No, the original surge in popularity was a combination of its features and collapse of lemm.ee. I don't think the downvoting policy had much to do with it.
Comment on User "threelonmusketeers@sh.itjust.works" is banning users for downvoting his posts.
socsa@piefed.social 2 days agoPiefed's original surge in popularity was arguably due to the main dev quickly implementing a voting agent function for pseudonymous voting. It wasn't perfect but it worked quite well until a bunch of other admins got butthurt about it and basically convinced rimu to abandon the idea in some discord back channels.
I have been vocal about my opinion that this was a mistake, and that public voting is the number one biggest issue with the fediverse at the moment (besides tankies, but that's a problem which will wither away with more users). Nothing good can come out of public voting though. People have this idea that it's some panacea for vote manipulation, but there are way better ways to handle that than IMO
Skavau@piefed.social 2 days ago
goat@sh.itjust.works 2 days ago
I regularly get vote manipulation in my community and on my account. What are some ways to better handle that?
socsa@piefed.social 1 day ago
Mostly I'm talking about various algorithmic ways to diminish or eliminate the influence of downvotes for post ranking purposes. Nothing that can be done without forking Lemmy or piefed unfortunately. Even something like downvotes don't actually rank posts, but enough of them will auto-report content would be better than what we have.
It's unfortunate that nobody wants to put serious effort into this kind of thing though, because it feels like admins are addicted to the tiny amount of insider power which comes with watching public votes, so there's no incentive to implement features which might allow closing that obnoxious privacy hole.
wjs018@piefed.social 1 day ago
Piefed has an open issue to look at improvements to the ranking/scoring algorithms. So, we are open to improvements on that end if there are suggestions.
Blaze@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
enough of them will auto-report content would be better than what we have.
Seems like an easy abuse case: once the threshold is known, people can create auto reports using puppet accounts, that can’t be identified due to anonymous voting
socsa@piefed.social 22 hours ago
The voting agents can still be identified and banned. As with all of these imagined issues, a single permanent voting agent introduces no actual vulnerability above normal sockpuppets without voting agents. Misbehave in the votes, ban the voting agent. Misbehave in the comments, ban the user. In terms of just vote manipulation, it literally does not reduce the effort of the troll or increase the work of the mod.
goat@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
Too often are the devs busy with moderating and removing content critical of their ideology instead of development
Blaze@lemmy.zip 2 days ago
Piefed’s urge came from crossposts comments consolidation, keyword filters, posts flairs, community migration and lemm.ee shutdown
The private voting was marginal
socsa@piefed.social 1 day ago
It was absolutely the reason why I switched. I know several other people who made accounts for the same reason.