How should Lemmy & Piefed handle voting activity from banned/deleted accounts?
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Vote manipulation is done in both directions
I know? I didn’t say it didn’t happen, I said that positive vote manipulation can more easily be addressed with spam prevention measures.
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Yeah, I haven’t seen that anywhere else. I also liked that each user had a limited amount of votes to cast and thus would (presumably) spend them wisely.
Source: Excellent slashdot karma from when the site was good.
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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.
PieFed, at the discretion of community mods, offers restriction of voting to only subscribed community members. This limits drive-by downvoting from All, where people would not have read the community rules (which in PieFed are repeated in their entirety at the bottom of every post from that community).
It also offers restriction of voting to only “trusted” instances, thereby introducing a third category between the binary federation vs. defederation.
I have also seen communities on PieFed that disable downvoting entirely, even to subscribed members, even on the same instance.
Community mods can enable or disable these settings at will iirc.
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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.
I like the idea of a weighted rating or star system
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This shows up regularly. It would definitely be an improvement over the current binary system.
Piefed already has the emoji reactions, so that’s a step in that direction
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Downvotes don’t seem to be much of a factor in post visibility, at least in scaled mode?
They are in /hot/, which is likely to be vastly more common than scaled.
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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.
This is just in fundamental contradiction to how the Forumverse works. No content regarded as highly relevant and interesting can be filtered via your system and sorting by /new/ on a wider scale just means that a new post you make can be completely missed if no-one notices it.
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or have users earn additional votes for receiving positive votes on their comments
I found the slashdot system worse than the reddit/lemmy system, if you commented anything that offended the hive mind you got downvoted into oblivion and lost the ability to vote, which obviously ended up reinforcing the hive mind.
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Well, I’m here for the internet points. I’m a hoarder, so I like collecting stuff, internet points included.
You must love cookie banners
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No one is here for the internet points. Why worry about imaginary karma?
Because at least on piefed you get punished if downvoted too much
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Piefed has some comment emojis available. Not sure how they show up on other instances.
I used a "no smoking’ one on your comment. But did i use it properly or just to screw around?
it worked. i also added a no smoking emoji to this comment.
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Hard agree on the first part, hard disagree on the second part. Making the system into any sort of rewards system with counterbalancing not only makes the overall system tastier to exploit for Fake Internet Points, but also makes migrating less sellable to new users because their ability or value to interact is reduced or even nullified for a non-deterministic amount of time.
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Because at least on piefed you get punished if downvoted too much
Yes piefed is known to exact CCP-style hidden moderation.
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Yes piefed is known to exact CCP-style hidden moderation.
It’s a shame honestly, I feel like Piefed without up/downvotes at all would work better. No algorithm, thanks.
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It’s a shame honestly, I feel like Piefed without up/downvotes at all would work better. No algorithm, thanks.
Eh, it still has some good things and in theory since this is FOSS someone could just, like, fork it and remove the whole shadow cabal moderation thingy.
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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.
For positive voting you could look at how quickly accounts upvote after a post has been made, combined with how new they are, and whether they have comments or not (maybe also if those comments seem AI-generated).
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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?
oy vey, @[email protected] it’s your time to shine!
tell threadiverse your solution to this! -
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?
Uh, votes don’t matter here. That’s one of the improvements over Reddit.
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I know? I didn’t say it didn’t happen, I said that positive vote manipulation can more easily be addressed with spam prevention measures.
But your (one of) solution is to kill half of the voting system to solve half of the vote manipulation. It’s like solving spam by turning off comments. I don’t think that is going to be a popular opinion
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When banning someone there is the option to remove their content too. It makes sense to include votes in that.
I agree this makes the most sense.
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