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.
If you don’t like a community’s content, ignore/block it. Why are you downvoting a bunch of stuff?
because downvoting is one of the central actions pivotal to the kind of social media that Lemmy/piefed/reddit is.
Yeah, that’s great for flagging spam or stuff that’s not relevant to the community it’s posted in. Downvoting content that’s good for a community just because you don’t like the community is like the godbotherers that yell at people about sin during pride celebrations. Don’t be like them.
Downvoting a toxic community is also a valid use of your downvote. Reddit has several examples (gamersriseup, the_donald, fatpeoplehate, among many more examples).
Think of it like concerned citizens yelling at the westboro baptist church for being hateful pieces of shit.
An analogy can really color an argument eh? I don’t usually engage in that kind of rhetoric, I find it undermines the conversation by overtly engaging with peoples emotions.
The community barely exists and certainly isn’t toxic. Mass downvoting is a great way to undermine the conversation though
Which community?
The one pictured in the screenshots, !boringcompany@sh.itjust.works
In that case, this isn’t about mass downvoting, this is about users being banned by the moderator for downvoting one (1) post, one (1) time. The ‘mass downvoting’ (read, multiple users downvoting each post they don’t like one time each, as intended, and being banned for it) is my other post.
Downvoting a toxic community is also a valid use of your downvote.
No, it’s not. You can flag/report/block the author of any posts in the community if you want, but downvoting will not achieve anything of value except of a dopamine rush.
Disagree
How many people did you get to change their point of view and/or behavior after being downvoted into oblivion?
12
For real. What they’re missing is that Lemmy/Reddit display posts outside of their community, aggregating every post to an “/all” feed, and up/downvotes help sort the posts by Hot, Top and such.
Yes, but downvoting something because you don’t like the community is going to potentially lead to getting banned if the mods notice you doing it on there.
And nothing of value will be lost.
So you don’t oppose community mods responding like that?
Of course it’s shitty of them, but I wouldn’t lose sleep getting banned from a random community I don’t care about.
Well fair enough, although I do think (and I know this isn’t the same here specifically) that it isn’t shitty to ban a metal-hater from a metal music community for downvoting everything.
Votes are (or were) only meant to work as a signal of what the community thinks to be relevant. This is especially important for niche communities. You are being borderline authoritarian when you are not part of a community and you still think that the whole site needs to have a say in their discussion.
Authoritarian? you need your head checked.
If you feel compelled to try to silence people and try to justify yourself based on your value system, yes, you are being authoritarian.
Also, it’s curious that you only managed to resort to a strawman as a response for me calling you out on your behavior. Surely you can do better than that…
Sounds like someone is salty their little fiefdom of communities fucking suck and get no traction. skill issue lol
Cool, I will take this repeated strawman as as a sign that you simply can not address the discussion at hand, and that each of your responses is making the case for anonymous voting harder to support.
You watch too many debatebro streamers lol. Go away.
Rule #0.0
Don’t hurt moddy-woddy’s fee-fees.This is a certified True and Real rule. I checked.
Public votes are probably the dumbest lemmy “feature”, so much unnecessary drama because of 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 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.
IMO, it enforces some sort of accountability to people’s voting behaviour.
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.
Doesn’t seem sound like a major problem to me.
It is to growing communities. My community is large and not controversial enough to worry about that much now. But it was not always like that
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
You’re probably right about that.
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.
We literally had this discussion yesterday…
I missed that post, thanks
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.
Also users profiles are already viewable and usable as a “stalking tool” by the same logic. Do you also object to that?
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.
This is why it would be good to limit downvoting to subscribers only
It should absolutely be an option (it is on Piefed) - not mandatory, but anyone could subscribe to downvote anyway - and doing so would also in itself be harmful for small communities trying to gain new users as they wouldn’t have enough subscribers to upvote content posted on the community.
I think upvoting would be allowed even if you are not a subscriber. Only downvoting would be limited in that way. And yes you could get around it, but small obstacles are surprisingly effective because people are lazy (ever try to get someone to switch to the Fediverse? Lol)
Oh, I was just saying how it works on Piefed right now.
