• Otter@lemmy.ca
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    3 months ago

    Gathered some thoughts here

    Potential positives:

    • Any admin can already review voting activity, but some people don’t realize that. This change would make it less surprising
    • it would make it easier for non-admin users to study voting activity and find abuse
    • it would make it consistent with other platforms that we federate with, which can already see votes

    Potential downsides:

    • People will report voting activity that they don’t like, even if it’s not malicious.

      • Admins will need to set up rules on what activity they will act on (and also take action against people that spam bad reports).
      • It would also help to have automated tools to review voting activity since it’s hard to do that manually.
    • It’s another option for abuse, similar to bringing up past comment history

    Both could be dealt with but it would make moderation somewhat harder

    Likely bad:

    • Mods and admins can ban people for upvoting content in communities they aren’t in charge of. This might work on a small scale, but I’d caution against it because it often misses nuance:
      • it’s very easy to accidentally vote on something while scrolling (unless there is a consistent pattern)
      • even if the community is seen as “bad”, the post might be good (ex. it could be calling out the community)

    Bad

    • it lowers the barrier for other types of abuse, such as tracking vote activity for advertising, approximating when a user is asleep, etc