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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 15th, 2023

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  • Also, never said unranked… I meant simply hide the rankings

    Sounds trash to me. Fortunately it would be trivial for me to add them back in because again, all you’re doing is making the information inconvenient.

    It also means that people don’t mindlessly upvote posts simply because there were a lot of upvotes

    Is that how your mind works? I’ve never once done this and I’m extremely skeptical that anyone does. Sounds to me like you don’t like the content and have decided that nobody really does, they’re just upvoting it because it was upvoted.

    Showing Upvotes/downvotes doesn’t show whether they are bots are not. It just means they’ll upvote/downvote more random shit and mess around wit the rest of the posts, so more crap rises to the top because they’re interfering with the rankings.

    A log of votes is the data you need to discover bots. It doesn’t magically reveal them, nor did I claim it would.

    Voting on random shit might make a slightly more plausible voting log for a bot but that’s going to be far more obvious than you think, won’t actually interfere with the rankings if it’s truly random and once again, not having rankings shown doesn’t address this problem either.

    Votes and rankings are always knowable, even if you hide them from the UI. If there is a pressure to make bots plausible through random voting, that pressure exists regardless of it being shown on the default UI. All you’re doing is misleading users about what information they’re exposing.

    There are easier ways to identify bots

    Describe them.

    And, it just aids abusive people

    You’ve already claimed to be a victim of them and your solution does nothing to address it. You’re just adding another value to the list of poorly obscured information, because it’s what you personally want.



  • Problem is, it actually encourages a hive mind. I’ve already had 2 people try to bully me.

    Then tell those people to get fucked.

    I’d go one step further. Upvotes down votes and totals should be hidden entirely.

    Unless you have an actual implementation of how that would work, telling us “what you’d do” is just a fantasy. You can’t “hide” things from federation – they’re either included, removed or made inconvenient to access.

    Does “posting without external influence” even have any value besides sounding cool? The entire concept of Lemmy and Reddit is that external influence floats and sinks content. If you want unranked, anonymous content, you want 4chan (which is of course riddled with extremists and good content is almost entirely drowned out with worthless shitposts).

    Personally, I’d rather that “external influence” was as fair and open and accountable as possible, rather than “I wonder if 500 of those votes are just Russian bots”.



  • Yes, and there’s no genuine argument otherwise.

    If you want Lemmy to grow and not be completely overrun with bots posting propaganda and signal boosting extremism, showing votes is the only way forward. It’s the only mechanism by which independent parties can discover and expose things like “every post and comment by this account is upvoted by these 20 other accounts that have never posted and whose names follow the same formula”.

    The privacy you’re mourning never existed in the first place and it can’t exist on any platform. For Lemmy, it’s required for federation. On sites like Reddit, you have privacy from other users, but not from the company or anyone they sell that data to.

    Since true privacy isn’t an option, it would be far better to be open about that lack of privacy. This thread is already riddled with people who thought their votes were private, rather than just inconvient to look up. That’s far more dangerous and deceptive.

    This needs to happen, regardless of the ill-informed tantrums it may cause. If you want to upvote pornography without it being used against you, create accounts that are strictly for pornography and properly compartmentalize your accounts.


  • Oh I understand those far-right “others” just fine. They’re all the abusive partners, parents and bullys we’ve all known. The ones who will torture their own family members for doing something, anything, without their unpredictable stamp of approval. The ones who eagerly twist and lie and manipulate people to get what they want, saying vapid shit about “empathy and understanding” that they have no intention of following themselves.

    The Republican party is indefensible and by extension, so are those that support them, from Fox News all the way down to fuckstains at the local bar. They’ve made themselves a shining beacon for the worst people in America and I’m comfortable writing every single one of them off.

    Because if they were actually capable of empathy, understanding or reasonable discourse, they wouldn’t be far-right in the first place.





  • Did anybody say admins aren’t entitled to block stuff

    His “defederation bad (except pedos)” isn’t exactly wet with support for blocking instances for spam and extremism.

    User just wanted a system to see everything and block what they didn’t want.

    That system exists. It’s the “run your own server” that I explicitly mentioned. But let’s be honest, he doesn’t want that system (which again, he already has) for himself, he wants it for everyone else.

    It’s the same bullshit that “free speech absolutists” push in every single thread about defederation – admins should be hands off and users should dig through through slurs, racism, homophobia looking for content worth engaging with.

    It benefits exactly one group of people but apparently doesn’t set off your “bad-faith” radar.