Apparently, you can't downvote if you have no comments/posts in your account
1mon 22d ago by lemmy.today/u/Lirton in yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com from lemmy.today
Not my account, but want to advocate for it. Because of, personally, I find it hilarious.
So, it seems like a mod with username MysticMushroom1776 lemmy.dbzer0.com has some interesting policies about interacting with their content.
I agree that this user called PyroRondo has no content for 5 months straight. This is unusual but totally isn't against any rules of Lemmy.
As I suspect, they reacted to a few posts of MysticMushroom1776 lemmy.dbzer0.com during random session of content scrolling. No brigading or any other types of harassment. I even suspect that these reactions were in communities connected to mod's AI art, not political ones.
And this for some reason triggered a ban in all comunities. Not in 1 or 2. Moreover, it seems like this mod uses specialized tools, that allow to track downvotes on their content made by other users with ability to get their usernames. I may be wrong, but I don't think that such tools are basic for moderators on Lemmy.
Edit: typo.
Yeah unless there's an actual attack where a bunch of throwaway accounts mass-downvote certain posts, banning a single individual for daring to downvote is wild
It's also my first time seeing that vote-viewing website and it's honestly a bit insane that this quirk is part of Lemmy design ngl
Federated voting means both up and downvotes have to be shared.
Yes but it doesn't have to share usernames to anything but the originating server for the vote and host server for the content. All others only need the sum.
This does still mean instance admins can do broad bans. There's other privacy techniques if that matters like cryptographic blind signatures for voting, etc, where you can know each user only cast one vote (and can see totals per originating server) without revealing the specific users.
In theory you could also make this ban compliant (such that you can't vote if you're banned, but if you're not and cast a vote you still can't be identified).
If you do extra fancy stuff like transparency logs with anonymous credentials and secure multiparty computation (MPC) you could do it while still allowing abuse detection. Although for now that's very complicated and compute heavy 🤷
If you actually understand how to implement all that maybe you should go contribute to PieFed.
Piefed already tried exactly that and had to revert because it's indistinguishable from vote manipulation
People just need to accept that on platforms where votes determine ranking, or worse, user reputation scores. Vote manipulation will be a real problem, and it needs to be managed or people are allowed to suppress and destroy smaller communities with alts if they so choose.
If the receiving instance cant view who votes, you open it up to extreme vote manipulation.
It's trivial to start your own instance, and one could fork any code to counteract bans on their end or mass send votes without a set user behind them.
instance admins could reject votes from abusive instances and you could let mods see totals per instance
There's other possibilities like using private set intersection and more to detect possible abusive patterns without sending raw data over between instances
Theoretically, couldn't instances have been designed to count the sums of upvotes and downvotes by their users for any given post or comment—those counts being federated with each increase or decrease—so that a tool such as lemvotes would only be able to output a list of instances for voting activity, rather than their individual users?
Doing so would remove the ability for moderators to see individual voting patterns unless that data were also sent separately in an encrypted manner that could only be accessed by moderator accounts, however.
That would make it easier for a malicious instance to send extra votes, or otherwise manipulate vote counts.
I don't quite see why up+downvotes wouldn't be public. Everything you post is public, up/downvotes can be used by bots (and posts are actually heavily influenced by them on reddit), so it makes sense that you can see who down/upvoted what.
Of course it's an additional tool for people to abuse, but if they're the type of people who do that, then they're going to find some way to abuse something anyway.
It's also my first time seeing that vote-viewing website and it's honestly a bit insane that this quirk is part of Lemmy design ngl
It's kind of in the nature of the fediverse.
For the most part though it just proves that you don't know why people upvote or downvote something until they post. Otherwise it just reveals chronic haters.
Like, I got a couple haters that downvote my post history periodically. I know it's just primarily just a proud german nationalist and an australian racist that can't stand to see my username.
But I do see that people use vote lookups to provoke fights and, well, pursue people for their votes, which is kind of silly.
an australian racist
ikt?
I bet 10 dollars, that mod hasn't even send a message to that person asking what that was a thing.
Why, when they're clearly a troll? Fuck em.
