Hello World!
We’ve made some changes today, and we’d like to announce that our Code of Conduct is no longer in effect. We now have a new Terms of Service, in effect starting from today(October 19, 2023).
The “LAST REVISION DATE:” on the page also signifies when the page was last edited, and it is updated automatically. Details of specific edits may be viewed by following the “Page History” reference at the bottom of the page. All significant edits will also be announced to our users.
The new Terms of Service can be found at https://legal.lemmy.world/
In this post our community mods and users may express their questions, concerns, requests and issues regarding the Terms of Service, and content moderation in Lemmy.World. We hope to discuss and inform constructively and in good faith.
Whoa there. I don’t do any of that, and I think my account history and behavior speak for themselves, but in any given single thread, when trolls be trollin’ they rarely limit themselves to just one comment because the point is to ignore and provoke, NOT to converse or exchange ideas.
So a little clarification would be helpful. If you are speaking about following a user from thread to thread via their post history and downvoting them whenever they post anything at all, in any discussion about anything – “downvote stalking” – then sure, I see your point and it’s well taken.
But if you’re saying I can only downvote the first asinine volley of provocative stupidity from a given user in one specific thread, and must not downvote any of the successive proofs of idiocy and/or bad faith they offer in that same thread to support the first, I just don’t know if I can keep my itchy trigger finger holstered.
As an aside, one of the cool things about the Fediverse is that many users can see who downvoted them; I think that’s more of a real deterrent against weaponizing downvotes than any other policy or action. If you were to turn that on for lemmy.world as well I think it would get you better voting behavior from users all around.
The best way to fuck a democratic process up is making votes public. No one should feel like there’s a “deterrent” to voting. All that does is create incentive to reward/punish people for how they vote.
Voting is what fuels the content aggregation, too. It is a very bad idea to deter people from voting how they please because it strangles the algorithm of the data it needs to sort the content. You want people voting, a lot. That’s what makes the whole thing work.
Edit: which is to say nothing of how bad it will get when people make tools that help automate retaliation for downvotes. You can potentially state an opinion in a comment and set up a bot to auto block every downvoter, then share that list publicly. You may think that sounds like a great system for weeding out hate but I promise you it’s going to be far messier than that, and more importantly, this kind of retaliatory shit hurts the aggregation even more.
Votes on lemmy are inherently public, due to how federation works.
The US is based on Federalism and we don’t make our votes public
Votes are public on Lemmy, in the sense that if you have admin access to an instance that is federated you will be able to find who upvoted which posts/comments in the database.
That should really be changed so that you can only see the cumulative votes from any given instance and only a user’s specific instance will have records of their individual upvotes and downvotes.
That would make pushing posts to the top via botting way too easy, and far harder to detect. Federation is intentionally set up so that instances do not trust each other.
so less than 1000 people can see up/downvote data. not exactly “public”
You can see upvote info by viewing from kbin. Upvotes are displayed as favorites there.
All Lemmy instances have up/down votes. its disabled by default in each users’ settings. Literally just go into your settings once, and look around.
Lol
IIRC
Kbin recently removed the abilityto show who faved/unfavved a post for Lemmy instances.Edit: guess they did not 🤦
It is quite easily accessible. Here
I swear there was discussion about hiding faves coming from lemmy… guess they decided not to. At least you can still follow people and see who else is following them… 🤦
It’s pretty easy to spin up a temporary instance in a VM.
Since upvoting is most of what I do, I think it’s great that people can see it was me who upvoted them.
I don’t mind the accountability of a downvote at all. If I didn’t craft a specific reply, it lets people know who to ask if they genuinely don’t understand why their content was problematic.
Shhh dont give them ideas
You misread. What I wrote:
Voting and weaponizing downvotes are two very different things.
To be clear, I used the phrase “weaponizing downvotes” to paraphrase the intent behind the written policy I quoted in full. Here it is again:
Do not engage in content manipulation such as posting spam content, vote manipulation through using several user accounts or consistently down-voting a user. Vote for the content, not for the person.
Seems like you have a problem with the policy then, because it is requiring you to self-regulate your own voting, and to specifically NOT vote as you please, but in a way that is best for the community as a whole.
I’ve had a user disagree with me and then go through my entire post history and downvote every single one of my comments. I don’t get why someone would do that but I can see why Lemmy.world would put it against their terms of service.
I get that all the time. It amused me greatly until the day I found out I can turn off the Fantasy Internet Points entirely. Now I have no idea if my votes are up or down or sideways.
And I don’t care.
Why is it necessary to count votes cast an unlimited time after posting. The best policy is to register votes in the UI for the user but silently ignore votes after max duration. So they can feel like they stuck it to you while not having an unreasonable effect. You could even detect and silently discard downvotes that matched that pattern or rate limit the downvotes against one party silently.
“Not my previous updoots😭”
It happened to me, and it was the She-Ra fans who did it. They were angry that I called them monarchists.
Then a downvote is justified, same user or not.
I don’t think so. I think the more likely scenario is this would lead to people weaponizing other’s downvote history, and then very quickly people would stop downvoting completely. You’d have less downvotes overall, which is not always a good thing. At that point they should just remove the ability to downvote altogether, they’ll be accomplishing the same thing.
I think that if you access Lemmy via api, you can see who downvoted you specifically. I’d prefer it’d be turned off as I think people feel better about participation when they don’t have to go on the record to other users officially.
Just for clarity: it’s not viewable through the API. As others have said, you need to spin up an instance. In contrast to the API, this means it’s not free (due to server hosting and domain name costs), and it’s not necessarily easy (for the non-techies).
So you’re saying a motivated individual can still quasi weaponize it.
Imagine getting blackmailed because someone knows you upvoted that kink content or whatever
Multiple accounts. It’s somewhat unfortunate, but in a public ecosystem like the fediverse, it’s pretty much a requirement to compartmentalize separate aspects of your personality. Particularly if you dare to hold different opinions on different things that don’t align with majority social groups of people.
Honestly, not writing this from some dedicated “introspection” account, already makes me slightly uncomfortable 😐
That sounds like an awful complicated way to say you care about what other people think too much
Or maybe I’ve met too many people who care too much about what I think 🤷
Is it possible on Lemmy interface ? I thought that data required to have a look at the database
Not through the Lemmy webUI, but if you spin up an instance and subscribe to communities, the posts and comments will start getting federated to your database.
That’s what I had in mind, thanks