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PSA: Lemmy votes can be manipulated
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this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2023
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Get rid of votes. They suck.
Nah, I want to downvote Nazis. Their opinions don't matter and should be suppressed.
Suppress nazis by bullying them, not by passively downvoting their hate speech and moving on.
You can do both.
I guess. Ones really effective and tells everyone around you that the person is a nazi in case they were cloaking it, pushes back on their bullshit and makes everyone aware that it’s not okay to say shit like that and that it is okay to fight them.
The other is a downvote and changes where the nazi content ends up in a rank.
Nazis will always act in bad faith and it shouldn't surprise us when they use their 10 alts to fuck up voting, which is another reason to hide votes and focus on commenting rather than voting. Although i don't agree with the negative style of confrontation, the positive and neutral are great though. Commentate on each bad faith action they take in real time so the audience understands how stupid nazis are, and becomes resistant to bad faith tactics.
You can do both!
On Reddit, enough downvotes collapse the content so people who might really not feel up to seeing any Nazi content that day, even if there’s tons of pushback against it, didn’t have to see it. (Of course, the collapsed downvoted comment might have just been an unpopular but unbigoted and unharmful opinion, like “I think Mario games are poorly made and unfun” getting downvoted to hell. But it’s a risk you know you’re taking when you open a collapsed post with a score of -17. Unpopular opinion, spammer, or hate speech?). You have to open the comment thread to see it. I do not know if anything on the Fediverse has this functionality. Until then, downvotes can still make Nazi content less easy to see by being ranked lower.
And despite the downvotes, lots of people still responded to the Nazi anyways, in a way that let me know that this was one troll and the community was very much not accepting of bigotry. That was also useful. Both things have a place.
How else would you rank the content?
You don’t. Ranked content is a solution for owners of social media platforms to avoid paying moderators. It’s a no brainer if you want a cheap automatic advertising platform but isn’t great and requires constant intervention if you’re not monetizing somehow.
Getting rid of voting would do nothing to combat spam. There would be plenty of other ways communities could (and would) get spammed, not to mention how impossible interacting with and navigating communities with thousands of users would be even without the spam that would absolutely happen without content ranking.
Spam will happen on large platforms, and thankfully ActivityPub gives instances the ability to defederate/federate however they like to deal with problem instances. Personally, if Lemmy were to get rid of voting, there is no chance that I would use Lemmy whatsoever, and I feel pretty confident that most users wouldn't either.
If we could run microcommunities with single mods, that lock when we sleep and are invite only to post or comment, it'd be a pretty fun experiment. I could invite a dozen interesting people and we could just slowly chat away, id ban em if they break the simple rules and delete their post/comments. Anyone would be able to view it, like a blog and if they want to comment they can always make their own post for comments in their own microcommunity. You could be subscribed to stuff you actually care about, although it'd take a while. Some people could make content copy microcoms where they just solo post from reddit or whatever.
You’re commenting in a thread about vote spam. How can there be vote spam without votes?
If you’re worried about content spam why not look to the uhh 40 years of solutions to that problem.
Too bad activitypub is carved in stone and can’t be changed for any reason.
You can take the guy out of Reddit…
My reply to you was sarcasm. Specifications can be changed. Things can be removed from them.
Yeah, it would break all those things for which votes provide no benefit. They should be broken.
There isn’t any use for votes on a platform that isn’t using them to automatically rank content for the purposes of profit.
Running a voteless instance of one of those does no good because the problem is structural. Votes aren’t secure and their whole purpose is to manipulate what content gets shown to users. People using the votes to make something get shown (or not) isn’t a bug, it’s a feature.
The existence of a system that ranks content according to votes changes how people behave on the platform. Spinning up an instance that just doesn’t allow or show votes doesn’t change the problem that all the content is produced using the vote system and reflects it.
Yeah I know there’s votes on stuff other than lemmy. There shouldn’t be for all the reasons I keep saying. What some other platforms use votes as a stand in for (except for maybe mobilizon, idk much about that one) are weird hacks like the boost/rt implementation or shouldn’t exist.
I’m talking about it at the protocol level because you took it there and because without a for profit content mill votes serve no purpose.
If votes not being secure isn’t a problem then why does it blow up like crazy every time someone makes a post about it? Also, it’s obviously a huge problem. Minimizing it by saying it’s just part of any federated system just sounds crazy.
My overarching point is that the structure informs and defines the function and when there’s a structural reenforcement to karma farming, vote laundering and general shitty Reddit (or twitter) style behavior the solution is to remove that part of the structure.
It should come as no surprise to you that I’m not gonna go off half cocked on git about this. I’m well aware that it sounds like primo old man yelling at clouds. The only reason I’m talking to you about it is in the hope that other people see the conversation and go “damn, it sounds weird but he’s cookin’”.
Once enough people realize that noncommercial social media has a different form than it’s predecessors there’s an actual chance that some fundamental change to activitypub could happen. That mr smith goes to Washington stuff never worked.