• Not a newt@piefed.caEnglish
    62·
    12 hours ago

    As much as it pains me, I think the only solution to vote manipulation is to disable downvotes. Mind you, I don’t like it - I think downvotes are useful in a healthy self-governing community - but here’s my rationale as to why it’s the only solution:

    • The goal of negative vote manipulation is to remove visibility from content. For that, the first few hours of the post’s or comment’s lifetime are critical. Sure, a mod can remove the downvotes, but it would likely be done after the content’s attention window is over, so the damage would be done. [1]
    • Positive brigading (artificial boosting of content) is another problem, but out of scope of this post. I consider it to be in the “dealing with spam” category.
    1. As I’m writing this, it comes to mind that perhaps we can selectively disable downvotes? Just like some instances don’t allow fresh accounts to post, perhaps something similar can be done for downvoting. Maybe it can also be extended to accounts below a certain up- to downvote ratio, to avoid mass downvoters.
    • OpenStars@piefed.socialEnglish
      31·
      10 hours ago

      PieFed, at the discretion of community mods, offers restriction of voting to only subscribed community members. This limits drive-by downvoting from All, where people would not have read the community rules (which in PieFed are repeated in their entirety at the bottom of every post from that community).

      It also offers restriction of voting to only “trusted” instances, thereby introducing a third category between the binary federation vs. defederation.

      I have also seen communities on PieFed that disable downvoting entirely, even to subscribed members, even on the same instance.

      Community mods can enable or disable these settings at will iirc.

    • lath@piefed.socialEnglish
      3·
      11 hours ago

      Gog disabled down votes on its forum and now there’s a bot up voting every reply in derailed threads. Mass up voting can also be a problem in creative hands.

      • Not a newt@piefed.caEnglish
        21·
        11 hours ago

        I know? I didn’t say it didn’t happen, I said that positive vote manipulation can more easily be addressed with spam prevention measures.

    • unknownuserunknownlocation@kbin.earth
      31·
      11 hours ago

      I have to say, I’ve always admired the Stack exchange system. Yes, it’s a Karma-like system, and it’s obviously not perfect, but it means that accounts always start with very little abilities, most notably that they’re not able to downvote yet. And when those accounts do get the ability to downvote (which doesn’t come all too quickly), it costs a certain amount of their “reputation”, which makes them think twice about downvoting.

    • witty_username@feddit.nlEnglish
      2·
      12 hours ago

      I suppose that would address only a part of the issue and there are other, less intrusive ways to mitigate the effects of malicious early down voting. For instance, early down votes could be weighed less.

      • captcha_incorrect@lemmy.worldEnglish
        21·
        11 hours ago

        Or disabled until a certain number of upvotes are reached. It could potentially be disabled again of upvotes falls down under the threshold again. Or just have them time gated.