It should be an option anyway for communities to implement that if they want.
At least they can be hidden unlike on some other reddit
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.
Also any drama is around downvoting, no cries about systematic upvoting.
Vote manipulation using alt accounts also get dealt with: https://lemmy.ca/post/50545875?scrollToComments=true
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.
👀
You know you want to
There were more arguments for the anonymous votes to be abused for vote manipulation than power tripping mods
We’ve been over this before. I believe my ability to explicitly control how my information and privacy is handled on the fediverse is far more important than fake Internet points, especially when you can eliminate the impact of vote brigading by just reducing the impact of downvotes, or let a mod selectively wipe downvotes, or selectively make a post immune to downvotes. There are many ways to handle this which are better than the status quo. There’s absolutely no reason why every action I make on the fediverse ahould be saved in plaintext in a thousand different places so that a person can be protected from seeing a largely inconsequential negative number on a UI. It’s absolutely insane that so many people who are otherwise so concerned with privacy and cyber security even attempt to defend this.
There’s absolutely no reason why every action I make on the fediverse ahould be saved in plaintext in a thousand different places so that a person can be protected from seeing a largely inconsequential negative number on a UI.
Extend this logic to actual comments and ask yourself how quickly this would descend into 4chan.
Whether you like it or not, a vote is a much expression as any type of reply. Why is it that a button that says “I dislike this post” should be protected while a comment saying the exact same thing should not?
let a mod selectively wipe downvotes
How does a mod selectively wipe downvotes with anonymous voting?
I think what Blaze was saying is that your opinion was a minority. When put to the debate, most people prefer the public voting situation.
Now I don’t necessarily think that the upvote/downvote system in itself is the best system that can exist on these sites and !blaze@lemmy.zip himself has also talked about this, but so long as Piefed is the junior partner to Lemmy - it can’t really dictate the future here as of this moment.
What debate? This was discussed mostly in a discord stovepipe. There was one open thread about it in the piefed meta community which never showed up in my feed.
The frustrating thing is that the problems were entirely imagined. Having a voting agent is literally no different from me having a voting alt, except it’s only one instead of unlimited. I could write a browser plugin which restores the functionality that could do far more damage, so if a single voting agent is truly a game breaking issue, then the alleged problems are far more fundamental. But they aren’t. There was never any actual problem and this whole thing was just shitty forum politics.
Indeed. I am preferably in favor of a drop of the updownvotes for a Slashdot like system, but that’s a major change
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.
There’s not really a way to do votes privately on a federated system.
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?
Thinking out loud, one way hashes would work as a way to keep the id of user votes secret whilst avoiding vote duplication.
Not to remote servers
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.
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.
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.
The chans also have no quality filter because of this.
You don’t get banned for words in most boards (all?, I haven’t been there in a decade), but you can’t post CP (and maybe high level gore, again, I don’t recall much) and definitely can’t post anything NSFW in blue boards. For me, that’s enough, as I can deal with words.
Well no I meant purely about the lack of upvotes and downvotes. Obviously yes, the Fediverse also has more rules than than 4chan too.
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.
Oh hi, this post is about me!
I’m experimenting with the moderation policy for niche communities described by @jet@hackertalks.com.
@TheDude@sh.itjust.works, do you have any issues with this?
That’s a whole lot of mental gymnastics to try to justify enforcing toxic positivity.
The coward’s way: don’t explain why you did what you did clearly, just obfuscate/point towards some “guideline”. 🙄
Not even a guideline, just some guy’s personal opinion.
Punishing users for their individual votes is mod abuse and vote manipulation. You are removing the voting rights of users who dislike your content.
The only acceptable grounds for banning a user based on their votes would be using a sock puppet to vote on a single post or comment multiple times.
If people think your posts are shit, they should be allowed to express that without fear of phantom banning. Suck it up, or delete your account.
hear hear
You can express yourself. You can make a post in the community and engage in a dialogue. You can make a post another community, such as this one, complaining about the original community. You can make a new community where you just complain about the other community. You’re free to express yourself. But for people who want to participate in the community it should be for them
So if I’m a part of a community, I should only upvote and never downvote? You want echo chambers, got it.
