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.
The message is “If you disagree with me, you will be banned”
It used to be that votes were meant to be used as an indicator of the quality of the post according to the community guidelines, not how “agreeable” a comment or post is. This cultural change is one the most toxic behaviors that made Reddit such a crappy place for discussion.
This was already bad on Reddit, but at least there one could avoid this problem because people were used to browse only the subreddits they subscribed to, so niche subreddits could still have some semblance of “good” community participation. On Lemmy, most people browse by /all and lots of them still treat the downvote button as a some mechanism to train an algorithm. These users are the worst.
In the beginning, I was actually sending DMs to people asking them to please not downvote something if they were not part of the community and their reaction was basically “I don’t want to see this, so I will downvote to bury it” (completely ignoring the fact that they could simply hide the post or stop browsing by /all).
So, while “banning everyone who downvotes the post” might seem an overreaction, I could definitely see a moderator could flag a vote as coming from a non-community member and use that flag to ignore their votes in the ranking systems, and I would love to have a bot that auto-messages every clueless downvoter explaining the proper netiquette around votes for non-community members.
It used to be that votes were meant to be used as an indicator of the quality of the post according to the community guidelines, not how “agreeable” a comment or post is.
Never was. It was a wish by some but not it was always an impossible one.
My Reddit account is from 2006. I joined it when Aaron Swartz was still working there.
In the very early days, it was like that. Even it was an unwritten rule, people expected to see disagreement in a conversation, not in a vote count. Only spammers would get mass-downvotes.
It used to be that the best posts would have hundreds of upvotes and hundreds of down votes. They showed +100/-98 and you did mediately knew this was an interesting comment.
Then they stopped showing both up and down, and only showed the summation. 100 upvotes and 98 down votes is now +2, and this comment is now lurking among all the other +2 comments.
Showing the total instead of the ratio was the end of reddiquette, and the earliest Reddit enshittification that I can point to.
It was gone by '09 when i made my account at least, the good old days when their where still site wide mod drama like this one :D
While that was the intent of upvote/downvote in some places early on, virtually nobody has actually done that to a sufficient degree for it to not be agree/disagree.
I guess I’m one of those old dinosaur users that still tries and mostly adheres to that old unwritten rule but the lines of inflammatory BS, rampant strawman, whatboutism with disagreements has made it so much harder.
I personally prefer to downvote what I don’t agree with. Why would I want to promote a point of view I don’t agree with?
Why would I want to promote a point of view I don’t agree with?
Because you also wouldn’t like those that disagree with you to essentially censor you. I.e. the golden rule, do unto others as you would have them do to you. If you don’t want to be censored because of your personal opinion, maybe don’t do the same to others either.
Now a downvote is not really “censorship”, but still, I would say you should still have respect for an opinion that is different from your own (provided it’s not a completely unreasonable opinion). That respect should be enough to prevent you from downvoting such an opinion, I feel.
But why does a platform have logins, persistent identity, and voting if the users aren’t intended to use that to moderate the conversation and push comments that they feel don’t belong in the discussion to the bottom of the thread and ultimately hide them? Why not present threads in bump order with users identified with a single thread ID inside threads?
I personally don’t see votes as a way to moderate, they mean much more to me
You are intended to moderate via votes. But I hope you don’t feel that something you disagree with needs to be “moderated”. Other people are allowed to disagree with you, it doesn’t require moderation.
Right that’s what I’m saying, I don’t understand why voting buttons are there except for users to use them to moderate each other. I don’t feel like they’re necessary at all. I participated in online discussions for 25 years before reddit showed up. We didn’t need voting buttons at all and the presence of those buttons removes nuance and complexity from the conversation.
They’re there so the frontpage isn’t a disordered mess where nonsense posts aren’t given equal weight to meaningful news stories.
You can do this by displaying the threads in the order they were last bumped and pruning / deleting them by the last time they were bumped (age) or thread limit per board, in other words, based on participation. …you don’t need voting buttons.
This is so revealing, I always thought “why not engage with an opinion I disagree with?” Now I see that engaging with it might bring attention to it, even if it were to help us learn and teach.
