genuinely helpful and honestly meaningful (especially if you’re going to invest any level of your mental health in posts (which i don’t recommend but is natural if you try to post what’s on your mind)) being able to see like, oh even if 20 people downvoted me, 7 people agreed with me, i have seven fighters. it’s so much better to see that and get a fuller picture of how your comment was received.
i remember seeing reddit make that change out of nowhere for no reason and thinking…jesus, this is the beginning of the end
Reddit used to do that, then they changed things to prevent vote manipulation. Then they straight up started manipulating the vote count themselves.
I’m kind of waiting for the time Lemmy does the same.
I don’t think it’s possible to do on Lemmy without complete structural changes and possibly abandoning activityPub & federation altogether
You can even check who upvoted what with enough work.
Closest you could get would be to change the UI to not display the vote counts, but anyone could get around it by using a different app or UI so it’s more of a suggestion
Yeah lemmy is vulnerable to vote manipulation at its core, and there’s virtually nothing anyone can do about it. All the more reason not to care about vote scores, imo.
The less vote scores matter, the more likely to be accurate they are because there’s no motivation to bother manipulating them.
It’s harder to implement things that will influence the psychology of the user and their behaviors (ex. Hiding vote counts for some time, fuzzing the specific values)
But it’s also easier to catch bad actors. If you can see who voted on what, you can more easily catch vote manipulation, brigading, or bad faith downvoting
Nah you can’t really trace vote manipulation, because someone manipulating votes can work across multiple instances while admin can only supervise their own instance. They could develop a network of trust (ie user data sharing) between instances, but that would undermine the principles of federation. Even with such a network, there would always be an inherent trust needed for small instances to take part.
Like I say, the best solution is to just accept that internet points don’t really matter.