Well that broadly depends on the communities policy. Mostly communities will ban people outside of the community, ie lurking and looking in for the mass downvoting all content on the community.
Cop out bullshit
The only acceptable grounds for banning a user based on their votes would be using a sock puppet to vote on a single post or comment multiple times.
What about if someone entered the community to mass downvote everything? Or did so every day?
If people think your posts are shit, they should be allowed to express that without fear of phantom banning. Suck it up, or delete your account.
If I made a metal music community, and an account came in every day to downvote every post because they don’t like metal - would I be justified in banning them for that?
What about if someone entered the community to mass downvote everything? Or did so every day?
That’s fine, if the post is legitimately popular, the upvotes will outweigh the downvotes. That’s how all of this works, and how it has always worked.
If I made a metal music community, and an account came in every day to downvote every post because they don’t like metal - would I be justified in banning them for that?
No, that would be an abuse of your mod powers. Conversely, how many downvotes do you think a user should be allowed before you can ban them for disagreeing with you?
That’s fine, if the post is legitimately popular, the upvotes will outweigh the downvotes. That’s how all of this works, and how it has always worked.
No, this doesn’t apply to small and growing communities. Or niche communities of specific interests. When I started up my community, many posts wouldn’t get many votes - and an early downvote or two could easily sink a new post from trending at all, leaving it to languish to nowhere.
No, that would be an abuse of your mod powers.
Based on what?
Conversely, how many downvotes do you think a user should be allowed before you can ban them for disagreeing with you?
It’s not about numbers specifically. People downvote in my community now - and I see the same names whenever I check from time to time, but they also upvote and contribute - so I am not that bothered. I have only banned a handful of users for this behaviour since I started. Each one of them did nothing but downvote everything, and never contributed at all to the community.
Based on what?
You’re actively arguing for vote manipulation on the part of moderators.
I think its justified for community moderators to ban an account that never interacts on their community, and downvotes everything. I think it’s not justified for community moderators to ban an account just for a single downvote on any thread.
I think if there’s a serious problem, people can either make their own version of the community on another instance (a perk of the fediverse) and lead people away from the problem community to there, or pressure the instance owner in which the community is based - to remove them (another perk of accountability that doesn’t exist in the same way on Reddit).
Each one of them did nothing but downvote everything, and never contributed at all to the community.
Downvotes are a contribution, they are just the kind of contribution you don’t like. based on this, I don’t think you area good fit for modding; you should probably look to pass your role on to someone who can moderate responsibly.
Downvotes are a contribution, they are just the kind of contribution you don’t like.
I fail to see the valuable contribution of an account that has literally never posted on the community they are downvoting in, never even posted on the fediverse, quietly downvoting every single post in a community. It is nothing but vandalism that hurts the growth of new communities.
based on this, I don’t think you area good fit for modding; you should probably look to pass your role on to someone who can moderate responsibly.
By your logic almost every single community moderator on the fediverse is not a “good fit for modding” because they too, will ban accounts for spam-downvoting on their communities.
I think you’ve made my point for me. You should really find someone more emotionally stable to moderate your communities.
Replying here as it’s higher the thread , but the other person you were replying to just seems to be sealioning.
Also, a 3 months old account with 3 posts, 2 about moderation issues, seems like an alt looking to stir up drama.
Downvotes are a contribution, they are just the kind of contribution you don’t like
and we allow rules in comms that ban certain types of contributions, like propaganda outlets, low value sources, *phobia
in general, not allowing contributions that moderators believe is bad for the health of the comm is an acceptable policy
That is some total whackjob reasoning.
A community means EXCLUDING people who don’t share a interest.
The actual fuck? This is the dumbest take I’ve seen in a while (yeah, including all the commentary around the Charlie Kirk shooting), and they try to justify it as being a rephrasing of “A community is for people who share an interest”?