Instead people want to push the punish button, to be a nameless and unidentifiable avatar of hegemony. Our role in history is to suppress the ideas of others and boost those ideas which we’ve adopted. Hide what we are uncomfortable looking at, even if it is only an opinion, and let the people who control our own opinions continue to push their own agenda without obstacles.
People actually want to remain ignorant, and not develop discourse; people want a closed discourse away from disagreement. When we create our logins, our online identities, we want to remain anonymous and detached from reality. We don’t want those who disagree with us to be considered human with differing opinions, because we don’t see our own opinions as human.
Every interaction is a conflict, and conflict is hard, so I’ll punish this other person. I’ll play my part as a silent executioner, murdering ideas by consensus without a thought as to why I disagree, or why the other person disagrees with me. I’m powerless but at least I can take away someone else’s power.
Eloquent well said
I prefer platforms without voting buttons for this reason. People are treating the up and down arrows like “punish buttons” because of the result of pushing the button. Older forum and imageboard style platforms did not have voting. You couldn’t just push a button to register your disagreement, you had to actually make a comment if you didn’t like something, and other users could judge the quality of your response.
In addition, your identity was often only relevant to a single thread, which was on a single topic, so your opinions weren’t portable or traceable. There were no profiles, so other users weren’t able to use your comments on different threads to try to accuse you of intellectual inconsistency. This led to more complex discussions because people are complex.
Furthermore, on a platform like the one we’re on, if enough people click the “punish button” then the platform makes the comment less visible, requiring an extra step to be able to see it. The purpose of voting buttons is to shape discourse into what’s most agreeable, and homogenize it into what’s agreeable to the most people. Complaining about users “misusing” the voting buttons is something that happened a lot on reddit in the early years. People didn’t realize that they were working as designed.
I see where you are coming from now, I misunderstood your intent. I took what you meant as “its good to use these buttons because that’s why the platform has them,” which I disagree with every which way!
But you were actually saying the design of the platform causes the behavior, the platforms hurt discourse more than individual users who’s understanding (or misunderstanding) of how a vote button is supposed to be used is an ambiguity that is inherent to the platform. Which, yes I agree with that also, and it is a better point to make than which user is vicious or virtuous in using the platform.
I make similar criticisms often about structural basis for social movements, but admittedly I have a blind spot for tech platforms. Not because I’m bad with tech, but because I’m pretty good with it. I do tend to think of these platforms as neutral, but that’s more of a bias than a product of analysis. I’d like to unlearn the bias.
You seem pretty advanced in your understanding, is this something that you’ve just thought about, or are you in community, or educating yourself by other means? I could use a little of that in my own work, as I am aware of this bias but still wasting time and energy because of it
Anyway, holy shit its a conversation if either of us had the attitude of “downvote and go” then I’d have missed your actual intention. Another tendency of online discourse is for people to take the dimmest possible interpretation of others opinions. I guess I also fall in this trap, at least around certain topics
I think really most folks don’t realize how easy it is to design a platform that provokes real discussions and engages users but nobody would go there. Casual users are coming here for enjoyment, not engagement, and they don’t want to see anything that rubs them the wrong way. And we aren’t even talking about algorithmically driven feeds which learn from your behavior and give you content that you’re most likely to interact with, like Facebook, which can actually be dangerous.
These are just my observations. I was here before the internet talking on BBSs. I don’t know why all these people are here, to be honest. When I started out it was just nerds talking to each other. I wonder if people would participate in a discussion board that held all posts and responses for 24 hours before making them public to give people time to reflect on what they just said.
We don’t see each other as people anymore. This is complicated by advanced AI enabled LLMs driven by commercial and political interests, so you don’t even know at this point whether you’re talking to an actual person. But this is what we have now so this is what I use. Listservs were the first great platform I remember enjoying, and I wouldn’t mind going back to that. Usenet was also good.
I just think the days of the average person being able to go on the internet and just say whatever they want, relatively anonymously and with no real oversight and no consequences or accountability for what happens afterwards are coming to an end. At that point hopefully we’ll see less inflammatory politics and engagement bait as more and more people move on, and go back to whatever they were doing before they started doing this, maybe watching cable TV or going to sporting events.
