Thanks for clarifying, I guess I misremembered the shadowbanning part. I think I was mixing together the fact that reputation isn’t really transparent (users’ reputation can change by even attempting to upload an image that gets flagged, and the vague error means they’ll probably try multiple times without realizing they’re being moderated) and the fact the communities can autoban any user whose global reputation is low enough.
I still think the security-by-obscurity approach to moderation is inherently flawed though, and I hate to imagine how the dev approaches actual account security if that’s their approach to moderation.
Blaze@piefed.zip 8 hours ago
The code is open source. Nothing is obscured. The main objective is to identify trolls and toxic users who won’t bother looking at the code.
It’s not a silver bullet, it’s just supposed to grab the low hanging fruit, but it’s fine for me
Zangoose@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
“Security-by-obscurity” is a phrase used for any measure that is useless once you know how it works. In this case it’s hoping that a troll doesn’t know about the specific hardcoded rules. None of the rules in PieFed actually work if you are at all aware of them.
Blaze@piefed.zip 7 hours ago
Yet I still regularly see toxic users being flagged as such, with a 95% accuracy. Either they don’t care or they don’t know enough about the system to bypass it.