When I DM people who are engaging in vote manipulation the best response I've gotten is silence and the worst responses I've gotten is lying, hostility, and slurs. And since so many people have decided to harass me personally over moderation, or just over AI. I won't DM people over bans.
Moreover, it seems like this mod uses specialized tools, that allow to track downvotes on their content made by other users with ability to get their usernames. I may be wrong, but I don’t think that such tools are basic for moderators on Lemmy.
That information is readily available. For example: https://lemvotes.org/
If you are that obsessed with individual votes on a comment or a post, you’re spending far too much time here
Agreed.
It’s open for admins to see. So lemmyvotes either hosts their own instance or has admin access to one, and then just relays that.
Exactly. Anyone in the fediverse can arbitrarily become an admin, simply by deciding to host an instance.
I see this thing for the first time. Interesting tool. But I think that this one is kinda wrong to exist? Aren't votes and downvotes supposed to be a mostly private and detectable only for admins?
Mods can see votes on content in their communities without needing external tools too. The information is public, it's just not usually made visible to everyone.
Community moderators can also see who has upvoted or downvoted on their own communities.
Hmm... Okay, thanks for the info.
Lemmy certainly isn't a very privacy-respecting platform.
It never pretended to be. It's a platform for broadcasting actions based on usernames not secure communications. Kinda cross purposes to think you can effectively do both. Why I liked that kbin was very upfront and let users see all engagement right from the post. It can provide a level of anonymity if you want (though community moderation resists this because strong anonymous protections just leads to abuse), but privacy for that persona isn't part of the plank.
Eh, that's not really true. The concept of "privacy" has been broadly corrupted by centralized services. There is no "privacy" when you provide information to another person, let alone publish it to the world. Never has been. You never had any actual "privacy" on any platform. What you had was admins lightly concealing from you the manner in which they used the information you provided. That's not "privacy".
Actual privacy only comes when you shut your mouth and keep a thought to yourself. As soon as you put the idea out, you abandoned your expectation of privacy.
The purpose of Lemmy is communication. It is designed to share the information you provide to the general public, whether that information is a post, a comment, an upvote or downvote. It is designed to limit and bypass attempts at centralized control over the flow of that information.
How? I'm a mod and haven't figured that out yet (short of looking up things one at a time on lemvotes).
Click the "..." in any post on your community and it will have a "View Votes" option
Ah, thanks!
If you want your votes to be (somewhat) private, probably the best thing to do is to create an alternative account and use that for voting without making any comments/posts.
PieFed also gives you an option so that your votes are only shared within the same instance. So, tools like "lemvotes" wouldn't be able to pick up on your voting history. In that case only the local instance Admins (and maybe moderators) would be able to see your voting history.
From this user it is fairly obvious that it was created recently. They downvoted 49 times in the first few minutes of activity. They then upvoted once a few days later.
https://lemvotes.org/user/PyroRondo@lemmy.world
Based on the first day of activity, it almost does look like this was an account created just for downvoting.
It's funny how you say that's the best strategy in a thread about somebody getting banned for it.
49 downs in a minute or two and 1 upvote is a little different than the use that was suggested, I would say.
I remember this being an issue when I first joined, to an instance admin is a simple as performing an SQL query .
Unfortunately Lemmy is full of people who can't stand criticism and actually prefer having it this way, instead of finding a compromise.
Looks like this account and their main got what they deserved. I don't know why anyone would lie about something so easy to prove or disprove. Mods can see votes, so can admins. They're also easily viewable on Lemvotes.org.
This isn't organic voting, anyone can see that.
this looks similar to maddddddddddddddddd@sh.itjust.works, and oji@lemmy.world is the more organic kind you can see when finding someone oji hates you see theres mass downvote within short interval time
But Hexbear said you deserved because it is harmless content in a self contained space, on an instance that's comfortable with it.
Muh left unity thoooo
I'm sorry you're stuck dealing with such disgusting people constantly.
They can't even see my posts or communities anymore. What are they complaining about? Hexbears really are the worst people. I don't understand why they're still federated with us when they hate us so much.
Fuck if I know, genuinely think it's so they can just invade communities and go "well it was on our front page, it's not an attack when we do it."