This is just an unhinged way of justifying isolationism and silencing critics. It reads like it was written by the mods of r/conservative. Go touch some fuckin’ grass, dude.
Not speaking to the particular community in the OP, but this can be valid in non-political contexts. If I made a metal music community, and an account came in every day to downvote every post because they don’t like metal - would I be justified in banning them for that?
Would it be fair minded to downvote like that?
Sure but that’s not what’s happening. The criticism isn’t for banning sock puppets or banning accounts for brigading, it’s for banning accounts that downvote “on-topic posts”, evidently even a single time. What you’re describing and what the mod in question is doing are distinct behaviors, as is what you’re describing and the concepts laid down in Jet’s “guidelines”.
I’m not referring to the specific community here. Community moderators can justifiably and unjustifiably ban accounts for their voting behaviour. I was just asking if you think its ever appropriate to ban someone for their voting behaviour.
I think I’ve already answered that in the previous comment. I’m not really interested in debating broader topics in the middle of a discussion about a case of specific, contextual behavior.
Fair enough. It gets dodgy to me when the community is politically controversial (as the one in the OP is) rather than hobbyist. I certainly hold different standards there.
Okay.
The actual fuck? This is the dumbest take I’ve seen in a while (yeah, including all the commentary around the Charlie Kirk shooting), a
So trans communities should keep TERFs around ?
Can you identify a TERF from a single downvote? Or even 3 or 5 downvotes and no comments?
That’s not “not sharing an interest”. That’s being actively antagonistic and arguably harmful to the community. For at-risk communities, that’s a hard line to parse sometimes and it’s understandable for moderators to be less lenient in their decisions. A community about a money sink by the world’s richest idiot doesn’t really have the same concerns.
Hi I’m the wackjob, communities are places around the topic, and they’re focused on people who want to talk about that topic. If you go to the chess club and you want to talk about motorsports, it’s not going to be great for people. You be asked to leave eventually. Especially if you keep revving your bike in the chess club.
What you’re demanding is that everyone interact with your community “appropriately” and on your terms, but that your interaction with the larger community yours is a part of is not allowed to be questioned or criticized in the way all other communities are. That’s some one-sided bs.
Yes one side of the door is for the community members, the other side of the door is for everyone else.
I’ve explained my philosophy comprehensively here: https://hackertalks.com/post/13884733
If you can find something inconsistent in that i’m happy to hear about it.
I read it. It’s not good and neither are your analogies. There is no “door” if your community is on the front page of lemmy at large. You are taking advantage of the open nature of the service to openly publish your content while pretending that it’s “only for you” and demanding that anyone that sees it outside of your community abide by your personal rules. If that’s what you want, then a platform like lemmy is the wrong one for your community.
I respectfully disagree, allowing a tyranny of negativity to rein simply because people have a niche belief - like AI, or diets, or religion, or politics isn’t good for lemmy. It stifles the growth of lemmy, because everyone has some niche interest that should be part of the fediverse.
If every single part of the fediverse is for open referendum, that’s going to chill lots of participation; it’s much easier to hate many things, then to be so interested in something that you stick your neck out and brave the negativity.
If you really want to rage against some content, cross post it and have at it.
It is not reasonable to demand that every user that disagrees with a post publish their own counter-post. It’s excessive, inefficient, and is antithetical to how the fediverse functions. Post voting is the bare minimum of participation. If that’s still too “chilling”, this is simply the wrong forum for what you’re looking for, and trying to force the whole platform to bend to what you want it to be is just selfish.
What if i go to a motorsport club, but someone is revving is bike in the middle of a public speech, covering what they are saying? I should be able to downvote the revvig guy because I don’t like his ‘posts’.
With your logic, the moron should keep disturbing the speech and i would get booted off the club because I disliked his behavior.
Nobody’s forcing you to go to communities you don’t like. You can block them. In fact moderators of those communities are working hard to provide content. If you only want to be negative with that content it sounds like it’s a perfect idea to block it.