Downvotes are not censorship in any sense of the term.
They certainly are censorship in the sense that it reduces other people’s ability to see that content.
That is not at all a reasonable definition of censorship.
Censorship is “the suppression or prohibition of [media] that is considered obscene, politically unacceptable or a threat to security” according to Oxford dictionary.
How is downvoting content with the intent to make it less visible to other users not a form of suppression?
Because that’s social media we’re talking about. It’s an algorithm. There’s no central authority. The visibility of a post is chosen democratically and freely.
Censorship is removing and banning content. Censorship isn’t bad anyways when there’s a good reason (ex: hate speech)
Anyone that wants to see said content can still freely do it. Censorship would be abusive moderation, like banning someone because they don’t agree with you, essentially removing their freedom of speech. Or actively removing political opponents like lemmy.ml, blahaj…
The sine qua non of censorship is the authoritarian component missing from your definition. A moderator or administrator removing an article from a forum is censorship. A user demonstrating their disapproval of that article within the forum doesn’t qualify as censorship.
The Oxford definition is not wrong, just incomplete.
Can you blame censorship when you’ve voluntarily decided to participate in a network that has a voting for visibility system?
I’m not blaming anyone I’m just saying it meets the definition of censorship.
I kind of see your point, but I wouldn’t say it’s censorship
I am free to disrespect them (not voicing it) or their opinion, but I respect their freedom of speech
Everyone is free to downvote me. This is not Reddit, having a lot of downvotes doesn’t ban you, unless you’re in a shitty instance
Yeah, I mean it depends - doesn’t it? If someone is expressing a text-based opinion post you dislike, I can see that. If you think the articles source is corrosive - I can see that. If you think its off-topic, I can see that.
But supposing someone found a metal music community, and downvoted everything there because they don’t like metal - would that be reasonable?
Your position is reasonable if down votes are suppressive, but I wouldn’t develop a content algorithm that treated them as such.
I would use an “engagement” algorithm. Upvoting increases engagement, commenting increases engagement, down voting increases engagement, reporting increases engagement. The viewing time - the time between initially accessing it and viewing a new page - increases engagement.
The most suppressive thing you can do to a piece of content is click away in less than 20 seconds.
Well that would mean a lot of attention seeking troll posts could trend.
Depends on how exactly it’s implemented, sure. That obviously isn’t the result I’d be looking for.
My point, though, is only that a “downvote” need not mean “hide this kind of post away from the general public”. A downvote can mean something more like “This pissed me off and more people should read it.”
That probably wouldn’t and would obviously be vote manipulation. This situation is pretty rare and is ignored, like on YouTube, because people get bored and most people wont go out of their way to do this
Problem is: Lemmy’s algorithm is shit and doesn’t learn from our preferences. If it did, we would see less posts that we dislike
People just can’t stand being disliked. Should we ban people disliking crypto posts? Because damn most of my posts are disliked based on people hating and spreading lies about crypto just because they dislike it
People looking for stuff will find it if they want to, no matter the amount of dislikes
Problem is: Lemmy’s algorithm is shit and doesn’t learn from our preferences. If it did, we would see less posts that we dislike
Piefed has keyword filters that can help with that issue.
Keywords filters are really basic. Most people don’t want to bother with that, or risk hiding interesting posts
I filtered “musk”, “trump”, reduced the amount of US politics post tremendously
I might add “kirk” at some point, depending how much it’s still discussed in the coming weeks
great way to avoid the drama, but there’s a risk of false positives
I guess you don’t mind it, probably not losing anything of value
That probably wouldn’t and would obviously be vote manipulation. This situation is pretty rare and is ignored, like on YouTube, because people get bored and most people wont go out of their way to do this
Absolutely, it is rare. But people do it. As I’ve said before, I banned 5 people on the original !television@lemm.ee instance for just downvoting posts repeatedly. No pattern. None of the accounts were active on the community in terms of posting. Some of the accounts had never even posted on the fediverse - they were simply downvote accounts that purely existed to vote negatively on content.
