What options do we have to deal with suspected downvote brigading or voting abuse on lemmy and what do we do to report it
Just curious on what makes it “abuse” over just being posts people don’t like?
Some instances have downvotes turned off entirely
Some communities ban you just for a downvote
edit a brief scroll of your post history, the only posts with semi equal up and down votes seem appropriate - such as posting manga to skyrim and asking for a mod
Some instances have downvotes turned off entirely
From what I can tell, this only prevents users native to that instance from downvoting anything. It doesn’t prevent anyone else from downvoting posts on the given instance.
My lemmynsfw profile can’t downvote anything, but my other profile that can see lemmynsfw posts can downvote them.
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I wasn’t posting manga to skyrim, I was just asking for mod outfit suggestions to match the outfit in the manga and the context provided in the post is pretty obvious that I wasn’t just posting manga to skyrim mods
and I don’t know what you mean by asking for a mod because I don’t recall asking for a mod
And may I ask why you decided to go through my post history because it has nothing to do with this post
I assumed you felt you were having problems with your posts being downvoted regularly. Besides, your profile is completely public. Its fair game.
What can be done about downvote brigades
Assumption: you feel your posts are being brigaded. You provided zero other context.
You absolutely did ask for a mod. Literally in the title of your post
outfit mod is a mod. Not sure why you’re claiming an outfit mod isn’t a mod
edit
and before you blame me. I have not voted on your posts or comments.
edit
You didn’t even answer the question I asked on whether the downvotes are “valid” because people dont want the posts
I thought you where talking about mods as in moderators and not modifications
I mean really the only solutions are algorithms similar to centralized social media, although I suppose there’s an opportunity for transparency and instance specific or even individual user choice that you don’t get on those platforms. I’ve thought a lot lately about how algorithms could be implemented but made public and even opted in or out of in most cases so that you know how and why you’re seeing what you’re seeing.
You could even change how your own personal algorithm works so you could get more of what you like and less of what you don’t (although that’s putting a lot of trust in individuals to not just stay in comfy little echo chambers). A good example to me would be slightly obfuscating the exact number of votes to prevent people from from precisely quantifying the amount people agree or disagree with them as much, because I think that’s one of the more psychologically damaging aspects of social media. I actually think Reddit was on to something with that particular move, and again, that the main pitfall was just not making their algorithms public. I think you should still be able to get into the guts of the numbers for the sake of transparency, but being able to quantify things to that degree shouldn’t be the default and changing it should maybe even come with a short warning that doing so might cause more harm than good.
I feel like the easiest solution to this specific issue is just to be able to have the option to view / sort by votes from across fedi, or just local to your home instance, the instance of the post, or even just the votes of the individual community (although you could join the community just to downvote vs migrating instances is harder, especially if they have closed or restricted migration.
Hey there buddy,
Decided I’d poke my head in here and see whats going on. To answer your question directly, you can report it to myself or another admin, along with specific examples, links, and other available evidence. If we investigate and it’s clear that there is some form of brigading/abuse, we will take appropriate action against the user(s)/community that is being problematic- particularly if they are following someone across communities and instances.
If your conflict with a given user or group of users is mostly contained within one community, we will (generally) leave that to the community mods discretion.
All of that being said, I looked through your post history and I dont really see what you’re talking about. Can you DM me with some specific examples of the behavior you’re concerned about?
Message instance admins. They can see it.
What makes you think there is any voting abuse on Lemmy though?
I’d love to see the ability to downvote being proportionate to a user’s platform engagement and interaction. Maybe everyone gets an individual downvote pool. Making a comment gives you 2 available downvotes, a post gives you 6.