I don't exactly love those comments, but I gotta say it's uhh 2 maybe 3 hexbears that made comments and your reaction is that everyone there sucks? Idk, maybe I'm missing something here
It's a recurring issue with them and us. This isn't the first time they've started a fight and justified it.
Okay, thanks for your explanation
So in general, I agree that moderators who ban people for downvoting are absolutely PTB, and are basically engaging in vote manipulation themselves through their actions.
In this case however, we're looking at an account that has upvoted 1 post and downvoted 49 (With no comment interaction whatsoever) in the span of 3 minutes. This is a pretty clear downvoting account.
This is with you being banned from the same communities 3 days ago, which I understand is great motivation to look at the moderation practices, but the fact that you're posting about another users bans, rather than your own is suspicious with regards to the accusations in this thread of it being your sockpuppet.
If you want to discuss your bans by this mod, I would be interested in the conversation. But this user deserves the ban.
Account made to downvote/stalk a community, they deserved it.
And fuck the Hexbear users defending the banned account because they hate the content. Fucking jackasses.
Yeah it's disappointing. See my comment below. https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/67799335/25742930
Has noone told the mods of the 90/9/1 rule of the Internet? 90% lurkers, 9% commenters, and then the rare 1% that actually post stuff.
An account that performs no activity other than issuing fifty downvotes within a single minute is highly unlikely to be operated by a human, much less a typical user. This pattern is strongly indicative of an automated sockpuppet account, which explains why the dbzer0 administrators chose to ban it once the behavior was brought to their attention.
Appreciation to lirton@lemmy.today for highlighting the issue and enabling appropriate action to be taken.
Fair enough. I didn't see the timestamps
I don’t produce content and I think this is my first comment. I usually just read content and sometimes vote. Nobody banned me yet for not contributing with content 😬
You have commented before and even if you didn't, your voting history is extremely regular next to people like the one in the post or someone like maddddddddddddddddd@sh.itjust.works notice the downvote to upvote ratio and timestamp of each voting
Downvoting is, in general, toxic. To me the putative rule in the title seems like a good idea.
Complete insanity of a frail ego.
What you (plural) need to grapple with is that most ordinary people do not enjoy a free-for-all of insults and shouting and snark and... downvoting (because it's basically all the same thing). The reason my comments on this subject are always... downvoted is that those ordinary people are not here. You're in an echo chamber of your own making, filled with rude course people like yourselves, almost all male of course. This is the price for your behavior that you inflict on others and pay yourselves.
Its not an insult, its a downvote... Any comment can be interpreted by the reader as they will, a upvote/downvote is mostly an signal of agreement/disagreement.
This is YOUR echochamber, do you go through life without getting the smallest amount of pushback, a mere "sorry, I don't agree"? Instead this is a place where you can apparently comment and not even receive the simplest notice of disagreement without risking a ban like what OP showed. The price I'm paying is having to explain normal human interaction to people like you.
Well said.
No, it is not in general. It is a fast way to share your opinion. If it is not abused, then there is no reason to think that this is something bad. It is the equivalent of making a comment with emoji of thumb/arrow down. If you will remove downvote button, people will just send similar comments.
It was never intended to be a "fast way to share [an] opinion". That is post-hoc justification. Who cares what your (or my) opinion is? The downvote button is, de-facto, a way to say "shut up". Personally I find that toxic.
If you will remove downvote button, people will just send similar comments.
This is the pragmatic argument and it's slightly more convincing. Although oddly, I personally don't feel this need to throw my toys out of the cot when someone says something I disagree with. But apparently there are lots of babies on social media.
There are a few instances that don’t have downvoting if you’d prefer. I think Blahaj.zone is one of them actually
Yep, thanks. Trouble is, they don't have the communities I'm interested in.
I take it you mean they’re not federated with certain instances you like? You should be able to access any .world comm from a blahaj account, iirc.
Sure but I could get the same effect by just hiding downvote scores in my LW settings. For it to be disabled (i.e. impossible not invisible) the community admin must turn it off.
I called that at least one person would be mad in the comments. This community never disappoints that way.