True, but Reddit let this problem fester for a long time.

What’s interesting to me here regarding this, is Reddits current preparation timescale. This isn’t going to be enforced until March 31st, 2026. This tells me that Reddit would have been unprepared for a complete mass-walkout of community moderators during the 2023 Reddit API strikes. A large chunk of Reddit during that period was genuinely inaccessible. But after a few token gestures and a few examples made of some especially rebellious mod-teams, most of the striking moderators returned.

A huge opportunity was missed by people running major communities to functionally degrade Reddit in at least the medium-term as a website. You can’t just hastily promote random people to replace moderators Reddit is either forced to remove or who leave voluntarily. The average person is likely too lazy, too arbitrary and too corrupt to effectively oversee communities of notable sizes.

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.

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.

What would “banning the voting agent” look like exactly if it didn’t impact the account that triggered the voting agent? Just muted their downvoting? I assume this wouldn’t federate out, so wouldn’t impact the negative impact of potentially unwelcome and malicious downvoting from that account across the fediverse.

I don’t recall piefed showing you any voter details before Rimu changed it. I recall it being completely anonymous, and only deweighting downvoters if they did X downvotes in a row (meaning their downvote wouldn’t count locally). Then he changed it, and added non-federated voting.

But supposing we had a sort of proxy voting system, whereby a downvote by you is identified under a proxy name - if you got banned by a community moderator for voting like that, wouldn’t they instantly see who you were by checking the community ban list?

So you don’t oppose community mods responding like that?

1. Babylon Berlin
2. Black Sails
3. Mr. Robot
4. Game of Thrones
5. Farscape
6. The Expanse
7. Severance
8. Dark
9. Battlestar Galactica
10. Man in the High Castle

Having a single voting agent per user doesn’t change that though. If you’ve got downvote trolls you can just ban the voting agent just like you could otherwise ban the sockpuppet.

Sorry, so you mean obfuscating identities of voters but they could still be seen as separate ‘agents’? So in that way a community owner could ban downvoters, they just wouldn’t know who got banned?

I’ve seen a lot of discussion on this scattered around. I don’t sense popular support across the fediverse for going to anonymous voting.

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.

Downvote noise from random accounts isn’t a problem for 90% of communities most of the time - either they don’t have anyone like that, or they’re simply too big for them to have any impact. I sense the most obvious problem is when you’re growing a community and a handful of downvoters latch on, for want of a better word and continually downvote posts - as I did on my community. Until I removed them.

What plugin could you do more damage with?

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.

Okay, well that might be a good suggestion for /active/.

But in any case you already have your own tools for what you want.

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.

That’s still disordered and just encourages people to bump their own threads.

The upvote/downvote system is foundational to sites like this. Short of a new, more advanced voting system (which is a long way out) it’s not going anywhere. If you don’t want to look at it like that, you can always default all of your own feeds and threads to /new/.

They’re there so the frontpage isn’t a disordered mess where nonsense posts aren’t given equal weight to meaningful news stories.

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.

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.

Added

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.

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?