If you very much want to rage against content, you’re welcome to repost it someplace else and then have your say in a different community. But you don’t have the right to use the original community. If you behave well you’re welcome to most communities to participate. If you don’t behave well you’re not. It’s very simple
You don’t understand. In my example, i WANT to be in that community, but a single actor is being a jerk, so i let him know he’s a jerk.
Downvoting something you disagree with is not behaving badly. Banning people without knowing their motivation for a downvote is ridiculous.
On a single downvote? Sure. If someone comes into a community and downvotes the entire page, and they’ve never interacted on the community - I think thats different.
Agree.
Hey. Just wanted to say that you banned me from a number of communities I only voted on with no notification. I only found out because I randomly checked the mod log one day. Trying to police participation by bans via voting behavior puts a chilling effect on the greater Lemmy community and creates an echo chamber with no critical examination of what is being posted. Also, it’s a pretty cowardly way to mod.
Were any of those communities you were interested in having a positive interaction with?
I honestly don’t remember. But I shouldn’t have my voice censored simply for disagreeing with something that was posted. The entire point of the voting system is so that quality content reaches the widest audience.
Also, how do you define a “positive interaction?” If I disagree with what’s posted but provide polite criticism, is that a positive or negative interaction? IMO, if I’m not flinging shit at the walls and insulting users, or otherwise violating the rules of said community, that feels like a positive interaction to me.
Also, how do you define a “positive interaction?” If I disagree with what’s posted but provide polite criticism, is that a positive or negative interaction? IMO, if I’m not flinging shit at the walls and insulting users, or otherwise violating the rules of said community, that feels like a positive interaction to me.
Yeah, i would broadly agree, polite criticism is the bulwark of a good discussion forum and positive.
You can be on topic and have the wrong take, so wrong that people simply think it’s not productive to the conversation and as such the downvote is warranted. What are you doing, my guy?
hi i love this idea and have a niche community on lemmy.world that id like to remove the phantom downvoters from. I see under each post where it says Show Votes and i click it and get this. heres an example.
but if i touch a person it just brings me to their account.
If someone has never said anything in the community, how can I block them from that community? thank you!
I don’t think you can do it from the standard Lemmy UI, but you can use Tesseract front-end (tesh.itjust.works) to ban/unban a user by searching for their username.
From your link:
Shielding members of a community from external forces that would diminish or prevent free expression in that community is one of the major responsibilities of a community runner.
This is a noble intention and not without merit. However it completely falls apart when it’s YOUR posts that you’re banning people for downvoting.
it completely falls apart when it’s YOUR posts
For many niche communities, the moderator is very often the sole poster as well. While I can see the perceived conflict of interest, kickstarting niche communities is challenging.
So challenging that you need to protect your own feelings by banning anyone who downvotes you, so that you don’t decide to leave a community that you’re already in a position of power over? Grow a pair.
so that you don’t decide to leave a community that you’re already in a position of power over
What “power” does the mod have if the community doesn’t have other members?
cool idea :)
Everyone has issues with it. You’re abusing the concept of the fediverse with such power tripping
Looking at your mod log in detail, here is some feedback:
- Consider not banning on a single vote, look for intentionality (bad community fit)
-
- Someone might have simply miss-swipped
- lemvotes is a great tool to identify sockpuppet accounts
- Publish in the community sidebar your policy (or just link to my post) and make it clear if people can request a unbanning (accidents happen)
Here is a great (trivial to identify) example of a sockpuppets being used on your community right now:
Hi Jet, thanks for the feedback.
Publish in the community sidebar your policy (or just link to my post) and make it clear if people can request a unbanning (accidents happen)
Done.
look for intentionality (bad community fit)
What would you recommend for “drive-by” downvotes from /all? Does it always make sense to “wait for the second downvote” from a given account? On a practical level, this is difficult to keep track of as a moderator.
lemvotes is a great tool to identify sockpuppet accounts
Thanks for the tip. Is there a way to filter an account’s votes by community?
What would you recommend for “drive-by” downvotes from /all? Does it always make sense to “wait for the second downvote” from a given account? On a practical level, this is difficult to keep track of as a moderator.
