Uh, votes don't matter here. That's one of the improvements over Reddit.
this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2026
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But sadly do on piefed
Please elaborate.
Piefed ties your voting habits and how often downvoted so it can flag you if either downvoted too much or down vote up and down sort of equally.
Basically if someone goes against hive mind once or twice can cause getting removed or limited on their instance.
https://join.piefed.social/2024/06/22/piefed-features-for-growing-healthy-communities/
Find people who have low karma
When someone is consistently getting downvoted it’s likely they are a problem. PieFed provides a list of accounts with low karma, sorted by lowest first. Clicking on their user name takes you to their profile which shows all their posts and comments in one place. Every profile has “Ban” and “Ban + Purge” buttons that have instance-wide effects and are only visible to admins.
The ‘Rep’ column is their reputation. As you can see, some people have been downvoted thousands of times. They’re not going to change their ways, are they?
The ‘Reports’ column is how often they’ve been reported, IP shows their IP address and ‘Source’ shows which website linked to PieFed when they initially registered. If an unfriendly forum starts sending floods of toxic people to your instance, spotting them is easy. (In the image above all the accounts are from other instances so we don’t know their IP address or Source). Find people who downvote too much
Once an account has made a few votes, an “attitude” is calculated each time they vote which is the percentage of up votes vs. down votes.
People who downvote more than upvote tend to be the ones who get in fights a lot and say snarky, inflammatory and negative things. If you were at a dinner party, would you want them around? By reviewing the list of people with bad attitudes you can make decisions about who you want to be involved in our communities.
All these accounts have been downvoting a lot (Attitude column) and receiving some downvotes (Rep column). Their profiles are worth a look and then making a decision about whether they’re bringing down the vibe or not.
Jesus Christ I hate that the internet is turning this space into your shitty fucking idea of a dinner party
It's negative! Oh no better hide that, because some jerks decided being polite is the ultimate Maxim of human expression
I think votes should honestly be a bit more like old school SlashDot voting, where you had several different types of votes you could leave on a comment like Insightful, Funny, Helpful, etc. Have a few negative ones like Bad Faith Argument, Spam, Advertisement, etc. And also like old school /., you'd have a limited amount of votes you can give. Make them replenish once per day, or have users earn additional votes for receiving positive votes on their comments, or something along those lines.
That would prevent bombing an entire comment thread with downvotes, and provides much-needed context for any given comment's score.
Hard agree on the first part, hard disagree on the second part. Making the system into any sort of rewards system with counterbalancing not only makes the overall system tastier to exploit for Fake Internet Points, but also makes migrating less sellable to new users because their ability or value to interact is reduced or even nullified for a non-deterministic amount of time.
or have users earn additional votes for receiving positive votes on their comments
I found the slashdot system worse than the reddit/lemmy system, if you commented anything that offended the hive mind you got downvoted into oblivion and lost the ability to vote, which obviously ended up reinforcing the hive mind.
I suppose you mean the limitations per diem on voting is what encouraged the hive mind, but even without those limitations Reddit and Lemmy have developed hive minds of their own, with similarly SOHC behaviors.
I would give you an Insightful vote but I don't have any left. /s
Jokes aside, I like both limiting number of votes per day (or otherwise) and having different kinds of votes. The reason why something is up/down voted can make for a better discussion. But I am agnositc towards renewing votes bases on engagement. On one hand, it would increase engagement, and on the other hand, it could scare lurkers away from otherwise upvoting good content.
Piefed has some comment emojis available. Not sure how they show up on other instances.
I used a "no smoking' one on your comment. But did i use it properly or just to screw around?
On Mbin, it shows as just a regular upvote. Emoji votes would also be a great change, too! I like the way Misskey-like instances use them.
I wish Mbin had even a fraction of the childlike whimsy that Misskey has.
I also miss old school PHP bulletin board systems, which had similar emoji style votes where each one had different meanings, probably similar to what the op was talking about.
the childlike whimsy that Misskey has.
This, so much. I really wish I could read Japanese, because the really active Misskey instances look genuinely fun to be on. It reminds me a lot of the OMGPOP days, which I miss dearly.
it worked. i also added a no smoking emoji to this comment.
This shows up regularly. It would definitely be an improvement over the current binary system.
Piefed already has the emoji reactions, so that's a step in that direction
This! Lemmy/Piefed needs metamoderation.
The fact that scores were bounded to a predefined range ([-1, 5]) helped a lot, too.
I like the idea of a weighted rating or star system
Yeah, I haven't seen that anywhere else. I also liked that each user had a limited amount of votes to cast and thus would (presumably) spend them wisely.
Source: Excellent slashdot karma from when the site was good.
I like this a lot.
When banning someone there is the option to remove their content too. It makes sense to include votes in that.
I agree this makes the most sense.
It depends on the reason for banning, no? If the account was banned because it is a bot, it makes sense to remove all their activity including votes.
However, if the account was banned for misbehaviour, I think it makes more sense to remove only the offending posts and directly associated votes. E.g. all votes by the offending account in the thread in which the offence took place
No one is here for the internet points. Why worry about imaginary karma?
Because it affects visibility of content.
Read OP's post, they're worrying about manipulation, not karma whoring or harassment.
Stuff like bots mass up or downvoting a post to promote or hide it.
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Voting is an indicator of agreement/disagreement and will influence how people feel about a certain post.
Keep in mind, most people are just trying to look good in front of their peers.
It's literally how what you see is regulated. If a company X wanted to hide products from company Y, they could make bots to auto-downvote Y products and upvotes X products.
Granted, I feel like more commonly vote manipulation is done for geopolitical reasons rather than astroturfing
Because at least on piefed you get punished if downvoted too much
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@rimu@piefed.social @wjs018@piefed.social a good topic to developp :)
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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