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?
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.