It is, but yes, the most reasonable thing is to wait for a second downvote, or a third, or use time base grouping of downvotes, or opening the post to downvote comments. The signal that is most important to me is someone who DOES NOT LIKE THE COMMUNITY, all i care about is not excluding people who would participate in the community. For example downvoting a post, then opening the post and down voting comments, clear bad fit signal.
Thanks for the tip. Is there a way to filter an account’s votes by community?
Not as of yet, I’ve suggested it to the lem votes person, but you know how time is.
What do you expect from the mod of a grifting comm?
You can’t hang out in a shithole without getting a little shitty.
That mod is also literally the only active user in that group. Your post is the most attention it’s ever got.
And this is the second time in just over a day that I’ve seen moderators abusing the ability to monitor how people vote.
This behaviour undermines good faith participation. Users should not be afraid of copping bans for using the downvote button as they feel is appropriate.
It’s also blatant vote manipulation in keeping their personal content from being lower on the front page. Ban all the downvoters and suddenly your posts look very popular!
This behaviour undermines good faith participation. Users should not be afraid of copping bans for using the downvote button as they feel is appropriate.
As a moderator, I can see who votes on what and how in my community. But it is not my job to really do anything with that information (except if I notice a brigading attack / vote manipulation, then I might keep an eye on users for that). So I don’t even look at them. The community hasn’t been brigaded yet, and since its a moderately low traffic community, it would be pretty obvious if that ever happened.
But votes are information that normal users should definitely not be able to see at all. Eventually, sooner than later most likely, it will lead to “User X voted ‘wrong’ on Y” posts. You and I both know Lemmy users cannot be trusted to be mature enough to not do that kind of Fecal Flinging, especially from the comfort of online anonymity, and once that starts it’s not going to stop.
Users upvote or downvote posts for ten million different reasons. Nobody should feel like they can’t vote how they want on a post for fear of a moderator ban or other users yelling at them. If they are engaging in vote manipulation, its a different story, but people doing that are not only using a single account, so they know what they are doing and should expect nevative consequences. I’m not disagreeing with what you’re saying, just adding on that beyond a moderator’s ethical duty regarding (not) taking action for vote activity, normal users should also be held to the same ethical duty.
But votes are information that normal users should definitely not be able to see at all.
Votes on Lemmy are public. lemvotes.org exists, and Friendica and mbin both expose votes, and then obviously it’s decently simple (though not super-trivial like those three methods) to set up your own instance and look over all the votes.
You might feel that there should be a special category of “lesser” (you say normal) user that is unable to see votes, even though another category of user is able to. We could talk about that philosophically, but regardless, normal users can see votes. Vote accordingly. The error lies with the Lemmy UI being designed in a way that doesn’t make it clear to people that their votes are not fully private.
Yes and no.
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. That is my right.
That’s weird, what topic is so controversial someone would put in that kind of effort?
You tell me. I mean I think the accounts I’m referring to here had been downvoting all over the place, not just my community.
Yeah on closer look it seems like this particular baby strawberry is also a mod on nearly 50 other groups across more than 10 instances. Not good.
Hey I just wanna pop in and say I crossposted your post about lemmyusa over to power tripping bastards on dbzero the other day, and we actually had a mod from there come on and discuss things.
I think its a bit more complex than just… them clearly doing mod abuse or manipulation.
From their POV, they were basically getting hit with a mass wave of downvotes, as well as some genuinely unnaceptable harassment… and they basically panicked and went into lockdown mode.
Maybe you would be interested in adding to that discussion?
https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/53271052
Also, just… in general, the whole point of the ye power trippin bastards comm is to report and discuss potential mod/admin abuse scenarios, in case you’d maybe like to post stuff there yourself…
You … seem to be on something of a tear of call outs, so, maybe you’d be interested.
Anyway, more specifically relevant to this threelon person… yeah i dont find this behavior surprising, they are obviously a massive elon stan and their personality is collapsing as it becomes harder and harder to deny that, even in just a purely technical sense, leaving politics as far aside as possible… yeah elon is actually just a con artist fradulent idiot.
