Comment on Private voting has been added to PieFed
doctortran@lemm.ee 4 weeks agoSure, but by the same token, mods are just as capable of manipulation and targeted harassment when they can curate the voting and react based on votes.
On reddit, votes are only visible to the admins, and the admins would take care of this type of thing when they saw it (or it tripped some kind of automated something or other). But they still had the foresight not to let moderators or users see those votes.
Complete anonymity across the board won’t work but they’re definitely needs to be something better than it is now.
shnizmuffin@lemmy.inbutts.lol 4 weeks ago
I’m not sure what you’re trying to say.
I’m speaking as an admin, not as a mod. I own the servers. I have direct access to the databases. When law enforcement comes a’knockin’, it’s my ass that gets arrested. I have total control over my instances and can completely sever them from the fediverse if I feel it necessary. Mods are mall cops that can lock posts and deal with problem users one at a time.
There are no built in automations. Decoupling votes from the users that cast them interferes with my ability to “take care of this type of thing.”
rimu@piefed.social 4 weeks ago
Yeah, I see that and it does concern me now that it has been brought up.
However. In the last 6 months of being active in the 'Lemmy.world defense hq' matrix room where we coordinate admin actions against bad people, vote manipulation has come up once or twice. The other 99% of the time it's posts that are spam, racist or transphobic. The vote manipulation we found detected using some scripts and spreadsheets, not looking at the admin UI. After all, using code is the only way to scan through millions of records.
Downvote abuse/harassment coming from PieFed will be countered by monitoring "attitude" and I have robust tools for that. I can tell you with complete confidence that not one PieFed user downvotes more than they upvote. I can provide 12 other accounts on Lemmy instances that do, tho. Lemmy's lack of a similar admin tool is unfortunate but not something I can do anything about.
What I've done with developing this feature is taken advantage of a weakness of ActivityPub - anyone can make accounts and have them do stuff. Even though I've done it in a very controlled and limited way and released all the code for it, having this exposed feels pretty uncomfortable. There were many many people droning on about "votes must be public because they need to come from an account" blah blah and that secure safe illusion has been ripped away now. That sucks, but we were going to have to grapple with it eventually one way or another.
Anyway. I'm not wedded to this or motivated by a fixed ideology (e.g. privacy über alles) so ripping this out is an option.