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.
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?
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!
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
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?!
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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Power hungry people seeking validation without real-world obligations.
And no real power either.
They have the power to shape information.
It’s frankly terrifying how Reddit is now both what the major LLMs are trained on and what most search engines return as the top result for a lot of searches, when you look at the degree with which arbitrary shadowbanning, bans for posting in the “wrong” other subs, flair requirements etc all come together to make these huge self-censoring subs where the manufactured consensus is controlled by a shadowy cabal with no real oversight.
Time was that you knew when you were in a bubble and what shape that bubble was; the left-wing subs were overtly left-wing and stated as much in their description, the right-wing subs were likewise explicitly right-wing, and the topic subs were explicitly about that topic. But nowadays you have subs that are ostensibly about personal finance or history or funny memes or whatever, where an outside reader looking in has literally no idea that anyone who’s ever also made a post in r/politics gets their post automatically and silently hidden with no notification, and what they’re reading is a secretly curated wall of propaganda.
Not all mods are like that, of course. My instance admins had to ask me like three times to be a moderator for one of their communities because I refused them multiple times. I only said yes because it was an unmoderated/undermoderated (at the time), low traffic community, and felt bad that I had refused so many times.
I used to be a forum admin for a gaming/programming forum with what I would say is high traffic (1000+ active concurrent users daily), and moderating that felt like a full-time job, and I had appointed like 10 other moderators to help. I don’t have time for that no more lol.
That’s what I mean though, terminally online mods ruin it for a lot of us. No way in hell do I have an hour or more a day to commit to policing others, yet there are mods on all social media that love to do it for free. When it’s free you get a selection bias for motive. Not dissimilar to real world police.
People with a very high sense of responsability towards others generally avoid taking on responsabilities were their own mistakes might cause problems to others - for them such positions are a “weight on their shoulders”.
People who seek power, on the other hand, generally tend to do it because of perceived social prestige or what they can do with that power. The less they feel that sense of responsabiliy to offset such attractive elements in having power the more they want power.
This is a well known phenomenon: for example there are tons of sayings about how (political) power should be given to those who do not want it not those who want it, and there’s actually a Harvard Business Review article from over a decade ago about how they investigated this in companies and found that companies where the CEO unexpectedly got the position rather than seek it, in average outperformed the rest of their industry.
Rule #0.0
Don’t hurt moddy-woddy’s fee-fees.This is a certified True and Real rule. I checked.
this but as an actual legitimate rule, more explicit version of “don’t be a dick”
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.
So it’s literally just Elon.
I don’t know if this is even about Elon any more, it’s grown so much. Like a mushroom on a cow patty.
Going by the name, three Elons in a cassock.
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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.
I hope that dipshit is reading this thread. Ban me, too!
Yeee, I’m in this pic and I like it! Good job me 🫶
kind of the dark side of the reddits/lemmys. Mods just doing whatever they like. btw, fuck Elon musk, that guy sucks. and fuck threelonmusketeers@sh.itjust.works. What a snowflake douchebag.
Vote visibility is off by default (IIRC) on reddit so at least there folks wouldn’t be banned just for downvoting someone.
Votes are visible to mods for at least six months
If that’s the case on reddit it must be pretty recent because I don’t recall it from my time there.
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.
Thanks for the heads up I’m gonna go get banned from a shitty elon musk fan community. Badge of honor as far as I’m concerned
I don’t get it. Is he like… doing an Elon Musk impression…? Is this performance art…? I don’t get it
Or maybe he is… No… It can’t be… Elon?
I wouldn’t be shocked.
What do you expect from the mod of a grifting comm?
You can’t hang out in a shithole without getting a little shitty.
Public votes are probably the dumbest lemmy “feature”, so much unnecessary drama because of it.
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.
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?
didn’t piefed or some other alternative to lemmy add that feature
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.
Piefed implemented it, but it didn’t work out for some reason and they ended up having to remove it.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
You’re probably right about that.
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
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Yeah, I remember dozens of “me too” and “+1” comments after posts people agreed with. It was annoying.
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
let a mod selectively wipe downvotes
How does a mod selectively wipe downvotes with anonymous voting?
