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?
Piefed ties your voting habits and how often downvoted so it can flag you if either downvoted too much or down vote up and down sort of equally.
Basically if someone goes against hive mind once or twice can cause getting removed or limited on their instance.
https://join.piefed.social/2024/06/22/piefed-features-for-growing-healthy-communities/
When someone is consistently getting downvoted it’s likely they are a problem. PieFed provides a list of accounts with low karma, sorted by lowest first. Clicking on their user name takes you to their profile which shows all their posts and comments in one place. Every profile has “Ban” and “Ban + Purge” buttons that have instance-wide effects and are only visible to admins.
The ‘Rep’ column is their reputation. As you can see, some people have been downvoted thousands of times. They’re not going to change their ways, are they?
The ‘Reports’ column is how often they’ve been reported, IP shows their IP address and ‘Source’ shows which website linked to PieFed when they initially registered. If an unfriendly forum starts sending floods of toxic people to your instance, spotting them is easy. (In the image above all the accounts are from other instances so we don’t know their IP address or Source). Find people who downvote too much
Once an account has made a few votes, an “attitude” is calculated each time they vote which is the percentage of up votes vs. down votes.
People who downvote more than upvote tend to be the ones who get in fights a lot and say snarky, inflammatory and negative things. If you were at a dinner party, would you want them around? By reviewing the list of people with bad attitudes you can make decisions about who you want to be involved in our communities.
All these accounts have been downvoting a lot (Attitude column) and receiving some downvotes (Rep column). Their profiles are worth a look and then making a decision about whether they’re bringing down the vibe or not.
Every single time I see someone with a low reputation warning, they are toxic users.
It’s an imperfect tool, but it helps identify trolls and sea lions.
Except it appears designed for that not actually detection of the bad users. And does nothing when the toxic users just say on their own instance or comm. (like goat, pugjeasus and with recent db0 votes the feddit.org admin)
If “going against the hivemind” is insulting people (which is what I’ve seen most of the time with users with both warnings), then it works as intended.
Also, giving a lot of downvotes is usually a sign of toxicity, and that’s only based on the user’s actions, not the downvotes they receives.
As I said, it’s not a perfect tool. To solve toxic users creating their own communities where they reign alone would require admins stepping in. And in the case you mention, when the person is an admin themselves, there isn’t a lot you can imagine, no tool would be able to address that.
Emphasis mine. When is it not a sign of toxicity? Rules are defined by their exceptions, so I am curious as to how this exception is navigated, if at all?
Essentially someone who posts with high frequency has a capacity to issue more downvotes without compromising this admittedly imperfect tool.
Now I was never really a reddit user, but the problematic karma farming of accounts associated with that place was directly linked to these kinds of tools and metrics, no?
In my experience, it is almost always the case, but I said usually in case someone came up with a very unique situation.
Are you saying that because they would get more upvotes, they could offset the downvotes they receive? Potentially, but this is where the second metric comes in (giving a lot of downvotes), and as we said, the two are almost always present at the same time.
Karma farming is an issue when users can see karma as an absolute value. It’s not possible on Piefed, which only shows a percentage of attitude (downvotes given, visible to everyone: https://piefed.zip/u/Blaze ) and reputation (downvotes received, visible only to admins)
Right, though it’s a mitigating factor. I guess there’s something I don’t know about piefed: Lemmy comments all have a default upvote from the user that makes it. But it can be revoked by the user. Does Piefed work the same way? My thought only applies if that’s the case.
The upvote you give yourself is there, but IIRC it doesn’t count for your score.
While we are talking, this is the kind of users who gets the two warnings: https://piefed.zip/u/grimreaper@sopuli.xyz
That’s an interesting example of a user this is designed for/around.
The general system of up/downvotes seems to be doing its job quite as intended: their views appear routinely unpopular and there’s a seemingly pretty strong community consensus around that.
It looks like their threads have comments that solidly and clearly refute the garbage manosphere stuff. For some people it’s the opportunity to express a refutation of it publicly and directly. The public viewer gets to read those responses too.
So with that example: what do the flags do that the content of their posts don’t already communicate?
There has been many times on lemmy and reddit where that is not the case, just saying what people didn’t like was enough. From games to politics people love to dogpile. Making a system that helps do that is asinine.
Blaze you do so much for the fediverse but defending this type of system is very disappointing to me.
I said it above, but I’ll rephrase:
The point you are making with people going against the hivemind is related to people receiving a lot of downvotes, but doesn’t explain people giving a lot of downvotes.
I indeed do a lot, and I’ve seen toxic users going rampant at a few moments. The lemm.ee shutdown due to trolling and toxicity is a sign that we needed a way to identify bad faith trolls and toxic users better to avoid mods and admins burnout.
Because it’s treated differently in piefed but still an example of how the software is designed to punish those who do not act the way the creator wants.
It just doesn’t seem like a way to actually address bad faith trolls or bad actors just make it easier to purge. Especially with instances that love to keep those types around, see world and shit just works.
While we are talking, example of a user with the two warnings: https://piefed.zip/u/grimreaper@sopuli.xyz
And here’s an example of a bigger troll who it surprise surprise doesn’t get flagged https://feddit.online/u/FiniteBanjo
Then Piefed is fine?
Instances who tolerate bad faith trolls or bad actors are going to do so with or without tools such as Piefed’s.
If the part after the but is ignored sure. But that part is also the issue so 🤷.
The point is the tools of piefed will amply the bad actors by allowing them to do the worst parts of reddit in the fediverse.
Jesus Christ I hate that the internet is turning this space into your shitty fucking idea of a dinner party
It’s negative! Oh no better hide that, because some jerks decided being polite is the ultimate Maxim of human expression
as I understand it does not hide negatively voted comments. these are stats, for to moderators, for helping moderation decisions. It’s not automatic.