Have you ever noticed that post and comment points on Reddit seem to fluctuate? That’s intentional, and it’s called “vote fuzzing”, basically, Reddit is randomizing what score is displayed. Reddit almost never shows you the real score of a post or comment and claims that it’s for defense against “vote manipulation”. I don’t think that even makes sense because people generally vote manipulate by voting from multiple accounts, and all the votes are accounted for so randomizing it shouldn’t really matter. However, it’s massively annoying because it makes it impossible for anyone to gauge just how many people voted on a post or comment and what its actual approval rating is.

It’s one of the most annoying things about Reddit, so I implore the Lemmy developers to never implement something like this. Mind you, this is different from vote backlogging which suspends totaling of inbound votes when the server is under heavy load, but I imagine backlogs don’t last for very long and it actually serves a benefit.

  • DessalinesMA
    5·
    5 years ago

    Don’t worry I don’t plan on ever doing that. Apparently their rationale was to “counter bots” … well why not actually counter them by not letting bots vote?

    The whole idea that they need to lie about votes is pretty ridiculous.

    • AgreeableLandscapeOP
      1·
      5 years ago

      I think we need to have a registration process for bots: the accounts need to have a permanent flair saying they’re a bot, and they’re banned from voting or subscribing, and any bots that are not registered as bots are not allowed.

      • DessalinesMA
        4·
        5 years ago

        Bots if they’re ever allowed will be a separate concept / entity from users. And an some point I’ll have to add some more prevention like captchas.

        • AgreeableLandscapeOP
          2·
          5 years ago

          Please use self-hosted open source captchas when you do, they do exist! I’m so sick of seeing reCaptcha feeding Google usage data.

          • DessalinesMA
            2·
            5 years ago

            Agreed. I hate recaptcha too, free labor for the google.

          • oriond
            1·
            5 years ago

            Best Captchas I have ever seen are from Lichess They show a chessboard and say Mate in 1… in a pretty obvious position

        • DJWalnut
          2·
          5 years ago

          a dedicated system to distinguish between two types of users, humans and bots, would be helpful

  • nutomicA
    3·
    5 years ago

    I would actually prefer to hide the actual numbers as much as possible, thats how Mastodon does it and it works really well. Like you cant see the number of boosts, favs or replies of a toot without opening it. That avoids a lot of the “karma removed” where people just try to get their numbers up. On my Peertube instance, I tried to go in this direction by disabling the view counter on overview pages, it is only shown on the video page.

    • AgreeableLandscapeOP
      2·
      5 years ago

      You can hide points for brand new content like Reddit does, or at the very least solidify on the real score count after a set amount of time.

      I just think it’s disingenuous to fuzz the voting data if you are going to show it, as it’s effectively an approval rating.

      • nutomicA
        2·
        5 years ago

        Yeah I dont want to fuzz anything, just take the focus on numbers away. Also the “karma” number on the user profile seems counterproductive cause it encourages people to just post stuff for points. Opening the post should still show the correct count.

        • AgreeableLandscapeOP
          2·
          5 years ago

          I don’t really have an opinion on hiding points, I kind of even support it as it might prevent echo chambers and the rise of hive minds, but I just know that if it is going to be displayed, I want it to be accurate.

          • nutomicA
            3·
            5 years ago

            Agreed. This is also more or less an automatic fact because we are open source and because of federation.