It’s one thing to empower admins with mod tools, it’s another to establish reputation ratings based on opaque rules, hide them behind fake error messages, and then enforce them using destructive workarounds that cause nothing but confusion.
Go ahead, be restrictive with who can participate on your server - that’s perfectly fine. But be transparent about how your moderation tools work and don’t hide punitive ranking systems in your codebase.
It certainly makes it seem like the devs have an axe to grind, and don’t care how their careless decisions effect the rest of the network.
Skavau@piefed.social 2 days ago
The reputation ratings of users are purely based on downvotes received, it’s not really opaque.
The 4chan thing again, can be turned off.
The reputation/attitude system is not concealed at all.
anarchiddy@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 days ago
That isn’t true - the comment filters also dock users reputation points, and without any notification to users that it’s happening.
None of this is presented to users - that’s the definition of opaque. They’ve shoehorned these features into their code without any notice to other users or instance admins, and have provided no way of notifying anyone of what is happening on the backside that might effect how content is handled or federated.
All of this irreparably injures the reputation of not just the piefed implementation but of the broader fediverse.
Skavau@piefed.social 1 day ago
This can be turned off by instance admins who would see this in their settings. I agree maybe a public-facing form here could be of use though.
anarchiddy@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
There’s nothing in the code that I can see that indicates that any of the penalties are undone by turning off the filter - but that’s kind of the point. They’ve introduced a new metric that thumbs the scale of content visibility that’s hard-coded and inscrutable to everyone but those with knowledge of the codebase, and that makes the entire project and the devs who made those choices un-trustable.
Is there a version of their reputation system that’s less objectionable? Sure. But it would need to be exceedingly transparent with clear documentation on how to configure, alter, and revert if there’s a mistake made. But there’s nothing here that indicates the devs of piefed are willing or capable of transparency or even just clear documentation.
OpheliaAzure@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 days ago
It 100% was! no one outside of the people who coded for piefed even knew this was a thing until the recent posts, if it is such an important part why isn’t it stated clearly and upfront!!!
Skavau@piefed.social 2 days ago
Rimu literally wrote about it a long time ago.
Also, everyone can see the little exclamation points on accounts that are heavily downvoted from Piefed.
anarchiddy@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
This is like hiding changes in a 500 page TOS - is everyone who is impacted by this code going to know to look at this thread any time a new way of fucking with user reputation calcs is introduced?
Absolutely not.