability to discard votes, and if so, which admins? Should community mods have that ability? Can you think of any ways that tools like this could be abused?
When banning someone there is the option to remove their content too. It makes sense to include votes in that.
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Vote manipulation is getting more common. Some recent examples:
While the accounts were banned, the malicious voting activity stuck around.
Should admins have the ability to discard votes, and if so, which admins? Should community mods have that ability? Can you think of any ways that tools like this could be abused?
No one is here for the internet points. Why worry about imaginary karma?
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Not if you sort be New.
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Not if you sort be New.
If we expect to be remotely large, sorting by new only is infeasible.
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Vote manipulation is getting more common. Some recent examples:
While the accounts were banned, the malicious voting activity stuck around.
Should admins have the ability to discard votes, and if so, which admins? Should community mods have that ability? Can you think of any ways that tools like this could be abused?
As much as it pains me, I think the only solution to vote manipulation is to disable downvotes. Mind you, I don’t like it - I think downvotes are useful in a healthy self-governing community - but here’s my rationale as to why it’s the only solution:
- The goal of negative vote manipulation is to remove visibility from content. For that, the first few hours of the post’s or comment’s lifetime are critical. Sure, a mod can remove the downvotes, but it would likely be done after the content’s attention window is over, so the damage would be done. [1]
- Positive brigading (artificial boosting of content) is another problem, but out of scope of this post. I consider it to be in the “dealing with spam” category.
- As I’m writing this, it comes to mind that perhaps we can selectively disable downvotes? Just like some instances don’t allow fresh accounts to post, perhaps something similar can be done for downvoting. Maybe it can also be extended to accounts below a certain up- to downvote ratio, to avoid mass downvoters.
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As much as it pains me, I think the only solution to vote manipulation is to disable downvotes. Mind you, I don’t like it - I think downvotes are useful in a healthy self-governing community - but here’s my rationale as to why it’s the only solution:
- The goal of negative vote manipulation is to remove visibility from content. For that, the first few hours of the post’s or comment’s lifetime are critical. Sure, a mod can remove the downvotes, but it would likely be done after the content’s attention window is over, so the damage would be done. [1]
- Positive brigading (artificial boosting of content) is another problem, but out of scope of this post. I consider it to be in the “dealing with spam” category.
- As I’m writing this, it comes to mind that perhaps we can selectively disable downvotes? Just like some instances don’t allow fresh accounts to post, perhaps something similar can be done for downvoting. Maybe it can also be extended to accounts below a certain up- to downvote ratio, to avoid mass downvoters.
I suppose that would address only a part of the issue and there are other, less intrusive ways to mitigate the effects of malicious early down voting. For instance, early down votes could be weighed less.
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Vote manipulation is getting more common. Some recent examples:
While the accounts were banned, the malicious voting activity stuck around.
Should admins have the ability to discard votes, and if so, which admins? Should community mods have that ability? Can you think of any ways that tools like this could be abused?
It depends on the reason for banning, no? If the account was banned because it is a bot, it makes sense to remove all their activity including votes.
However, if the account was banned for misbehaviour, I think it makes more sense to remove only the offending posts and directly associated votes. E.g. all votes by the offending account in the thread in which the offence took place -
Downvotes don’t seem to be much of a factor in post visibility, at least in scaled mode?
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I would give you an Insightful vote but I don’t have any left. /s
Jokes aside, I like both limiting number of votes per day (or otherwise) and having different kinds of votes. The reason why something is up/down voted can make for a better discussion. But I am agnositc towards renewing votes bases on engagement. On one hand, it would increase engagement, and on the other hand, it could scare lurkers away from otherwise upvoting good content.
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This! Lemmy/Piefed needs metamoderation.
The fact that scores were bounded to a predefined range ([-1, 5]) helped a lot, too.
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I suppose that would address only a part of the issue and there are other, less intrusive ways to mitigate the effects of malicious early down voting. For instance, early down votes could be weighed less.
Or disabled until a certain number of upvotes are reached. It could potentially be disabled again of upvotes falls down under the threshold again. Or just have them time gated.
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Vote manipulation is getting more common. Some recent examples:
While the accounts were banned, the malicious voting activity stuck around.
Should admins have the ability to discard votes, and if so, which admins? Should community mods have that ability? Can you think of any ways that tools like this could be abused?
Do away with voting altogether and force people to think for themselves instead of just following the easily manipulated herd. Always sort by New Comments with no other options so the only things at the top are active discussions.
This also would make it so lurkers can’t influence the conversations they don’t actively participate in.
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No one is here for the internet points. Why worry about imaginary karma?
It’s literally how what you see is regulated. If a company X wanted to hide products from company Y, they could make bots to auto-downvote Y products and upvotes X products.
Granted, I feel like more commonly vote manipulation is done for geopolitical reasons rather than astroturfing
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As much as it pains me, I think the only solution to vote manipulation is to disable downvotes. Mind you, I don’t like it - I think downvotes are useful in a healthy self-governing community - but here’s my rationale as to why it’s the only solution:
- The goal of negative vote manipulation is to remove visibility from content. For that, the first few hours of the post’s or comment’s lifetime are critical. Sure, a mod can remove the downvotes, but it would likely be done after the content’s attention window is over, so the damage would be done. [1]
- Positive brigading (artificial boosting of content) is another problem, but out of scope of this post. I consider it to be in the “dealing with spam” category.
- As I’m writing this, it comes to mind that perhaps we can selectively disable downvotes? Just like some instances don’t allow fresh accounts to post, perhaps something similar can be done for downvoting. Maybe it can also be extended to accounts below a certain up- to downvote ratio, to avoid mass downvoters.
Vote manipulation is done in both directions
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I like this a lot.
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No one is here for the internet points. Why worry about imaginary karma?
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As much as it pains me, I think the only solution to vote manipulation is to disable downvotes. Mind you, I don’t like it - I think downvotes are useful in a healthy self-governing community - but here’s my rationale as to why it’s the only solution:
- The goal of negative vote manipulation is to remove visibility from content. For that, the first few hours of the post’s or comment’s lifetime are critical. Sure, a mod can remove the downvotes, but it would likely be done after the content’s attention window is over, so the damage would be done. [1]
- Positive brigading (artificial boosting of content) is another problem, but out of scope of this post. I consider it to be in the “dealing with spam” category.
- As I’m writing this, it comes to mind that perhaps we can selectively disable downvotes? Just like some instances don’t allow fresh accounts to post, perhaps something similar can be done for downvoting. Maybe it can also be extended to accounts below a certain up- to downvote ratio, to avoid mass downvoters.
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