Vote manipulation is getting more common. Some recent examples:
While the accounts were banned, the malicious voting activity stuck around.
Should admins have the ability to discard votes, and if so, which admins? Should community mods have that ability? Can you think of any ways that tools like this could be abused?


No one is here for the internet points. Why worry about imaginary karma?
Because it affects visibility of content.
Read OP’s post, they’re worrying about manipulation, not karma whoring or harassment.
Stuff like bots mass up or downvoting a post to promote or hide it.
Downvotes don’t seem to be much of a factor in post visibility, at least in scaled mode?
They are in /hot/, which is likely to be vastly more common than scaled.
Not if you sort be New.
If we expect to be remotely large, sorting by new only is infeasible.
Voting is an indicator of agreement/disagreement and will influence how people feel about a certain post.
Keep in mind, most people are just trying to look good in front of their peers.
It’s literally how what you see is regulated. If a company X wanted to hide products from company Y, they could make bots to auto-downvote Y products and upvotes X products.
Granted, I feel like more commonly vote manipulation is done for geopolitical reasons rather than astroturfing
Because at least I’m piefed you get punished if downvoted too much
Yes piefed is known to exact CCP-style hidden moderation.
It’s a shame honestly, I feel like Piefed without up/downvotes at all would work better.
Eh, it still has some good things and in theory since this is FOSS someone could just, like, fork it and remove the whole shadow cabal moderation thingy.
Well, I’m here for the internet points. I’m a hoarder, so I like collecting stuff, internet points included.
You must love cookie banners 😋