Surely there is no way to prevent vote manipulation if you allow votes from any instance to be counted. How does lemmy plan to get lots of vote information to help sort posts on small instances without being vulnerable to manipulation?
if you allow votes from any instance to be counted.
We won’t start out wide open. We’ll start with a federated allowlist of trusted instances, and build from there.
What if voting was removed entirely?
Hmm. What would social link aggregation look like without votes?
I’m not familiar with social link aggregation, but if it is just link aggregation, I’m not sure voting is important in that regard.
Voting adds extra categories like hot and top, but I’m not sure why we need those at all.
Time is all that we really need.
Are you familiar with reddit, slashdot, hackernews and digg (well, digg as it existed way back in the 2010s?) ? Those are the model examples that lemmy is an alternative to, and they all have been designed with voting at the center of them. I think lemmy is already quite far along in its development with these examples in mind.
I’m not necessarily saying we need voting. Metafilter is an example that doesn’t curate links based on votes, but they are carefully moderated, and charge people a small fee to join.
Wow, thank you for letting me know about MetaFilter. I never heard of it and it looks like an amazing place.
I’m aware of other websites, Reddit more so than others, I am trying to find a more privacy oriented community so I saw someone mention lemmy, which seems great. Voting just seems less of a privacy oriented content and is a potential for manipulated posts, like advertising.
One thing that I do enjoy about lemmy and reddit which seems to be absent in metafilter are groups/communities on a particular topic.
I think pay to use is a fantastic model to be mostly used in order to have stricter content posting and less nonsense gibberish, and they do seem to have a way for someone who can not afford to join as well.
May be there is a way to make voting work without being manipulated, I’m just not seeing how it can be yet.
I assume you’ll be able to ban entire instances from interacting with your instance, right? It would be helpful to have information about where votes are coming from. If this was available to the instance’s admins or better yet, it’s userbase, I think brigading wouldn’t be as much of a problem at all.
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It’s different on non-federated platforms because they can try to prevent spam by preventing people creating large numbers of accounts. They are somewhat successful. In theory on a decentralised platform you could make votes meaningless with a single malicious instance.
Wait, what? Other non-federated platforms have the abuse, therefore the abuse is not a problem? I am not understanding that logic.
Federating give you the option of quarantining bad behavior off to instances via defederating, which should help protect from the abuse.
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Understood. And well, if you haven’t heard it before, let me say so now. I certainly suspect that there is vote manipulation that happens on reddit. Whether it’s from people on private Signal group chats sharing links to go mass vote on something, bots that take popular content and re-post it at predictable cycles, russian troll farms, or rings of “influencers” and mods who organize themselves into in-groups and out-groups supporting their own content and banning posts that call them out, etc. I think reddit has experienced manipulation and it’s something potentially ripe for abuse here as well.
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