Was recently banned from a whole bunch of DB0 communities for, as best as I can gather, downvoting once when I viewed by All (potentially accidentally while scrolling).
Important notes:
- I don't use scripts.
- I don't mass-downvote Communities. If I see a post I generally don't like when browsing All, I may downvote one post, block the Community and move on.
- Some of the communities I was banned from don't have any posts in them so I wouldn't have been able to downvote anything.
- Of all of these Communities, in my history I downvoted one post in one of them. Voting in this manner is not vote manipulation. It's quite literally a feature of the platform and as a mod of another Community, I would consider it pretty good etiquette.
- One of my bans reads "Appeal Granted, not a brigading member" but I'm still banned.
- I don't troll.
WTF is going on here?
EDIT - Updated Info from the conversation below: In the initial image, you can see two "ban waves."
The 10 bans three months ago stem from a single downvote in one Community. It was @Draconic_NEO@lemmy.dbzer0.com See here: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/34853477
I was called out by name for a single downvote and culled from a score of Communities I did not participate in by them.
The other bans from two months ago are from four total downvotes over a 10-month timeframe in one Community.
I have also stated in this thread that I don't have issues with AI-gen images, but there are shoddy ones and well-done ones.
EDIT 2: Now unbanned from the ten Communities listed as "3 months ago" in my initial image, but have been banned from three more because of this thread with the reason given being "self-proclaimed anti-AI brigader" which are two things I didn't claim to be. God dammit Lemmy...
That mods/admins can even see who is downvoting is, by far, my least favorite thing about Lemmy.
It is an invariable aspect of lemmy though. It is open source. Anyone can make a server. The servers need to have a database for the up- downvotes and they need the info specific to the user, so it can't just be said by another instance "heres 1000 downvotes, deal with it".
E.g. on reddit and any other corporate social media the admins can also see exactly who up- and downvoted stuff.
Admins, not mods. Enormous distinction here. And I don't understand why that information can't be anonymized or attached to a user identifying number rather than username, but I will admit I'm not a develop not a sysadmin so I am a layman speaking outside my field here.
As anyone can spool up an instance and become admin there, this information is inadvertently available.
If it would be some anonymized information, it would make it more difficult to validate it. Again any server then could just toss around numbers without any meaning. If the numbers are static, it won't be too difficult to de-anonymize them.
I feel like this is a solution in search of a problem. Has faulty or malicious vote manipulation via instance federation actually been an issue before?
yup many times, sock puppets exist in abundance on dedicated instances or derelict instances. We have gone through many rounds of spam/vote manipulation cleaning at the admin level. This can be done through pinging the admins incase they missed it, or defederating from instances that are not behaving well.
The reason it doesn't seem so bad now is due to the attention the admins are paying to the blatant methods. (i.e. 300 votes from a instance in a minute from randomized user names)
Think of the most basic spam:
Advertising something, then give it a bunch of upvotes.
Alright, fair then. As a layman I am not privvy to that so I'm lacking that context in my understanding. I appreciate you sharing and will think on this more, thank you.
Lets ask the other way around: Has transparency over up- and downvotes actually been an issue before? It would require dedicated development effort to make this custom solution, that would require a rewriting of the activity pub protocol and a change to the philosophy of activity pub in general https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActivityPub
One could argue this very thread and similar anecdotes shared are the issues you're inquiring about.
And I'm not out here asking for Lemmy to be rewritten, I'm discussing the topic. It is my least favorite thing about Lemmy, yes, but that doesn't mean I'm disatisfied. I think mods seeing voting is less than ideal, but to be clear, I also think it's fine.
Nothing is perfect, and if that's the compromise for the benefits of Lemmy, it's an acceptable one.
Just before this turns into something where people think I'm outraged or calling for change.
We can discuss things in the abstract.
I appreciate your well-balanced tone and explanation. A rare thing on Lemmy lately.
That is kind of you to remark, thank you.
These comments are an eye opening experience for me; and I’m not sure I like that feature. It seems whatever the good it does, it’s open for endless abuse because at the end of the day, we are all human and petty at times.
It's incredibly helpful and helps cultivate a high-trust culture. On Reddit, many posts get swarmed with downvotes right off the bat, no matter what they are, due to voting anonymity.
Yeah I would like it if it weren't the case, but I'm not sure it's actually technically possible given the design.
They should really just remove up/down -votes.
Beehaw actually does remove down voting, so that you are forced to actually find things you agree with and upvote them to curate.
And how would content be organised and curated?
lets just do forums where everything is sorted by recency of comments and instead of bitching about voting people bitch about 25 year old threads getting necroed
It could be organized by community and I don't believe curation is necessary.
Edit: Posts. Posts could be organized by community.
How would they organise it?
What do you mean by "how"? Maybe by time posted or by last reply in that community, that sounds like an okay choice.
BUMP
SAGE
THIS
NECRO
It's a shit choice, many of us have grown up experiencing it via forums and boards. The community curated stuff is so much better than the 'last rando to spam something' system.
yeppers, the whole original appeal of reddit (digg) was the voting system lol we wanted community curation instead of BUMP
That would mean there's zero quality control and larger communities new posts would flood out older posts. No-one supports this idea.
Yeah, you're right about the larger ones. But smaller ones don't really need quality control, in my opinion. So perhaps they would add a toggle?
Up to community owners. You can already filter by /new/ now.
We already have that?
Yes.
Cool. Now I realized I sound like an idiot who posts before doing proper research. Regardless, thank you for letting me know.