Thanks for the context and for cross posting, this is turning into an interesting discussion across a wider variety of skill sets. Skill sets, as in the following: power users, people who don’t like mods and have done it before, people who have never modded but know exactly how it should be done, basic end users who are former mods.
Hey Verity, I support your right to do this (note: those are all my comments), even if you don’t!
Have a great day, and don’t shy away from that downvote button <3
Wow, you’re calling me out too and I’m not even a mod any more. Keep that powdered wig high and lice-free, Robespierre.
hah ‘Robespierre’ - Good one, probably.
Just funny you are serial downvoting in defence of banning people for serial downvoting :D
Let me guess, hypocrisy is only cool when you do it.
I downvoted your comments because I’m petty and it’s fun and it doesn’t matter very much. We started out all high minded and now we’re here, in the mud, slinging mud, like the Jacobins. So you win. Here’s a box of wheat starch for your 'do, live it up.
That’s not hypocrisy. People who support moderators rights to ban people from their community for mass downvoting aren’t saying no-one should ever downvote, and that all bans for downvoting are automatically justified.
This is something that would definitely be better to message the instance admins directly over, and not turn into a public Tomato Toss. I don’t know the specifics, but there could be a reason for this (potentially Anti-Vote Brigading). When in doubt, contact the instance admins, and if they don’t respond or don’t do anything, then create a new account on a different home instance. That is the point of the fediverse.
I hope that dipshit is reading this thread. Ban me, too!
We don’t need Reddit’s power tripping back
Do you really expect the platform that lets anybody form their personal power tripping fiefdom to inexplicably not draw those people in? No centralization doesn’t mean you’re free of the particular flavor of power tripping you experienced, it means there are many cells of various levels of power tripping with little to no oversight.
My hope for the Fediverse is, sure. We can just allow people to be sad little kings of their sad little hills. If it’s enough of a problem, everyone else can go to some other community, possibly on some other instance.
The federative structure of the fediverse means that your average community moderator is way more accountable than a subreddit moderator is on reddit, to be fair.
In theory maybe, but have we actually seen a community migrate away from a sub or the admins step in because of power tripping?
Yeah, I saw one that got so ugly, IIRC one admin stepped in to say “hi”. It was the split between the c/Risa mod and some commenters, leading the rise of c/TenForward. Was this a year and a half ago?!
Onehundredninetysix and the Trek meme split.
The 196 mitosis was due to mods literally closing the sub, what caused the trek split?
Actually, due to some mod shenanigans, they tried to close the community to move it to a less trans-friendly instance, where the use of neopronouns would not be enforced. The community said no and formed a new community on their original instance, got new mods, hookers, and blackjack.
https://lemmy.cafe/post/12094663
As for the Trek split, here’s a long, detailed, long post about it…
Thank you for the sauce!
Well that wasn’t due to power-tripping though. That was because lemm.ee shut down lol
I’m talking about the previous power trip, 2 years before Lemm.ee shutdown: https://lemmy.zip/post/25898384?scrollToComments=true
Oh, gotcha
Clearly you haven’t been here for long. It’s been terrible mods for years now.
allthewaydown.png
No gods, no kings. ✊🏻
I made the list!
I upvote most of threelonmusketeers’ posts (voyager confirms my votes are net +44) , but my down vote finger gets itchy when I see a string of pro Elmo content.
Not sure about that specific case.
How do they even know you downvoted? I was banned from a carnivore’s communities once and can’t say I’d ever even seen them. Claimed I was committing “systemic downvoting.” Even if I had, how would they know? I started some tiny little communities on another instance, just to learn really, and I have no such privied data available to me as a mod (at least not that I know of so far). I should have posted that weirdo.
I should have posted that weirdo.
Please do, holding people accountable is half the fun of lemmy.
Now that I understand the mechanics of it all slightly better, I wouldn’t let that happen again.
FWIW the account you are using now hasn’t been banned from anything.
Thanks. Good to know. My account on this instance is pretty new. If I remember correctly, those bans happened to my piefed account.
Because community moderators can see upvotes and downvotes of comments and posts on their community. Anyone can as well with Lemvotes.
