IMO if you're banned from a community, for good reasons or not, you shouldn't be able to interact at all. If I kick someone out, I don't want them peeing thru the mail slot.
this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2026
83 points (95.6% liked)
Fediverse
40494 readers
404 users here now
A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, Mbin, etc).
If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to !moderators@lemmy.world!
Rules
- Posts must be on topic.
- Be respectful of others.
- Cite the sources used for graphs and other statistics.
- Follow the general Lemmy.world rules.
Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration)
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
I think votes should honestly be a bit more like old school SlashDot voting, where you had several different types of votes you could leave on a comment like Insightful, Funny, Helpful, etc. Have a few negative ones like Bad Faith Argument, Spam, Advertisement, etc. And also like old school /., you'd have a limited amount of votes you can give. Make them replenish once per day, or have users earn additional votes for receiving positive votes on their comments, or something along those lines.
That would prevent bombing an entire comment thread with downvotes, and provides much-needed context for any given comment's score.
Hard agree on the first part, hard disagree on the second part. Making the system into any sort of rewards system with counterbalancing not only makes the overall system tastier to exploit for Fake Internet Points, but also makes migrating less sellable to new users because their ability or value to interact is reduced or even nullified for a non-deterministic amount of time.
or have users earn additional votes for receiving positive votes on their comments
I found the slashdot system worse than the reddit/lemmy system, if you commented anything that offended the hive mind you got downvoted into oblivion and lost the ability to vote, which obviously ended up reinforcing the hive mind.
I suppose you mean the limitations per diem on voting is what encouraged the hive mind, but even without those limitations Reddit and Lemmy have developed hive minds of their own, with similarly SOHC behaviors.
I would give you an Insightful vote but I don't have any left. /s
Jokes aside, I like both limiting number of votes per day (or otherwise) and having different kinds of votes. The reason why something is up/down voted can make for a better discussion. But I am agnositc towards renewing votes bases on engagement. On one hand, it would increase engagement, and on the other hand, it could scare lurkers away from otherwise upvoting good content.
Piefed has some comment emojis available. Not sure how they show up on other instances.
I used a "no smoking' one on your comment. But did i use it properly or just to screw around?
it worked. i also added a no smoking emoji to this comment.
On Mbin, it shows as just a regular upvote. Emoji votes would also be a great change, too! I like the way Misskey-like instances use them.
I wish Mbin had even a fraction of the childlike whimsy that Misskey has.
I also miss old school PHP bulletin board systems, which had similar emoji style votes where each one had different meanings, probably similar to what the op was talking about.
This shows up regularly. It would definitely be an improvement over the current binary system.
Piefed already has the emoji reactions, so that's a step in that direction
Yeah, I haven't seen that anywhere else. I also liked that each user had a limited amount of votes to cast and thus would (presumably) spend them wisely.
Source: Excellent slashdot karma from when the site was good.
This! Lemmy/Piefed needs metamoderation.
The fact that scores were bounded to a predefined range ([-1, 5]) helped a lot, too.
I like the idea of a weighted rating or star system
I like this a lot.
When banning someone there is the option to remove their content too. It makes sense to include votes in that.
I agree this makes the most sense.
It depends on the reason for banning, no? If the account was banned because it is a bot, it makes sense to remove all their activity including votes.
However, if the account was banned for misbehaviour, I think it makes more sense to remove only the offending posts and directly associated votes. E.g. all votes by the offending account in the thread in which the offence took place
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.
load more comments
(2 replies)
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 on 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. No algorithm, thanks.
Piefed doesn't incorporate any of this into an algorithm.
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 😋
@rimu@piefed.social @wjs018@piefed.social a good topic to developp :)
oy vey, @goferking0@lemmy.sdf.org it's your time to shine!
tell threadiverse your solution to this!
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.
- 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.
For positive voting you could look at how quickly accounts upvote after a post has been made, combined with how new they are, and whether they have comments or not (maybe also if those comments seem AI-generated).
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.
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.
Vote manipulation is done in both directions
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.
But your (one of) solution is to kill half of the voting system to solve half of the vote manipulation. It's like solving spam by turning off comments. I don't think that is going to be a popular opinion
That's not killing half the voting system to solve half of the vote manipulation. Downvotes do not even get used at the same ratio as upvotes. I'm sure someone can pull numbers, but I'd roughly estimate that in most communities no more than 10% of votes are downvotes. And even if they were, I'm not sure you quite parsed my full comment.
- I stated very early that I don't specifically like disabling downvotes.
- I stated why I think that post-hoc remediations will not work.
- I proposed a potential compromise which can be used to mitigate abuse without a blanket downvote ban.
Blocking voting on fresh accounts is not a novel idea. As another commenter said, it's the system used on Stack Overflow. Blocking all downvotes is not even the goal. The goal is to make brigading not worth the effort. The worst case scenario is that all downvotes get disabled (which still works, despite its unpopularity - it's been implemented by instances like beehaw). But in the end, that's just a baseline. It can be improved, and I like to believe that I was quite clear on that in my first comment.
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.
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.
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.
I think the other place tried to solve this by weighing a certain number of votes up or down.
So if a post got 10 upvotes, the 11th would weigh less in the algorithm, meaning that it was harder to burry something that was already perceived as upvotable. If a post of comment got 5 downvotes, the 6th etc would "weigh" less in the algorithm making it harder to bury posts just by downvoting them. They also labeled posts as things like "controversial", "popular" etc.
I don't know that this is a solution, in part because our "algorithm" doesn't really function on a karma system, and in part because I don't have the kind of knowledge it takes to understand the finer details of how this arm of the fediverse works under the hood.
But I do like the idea of limiting the number of downvotes an account can make per day, and also perhaps automodding accounts that do upvotes or downvotes an a rate that a human user couldn't.
Do away with voting altogether and force people to think for themselves instead of just following the easily manipulated herd. Always sort by New Comments with no other options so the only things at the top are active discussions.
This also would make it so lurkers can't influence the conversations they don't actively participate in.
What's the virtue of everyone taking part in a conversation even when they have nothing substantive to add?
Who said you have to participate? Not interested? Move on.
What is the virtue in liking or disliking a thing you're not going to otherwise engage with? Why should others dictate what you are more likely to actually see?
This is just in fundamental contradiction to how the Forumverse works. No content regarded as highly relevant and interesting can be filtered via your system and sorting by /new/ on a wider scale just means that a new post you make can be completely missed if no-one notices it.
view more: next ›