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 @[email protected] 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.
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.
They should really just remove up/down -votes.
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