We can see exactly how each person votes? I’m on piefed.social too and must be staring right at the thing but not recognizing it.
You need to be a community moderator to see the votes on your own community on Piefed.
You can also use Lemvotes to see votes on a post, but not piefed because rimu defederated from them.
Found it, thanks. I replied to my own comment with a couple screenshots before I saw your reply.
Today I learned! I’m surprised, knowing what I know now, that I haven’t been banned from more sublemmys. Ah, well. The day is young.
Well ultimately it doesn’t happen that often across the Fediverse. Specific communities that are controversial are likely to take harder lines on it, and big communities just won’t even notice it anymore.
BRB, gonna downvote all his posts so I don’t have to bother blocking that community.
(I also blocked it anyway.)
Thanks for the heads up I’m gonna go get banned from a shitty elon musk fan community. Badge of honor as far as I’m concerned
Because mods can only mod a single community, right, and no-one makes it almost their entire personality of “being a mod”?
I’ve sometimes found I’ve been banned on the weirdest communities which I’ve ever even visited, because some dipshit Russian got mad at me for calling out their propaganda and then banned me from all the communities they could. Pretty common on Lemmy
Hell fucking yeah! Good for them. Shitty digital neighbors deserve to get treated like shitty digital neighbors!
Some of those accounts are antiyank alt accounts
I also temp ban some accounts that are obvious alt accounts in my community, only ones where I can verify that the account is an alt. Honestly, downvotes should just be removed entirely.
I still want a placebo downvote button but I don’t want it to do anything. Othet than that, I agree - public votes are cancer and 90% of the cancer involves down votes. It’s a shame piefed caved to forum politics on this issue.
I doubt the devs will ever listen though, they’re too busy ranting about the validity of RT News as a reputable source. Maybe Piefed devs will?
Piefed’s original surge in popularity was arguably due to the main dev quickly implementing a voting agent function for pseudonymous voting. It wasn’t perfect but it worked quite well until a bunch of other admins got butthurt about it and basically convinced rimu to abandon the idea in some discord back channels.
I have been vocal about my opinion that this was a mistake, and that public voting is the number one biggest issue with the fediverse at the moment (besides tankies, but that’s a problem which will wither away with more users). Nothing good can come out of public voting though. People have this idea that it’s some panacea for vote manipulation, but there are way better ways to handle that than IMO
Piefed’s original surge in popularity was arguably due to the main dev quickly implementing a voting agent function for pseudonymous voting.
Piefed’s urge came from crossposts comments consolidation, keyword filters, posts flairs, community migration and lemm.ee shutdown
The private voting was marginal
No, the original surge in popularity was a combination of its features and collapse of lemm.ee. I don’t think the downvoting policy had much to do with it.
I regularly get vote manipulation in my community and on my account. What are some ways to better handle that?
Mostly I’m talking about various algorithmic ways to diminish or eliminate the influence of downvotes for post ranking purposes. Nothing that can be done without forking Lemmy or piefed unfortunately. Even something like downvotes don’t actually rank posts, but enough of them will auto-report content would be better than what we have.
It’s unfortunate that nobody wants to put serious effort into this kind of thing though, because it feels like admins are addicted to the tiny amount of insider power which comes with watching public votes, so there’s no incentive to implement features which might allow closing that obnoxious privacy hole.
enough of them will auto-report content would be better than what we have.
Seems like an easy abuse case: once the threshold is known, people can create auto reports using puppet accounts, that can’t be identified due to anonymous voting
The voting agents can still be identified and banned. As with all of these imagined issues, a single permanent voting agent introduces no actual vulnerability above normal sockpuppets without voting agents. Misbehave in the votes, ban the voting agent. Misbehave in the comments, ban the user. In terms of just vote manipulation, it literally does not reduce the effort of the troll or increase the work of the mod.
Piefed has an open issue to look at improvements to the ranking/scoring algorithms. So, we are open to improvements on that end if there are suggestions.
Too often are the devs busy with moderating and removing content critical of their ideology instead of development
Not the case for Piefed
