Should admins have the ability to discard votes, and if so, which admins? Should community mods have that ability? Can you think of any ways that tools like this could be abused?

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[–] lemmyng@piefed.ca 4 points 1 day ago (6 children)

As much as it pains me, I think the only solution to vote manipulation is to disable downvotes. Mind you, I don't like it - I think downvotes are useful in a healthy self-governing community - but here's my rationale as to why it's the only solution:

The goal of negative vote manipulation is to remove visibility from content. For that, the first few hours of the post's or comment's lifetime are critical. Sure, a mod can remove the downvotes, but it would likely be done after the content's attention window is over, so the damage would be done. [1]
Positive brigading (artificial boosting of content) is another problem, but out of scope of this post. I consider it to be in the "dealing with spam" category.

As I'm writing this, it comes to mind that perhaps we can selectively disable downvotes? Just like some instances don't allow fresh accounts to post, perhaps something similar can be done for downvoting. Maybe it can also be extended to accounts below a certain up- to downvote ratio, to avoid mass downvoters.

[–] lath@piefed.social 4 points 23 hours ago

Gog disabled down votes on its forum and now there's a bot up voting every reply in derailed threads. Mass up voting can also be a problem in creative hands.

[–] OpenStars@piefed.social 3 points 21 hours ago

PieFed, at the discretion of community mods, offers restriction of voting to only subscribed community members. This limits drive-by downvoting from All, where people would not have read the community rules (which in PieFed are repeated in their entirety at the bottom of every post from that community).

It also offers restriction of voting to only "trusted" instances, thereby introducing a third category between the binary federation vs. defederation.

I have also seen communities on PieFed that disable downvoting entirely, even to subscribed members, even on the same instance.

Community mods can enable or disable these settings at will iirc.

[–] birdwing@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 18 hours ago* (last edited 18 hours ago)

For positive voting you could look at how quickly accounts upvote after a post has been made, combined with how new they are, and whether they have comments or not (maybe also if those comments seem AI-generated).

[–] REDACTED@infosec.pub 3 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

Vote manipulation is done in both directions

[–] lemmyng@piefed.ca 1 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

I know? I didn't say it didn't happen, I said that positive vote manipulation can more easily be addressed with spam prevention measures.

[–] REDACTED@infosec.pub 1 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

But your (one of) solution is to kill half of the voting system to solve half of the vote manipulation. It's like solving spam by turning off comments. I don't think that is going to be a popular opinion

[–] lemmyng@piefed.ca 1 points 14 hours ago

That's not killing half the voting system to solve half of the vote manipulation. Downvotes do not even get used at the same ratio as upvotes. I'm sure someone can pull numbers, but I'd roughly estimate that in most communities no more than 10% of votes are downvotes. And even if they were, I'm not sure you quite parsed my full comment.

I stated very early that I don't specifically like disabling downvotes.
I stated why I think that post-hoc remediations will not work.
I proposed a potential compromise which can be used to mitigate abuse without a blanket downvote ban.

Blocking voting on fresh accounts is not a novel idea. As another commenter said, it's the system used on Stack Overflow. Blocking all downvotes is not even the goal. The goal is to make brigading not worth the effort. The worst case scenario is that all downvotes get disabled (which still works, despite its unpopularity - it's been implemented by instances like beehaw). But in the end, that's just a baseline. It can be improved, and I like to believe that I was quite clear on that in my first comment.

[–] unknownuserunknownlocation@kbin.earth 3 points 23 hours ago

I have to say, I've always admired the Stack exchange system. Yes, it's a Karma-like system, and it's obviously not perfect, but it means that accounts always start with very little abilities, most notably that they're not able to downvote yet. And when those accounts do get the ability to downvote (which doesn't come all too quickly), it costs a certain amount of their "reputation", which makes them think twice about downvoting.

[–] witty_username@feddit.nl 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I suppose that would address only a part of the issue and there are other, less intrusive ways to mitigate the effects of malicious early down voting. For instance, early down votes could be weighed less.

[–] captcha_incorrect@lemmy.world 3 points 23 hours ago

Or disabled until a certain number of upvotes are reached. It could potentially be disabled again of upvotes falls down under the threshold again. Or just have them time gated.