I noticed two communities where centralised concentration of power is antithetical to the purpose and topic of the community, despite side-bar promotion of the imperial Cloudflare empire:
slrpnk.net/post/25302329
slrpnk.net/post/25302230

background trivia

That was 2 posts. An asshole comes along and says “Shut up and stop spamming everywhere”. I don’t give a shit about the naïve dick move to call posts “spam” (which people now understand to mean any ideas that a person dislikes), but to say that two posts (without cross-posts) are “everywhere” as their thesis is a Trump-ian¹ lie. Ignorance exists and so do assholes – often simultaneously in one person who slings lies. We have to accept that and it’s not what this rant is about. That’s just the background. Dicks will be dicks.

The first voter bias

The problem that emerges is a 2nd asshole kid comes along and up-votes the first asshole without doing a quick and simple check of the facts (whether the msg was sent all over the place). Then the next up-voter thinks: the post got up-voted, so it’s probably true that it was sent all over the place. So they cast their up-vote because there is another up-vote (or simply because they are just like the 1st asshole). And in little time, you have ½ dozen up-votes from people who assume other up-votes signal that the lie must have been verified by someone. So the up-votes influenced by other votes pile on and make the voice of a fool louder than the more civil discourse.

It’s the same with down votes. If the first voter down votes, the 2nd voter is pulled in that direction. They think if someone votes to suppress, there must be something wrong with the msg so before they even start reading the bias already has inertia. It only takes 1 or 2 downvotes before some readers lose interest in even entering the thread. I know this because I have the same tendency myself, as I am managing my time and I don’t have time for garbage and have to make snap auto-pilot decisions.

Remedy to 1st voter bias

Lemmy servers can be configured to wholly disallow down votes. Some wise admins like that of beehaw (and a few others²) are aware of the problems under the status quo, so they disable down votes. It’s crude but it’s the best result with the blunt tools we have.

It could have a smarter implementation. E.g. The first ~6 or so down-votes could be hidden and only revealed all at once after 7th is cast. Or revealed sooner, one at a time only to offset up-votes.

The bias of demographics

The philosophy of decentralisation drove early engineers to focus on the nuts and bolts of implementing federated networks. The optimism of the Lemmy experiment drove the idea that if hosters simply have ability to control which nodes they federate with, a power balance will sort itself out. It was deployed without the foresight that network effect is still in play because countless users don’t have the insight, principles, or discpline required to do their part in maintaining balance. Fair enough, but it’s a design defect to neglect human factors.

We now have a massive flood of Internet newcomers registering on Lemmy.World like another Facebook, without philosophical insight. The same lack of insight that eludes them on why concentrated power is a bad idea culminates with their loyalty toward their choice of centralised fiefdoms. So they bring a flood of down votes onto anything putting a negative light on their fiefdom. It’s not just loyalty to their fiefdom. This demographic brings with it the mentality does not value digital rights in general apart from very basic concepts of speech suppression. The nuance of the culture is lost. This demographic brings votes that do not reflect the principles of the locals.

And votes have consequences. It’s not just an unmerited ego tool. Threadiverse votes have a suppressive effect for suppressing actual garbage.

For this reason, Lemmy.World votes on a slrpnk.net thread have relevance to other loyal patrons of Lemmy.World but to locals they just bring distortion. The example shows this clearly, where an anarchist community actually appears to be favoring centralised power contrary to an anarchist code of conduct that rightfully condemns it. From there, I’m not exactly proposing a fix for that aspect, just raising the issue in a rant.

¹ I made up the term “Trump-ian lie”, as it’s inspired by the variety of extreme exaggeration that the orange man routinely conveys despite being superficially instantly detected for what it is. ² va11halla.bar, discover.deltanauten.de, lemmy.casasnow.noho.st, links.nadia.moe, hexbear.net, crazypeople.online, lemminielettrici.it, level-up.zone, lemmy.thefloatinglab.world, lemmy.mods4ever.com, redlemmy.com, pridehaven.social, lem.ph3j.com, chachara.club, lemmy.snoot.tube, linux.community, nsfwaiclub.com, lemmy.balamb.fr, lt.harding.dev, lemmy.blahaj.zone, wolf3d.space, lemmy.curiana.net, discuss.hadan.social, libretechni.ca, beehaw.org, timeperiods.fr