Problem is: Lemmy’s algorithm is shit and doesn’t learn from our preferences. If it did, we would see less posts that we dislike
Piefed has much more control here. People can easily just block communities though.
If your posts turn up in /c/all they’re going to get treated accordingly.
And this is fine. /c/all should let users downvote posts they don’t like so popular stuff can rise to the top. That’s what makes /c/all sometimes worth looking at.
Otherwise, it’ll just fill up with all sorts of crap from communities with no downvoting rules, including edgy borderline racist stuff that’s not quite bad enough to get banned, or just shitty positivity memes copied from somewhere else.
Your problem is that you can’t delist your community from /c/all. That sucks, but right now your posts are turning up in two different communities with different expectations and you just need to deal with that.
Your problem is that you can’t delist your community from /c/all.
Your admin can, that’s a more effective way to deal with that than downvoting
Otherwise, it’ll just fill up with all sorts of crap from communities with no downvoting rules, including edgy borderline racist stuff that’s not quite bad enough to get banned.
I may be wrong, but admins will be able to configure what communities should be visible in the public view. So your instance would not show on their frontpage things that are not representative of the instance
For users themselves who are browsing by /all and feel justified in downvoting because they don’t like what they see, it’s a different story. If a community is (in their view) problematic, they can simply block it. Downvoting has no place in their curation.
And this is fine. /c/all should let users downvote posts they don’t like so popular stuff can rise to the top. That’s what makes /c/all sometimes worth looking at.
Yeah, but community moderators also have the ability to look at those downvotes and react accordingly.
Your problem is that you can’t delist your community from /c/all. That sucks, but right now your posts are turning up in two different communities with different expectations and you just need to deal with that.
Sure. I don’t want to delist /my/ community from /all/ but if someone did downvote every post on the community made in the last day, I might consider that mass-downvoting from someone who doesn’t like the topic and react accordingly.
Yeee, I’m in this pic and I like it! Good job me 🫶
I hope that dipshit is reading this thread. Ban me, too!
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
I doubt he’d bother w/ Lemmy. If he did, he’d just pay someone to do it, just like he does w/ video games.
90% of my downvotes are unintentional. The other 10% are for people who use alternating case. I have half a mind to go downvote everything in this boring company community though, just for laughs.
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 and sad/clown emojis (should be added to Lemmy IMO, makes convos way more fun, lol) 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.
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.
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.
We literally had this discussion yesterday…
I missed that post, thanks
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?
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.
Indeed. I am preferably in favor of a drop of the updownvotes for a Slashdot like system, but that’s a major change
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.
let a mod selectively wipe downvotes
How does a mod selectively wipe downvotes with anonymous voting?
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
Yeah, I remember dozens of “me too” and “+1” comments after posts people agreed with. It was annoying.
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
didn’t piefed or some other alternative to lemmy add that feature
Piefed implemented it, but it didn’t work out for some reason and they ended up having to remove it.
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.
I’m not talking about blocking users from seeing votes - the nature of federation requires, at the very least, that admins are able to see the data flowing into their instance, which includes voting records. All it takes at that point is a purpose-made instance to be spun up that will catalogue all the votes that it federates with and publish them. In fact I’m pretty sure this already exists.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
EDIT: There’s… in theory at least, supposed to be more of a structured way of making such a report… which ironically i kinda sorta broke by doing a crosspost, but uh … ???
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Wow, not even making up a lie, just straight up saying they’re banning for down voting.
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.
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?!
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
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!
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.
Clearly you haven’t been here for long. It’s been terrible mods for years now.
allthewaydown.png
No gods, no kings. ✊🏻
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this is “downvote trolling”….
basically if you have a community that a lot of people hate, people will come in and downvote everything… some will even subscribe and downvote everything.
so, obviously “the boring company” will get a lot of musk hate (and i hate musk).
but yeah, if someone never participates in a comm and just shows up to downvote totally on-topic posts it makes sense to ban them….
…
i’ve been permanently shadowbanned from communities i totally liked and agreed with for making a comment that reasonably stated a disagreement with a post… banning for downvote trolling makes sense… even though i do hate Elon Musk….
(the whole boring company community should be deleted because it’s a company owned by a literal Nazi).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.
