The best part of the fediverse is that anyone can run their own server. The downside of this is that anyone can easily create hordes of fake accounts, as I will now demonstrate.
Fighting fake accounts is hard and most implementations do not currently have an effective way of filtering out fake accounts. I’m sure that the developers will step in if this becomes a bigger problem. Until then, remember that votes are just a number.
Get rid of votes. They suck.
How else would you rank the content?
You don’t. Ranked content is a solution for owners of social media platforms to avoid paying moderators. It’s a no brainer if you want a cheap automatic advertising platform but isn’t great and requires constant intervention if you’re not monetizing somehow.
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Too bad activitypub is carved in stone and can’t be changed for any reason.
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You can take the guy out of Reddit…
My reply to you was sarcasm. Specifications can be changed. Things can be removed from them.
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Yeah, it would break all those things for which votes provide no benefit. They should be broken.
There isn’t any use for votes on a platform that isn’t using them to automatically rank content for the purposes of profit.
Running a voteless instance of one of those does no good because the problem is structural. Votes aren’t secure and their whole purpose is to manipulate what content gets shown to users. People using the votes to make something get shown (or not) isn’t a bug, it’s a feature.
The existence of a system that ranks content according to votes changes how people behave on the platform. Spinning up an instance that just doesn’t allow or show votes doesn’t change the problem that all the content is produced using the vote system and reflects it.
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Yeah I know there’s votes on stuff other than lemmy. There shouldn’t be for all the reasons I keep saying. What some other platforms use votes as a stand in for (except for maybe mobilizon, idk much about that one) are weird hacks like the boost/rt implementation or shouldn’t exist.
I’m talking about it at the protocol level because you took it there and because without a for profit content mill votes serve no purpose.
If votes not being secure isn’t a problem then why does it blow up like crazy every time someone makes a post about it? Also, it’s obviously a huge problem. Minimizing it by saying it’s just part of any federated system just sounds crazy.
My overarching point is that the structure informs and defines the function and when there’s a structural reenforcement to karma farming, vote laundering and general shitty Reddit (or twitter) style behavior the solution is to remove that part of the structure.
It should come as no surprise to you that I’m not gonna go off half cocked on git about this. I’m well aware that it sounds like primo old man yelling at clouds. The only reason I’m talking to you about it is in the hope that other people see the conversation and go “damn, it sounds weird but he’s cookin’”.
Once enough people realize that noncommercial social media has a different form than it’s predecessors there’s an actual chance that some fundamental change to activitypub could happen. That mr smith goes to Washington stuff never worked.
Arriving and Departing are also part of ActivityPub but I don’t see anyone sharing their travels here. It’s up to the server software or instance itself to determine what kind of ActivityStreams activities are supported or not.
In fact, there are explicit Like and Dislike activities, yet some software chooses to implement upvotes through boosts/favourites. Both are valid options in my opinion, especially if interoperability with tools like Mastodon are desired, but this goes to show how you can easily deviate from the spec.
If you really want, you can make a perfectly compliant ActivityPub server without any kind of text content. I can imagine a Strava-like app sending location updates and using departure/arrival to mark the start and end of a run, for example.
Disabling votes and relying purely on comment count wouldn’t be that hard. On the other hand, comments can be generated automatically by copying them from other articles/servers and users can be generated on the fly, so that wouldn’t solve anything, it’d just make it slightly harder to deal with the issue.
Nah, I want to downvote Nazis. Their opinions don’t matter and should be suppressed.
Assuming you’ve picked a server with decent moderation, reporting nazis would be a lot more effective. Let the moderators take action against that crap. Nazis don’t care about downvotes but the get real pissy when other people block them.
Suppress nazis by bullying them, not by passively downvoting their hate speech and moving on.
You can do both.
I guess. Ones really effective and tells everyone around you that the person is a nazi in case they were cloaking it, pushes back on their bullshit and makes everyone aware that it’s not okay to say shit like that and that it is okay to fight them.
The other is a downvote and changes where the nazi content ends up in a rank.
Nazis will always act in bad faith and it shouldn’t surprise us when they use their 10 alts to fuck up voting, which is another reason to hide votes and focus on commenting rather than voting. Although i don’t agree with the negative style of confrontation, the positive and neutral are great though. Commentate on each bad faith action they take in real time so the audience understands how stupid nazis are, and becomes resistant to bad faith tactics.