574
The mod banning these users is the same mod who made the posts they downvoted. This is mod abuse, turning the downvote button into an auto-self-ban button.
The message is "If you disagree with me, you will be banned"
Monitoring and banning users for using lemmy as intended to signal boost your opinion should be grounds to have all mod privileges removed. This behaviour undermines the integrity of the server and the wider fediverse.
Public votes are probably the dumbest lemmy "feature", so much unnecessary drama because of it.
There's not really a way to do votes privately on a federated system. Unless you're suggesting no votes at all, which could be interesting, but I'm not able to envision a functional way to do that.
It's a minor technical problem.
How should it work in your opinion? Like technically, how would you federate but also vote privately?
You use a one-way hash instead of the current identifiable key that is used to store the vote value.
What about double spending?
I don't see how replacing a unique id with a unique hash would have any effect on that. Even if you use a variable hash (that would change every time you change your vote) you just have to make sure that the backend properly removes the old value on a new call.
My point is that if a U user is on L local instances and R remote instance gets the vote, how does R know if U is double spending or not?
I see, guess I underestimated the problem a bit, I have to think about it some more.
Hash the whole fucking thing and store it with the entity being voted on.
UserID, UserServerID, EntityID, EntityServerID all together hashed.
Mind you, I'm assuming those pieces of information exist because thingID + thingServerID makes sense as a way to identify "thing" (user, comment, post) in a federated system.
Server is the server that hosts "thing": the server where the user is registered, or the server hosting the forum where a post was made or a comment was made under a post.
On an incoming vote, server calculates the hash. If the same hash is already present, server doesn't accept another vote if it's the same way or changes the existing vote if the new one is different.
Mind you, this is all blue sky thinking based on how I myself would design such a system as I can't be arsed to go learn Lemmy's API and data model just for this.
In your model Remote server would still know about User's votes, which is what we have now with lemmy.
didn't piefed or some other alternative to lemmy add that feature
Kbin shows votes i believe. Piefed doesn’t show you who voted. It does show users “attitude” which is a ratio of upvotes to downvotes that the user has given but it isn’t granular to show what they’ve voted on.
Piefed implemented it, but it didn't work out for some reason and they ended up having to remove it.
IMO, it enforces some sort of accountability to people's voting behaviour. Some of the online forums I frequent have it by default and I've never had any problems with it, as I can back my downvotes and sad/clown emojis (should be added to Lemmy IMO, makes convos way more fun, lol) with arguments if I'm asked to. 🤷
Having said that (and without knowing anything more about the situation): what a weird and most likely pathetic thing to do by that dude.
But that was never something that was needed.
Instead now you get mods like this going around banning people for votes, which is intimidating people from voting and is removing the communities ability to hold bad posts accountable.
As I said in this thread to someone else.
There are accounts who genuinely do go around downvoting en masse without any contributions. When I was growing my community, I caught about 5 accounts - some with no post history, and no contribution history on my community doing it. They also had a long mod log history of bans for doing it elsewhere.
So I banned them because they kept burying new posts.
I feel like it is to a certain degree, to discourage trigger-happy voting behaviour that pushes the masses one way or another... this dude is just a clown.
But these clowns are surprisingly common and much more of a problem than some trigger happy votes.
And it's a lot easier to notice and act on bad behavior when activity is public. Maybe on a centralized service that can afford full time moderation staff, you could restrict that information more effectively, but considering the fediverse is community driven, I think this is an effective choice
Then power-hungry moderators who behave like this can sully their reputation, risk the ire of the instance admin who may remove them over this, and if not - also risk the ire of the fediverse who might just recreate their community on another instance and supplant them.
You're probably right about that.
If you look at Reddit, most new posts on any given community get hit with a flurry of downvotes right out of assembly. Because it's all private.
Having upvotes and downvotes public keeps people, broadly, honest and fair minded in how they vote - and mitigates downvote trolls.
I'd rather have the "downvote trolls" than abusive mods with a stalking tool.
I banned 5 accounts from my community who were downvoting, between them, every single post. Sometimes straight out of the box. Should I not do that?
Also users profiles are already viewable and usable as a "stalking tool" by the same logic. Do you also object to that?
No, I don't think you should ban people for voting and mods shouldn't even have that info. In extreme cases it is something admins should deal with ... but 5 accounts seems hardly worth bothering over.
No, they are different. Comments are primarily about expressing your opinion, wouldn't make sense for them to not be public (that would just be 4chan). Votes don't need that.
5 accounts who between them downvoted everything I posted. 3 of them literally had no post history, and had multiple bans from other communities for the same behaviour. They were literally just doing the equivalent of vandalism.
They hurt the growth of my community and offered it nothing.
Yes, I understand your situation. It's a price I'm willing to pay for private votes.
I think it would be long term corrosive to the honesty of the fediverse, and fall into the same trapping as reddit.
I think the same way about public votes. It is one of the few things reddit did right (compared to other platforms with "likes" and such).
I truly don't see how. If you just mean mod abuse, mods will always abuse their power on any site - and the structure of the fediverse makes any mod anywhere more accountable than they are on reddit for bad faith moderating.
Maybe votes are stupid to start with, a feelgood up or down vote that does nothing for the conversation.
/Rant I remember when you typed out what you liked or disliked. Before the stupid Facebook thumbs-up. It was better before. /Rant off
Votes on sites like this are an algorithm by way of the masses, rather than what you'd find on centralized sites like yt or the like. It's how the front page gets curated to presumably interesting posts instead of being a random spew of every post made.
Perhaps for some posts / comments. But definitely not for all of them. Votes can often be more useful than just feel good or feel bad. Very busy posts often have hundreds of comments. While certainly silly memes and the like may get upvoted there, often relevant or helpful comments do too, with unhelpful or toxic comments generally getting downvoted. Without that system in place I would have to scroll through those hundreds of comments just to find relevant or helpful info instead of not being at the top because the community provided feedback.
Yeah, I remember dozens of "me too" and "+1" comments after posts people agreed with. It was annoying.
Agreed. I mean, the chans are like that: if you have something to say, you say it, you can't just e-nod/e-shake your head. And if the forum allows for it, then that should be visible to everyone.
For what its worth before hexbear disabled downvotes they looked at who had been systematically downvoting trans peoples posts and a couple transphobes got purged.
Also any drama is around downvoting, no cries about systematic upvoting. Seems like any drama can be avoided if downvoting is just disabled.
Vote manipulation using alt accounts also get dealt with: https://lemmy.ca/post/50545875?scrollToComments=true
We literally had this discussion yesterday...
I'm glad more people are starting to come around on this. Maybe rimu will resurrect voting agents for piefed if the sentiment becomes common enough.