Was recently banned from a whole bunch of DB0 communities for, as best as I can gather, downvoting once when I viewed by All (potentially accidentally while scrolling).
Important notes:
- I don’t use scripts.
- I don’t mass-downvote Communities. If I see a post I generally don’t like when browsing All, I may downvote one post, block the Community and move on.
- Some of the communities I was banned from don’t have any posts in them so I wouldn’t have been able to downvote anything.
- Of all of these Communities, in my history I downvoted one post in one of them. Voting in this manner is not vote manipulation. It’s quite literally a feature of the platform and as a mod of another Community, I would consider it pretty good etiquette.
- One of my bans reads “Appeal Granted, not a brigading member” but I’m still banned.
- I don’t troll.
WTF is going on here?
EDIT - Updated Info from the conversation below: In the initial image, you can see two “ban waves.”
The 10 bans three months ago stem from a single downvote in one Community. It was @Draconic_NEO@lemmy.dbzer0.com See here: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/34853477
I was called out by name for a single downvote and culled from a score of Communities I did not participate in by them.
The other bans from two months ago are from four total downvotes over a 10-month timeframe in one Community.
I have also stated in this thread that I don’t have issues with AI-gen images, but there are shoddy ones and well-done ones.
EDIT 2: Now unbanned from the ten Communities listed as “3 months ago” in my initial image, but have been banned from three more because of this thread with the reason given being “self-proclaimed anti-AI brigader” which are two things I didn’t claim to be. God dammit Lemmy…
If I get banned for a downvote I dont want to have anything to do with that community anyway.
the whole “if you don’t like the content, don’t downvote, but just ignore / block it” is really cringe
I don’t use upvotes to express my support, I upvote when a contribution was insightful, interesting or funny and downvote when I find the contribution off topic, not helpful or diverting/trollish.
If I personally find something uninteresting, I block. And report if something is against the communities the rules/TOS/law.
To each their own I guess
Downvoting posts in the All feed isn’t that bad, as it reduces their visibility if you believe it doesn’t interest you at all and probably
mostwon’t interest many other people, so you let a chance to other posts to show upEdit: typo
Yeah I think big level at the feed, down votes help control what is interesting conversation pieces and not and then in the comments it should be related to how on topic or useful or fun to the conversation presented by the original item.
There is some extremely childish behavior on Lemmy in regards to downvotes and in response to them as well.
Downvoting comments I don’t agree with doesn’t seem that bad either
It’s useful to show that not everyone thinks the same. When I see controversial comments and posts, it sparks my curiosity and I start really thinking about it
Right but if you disagree shouldn’t that be vocalized otherwise the downvote doesn’t make sense and people don’t know what the countering opinion is?
I get it’s not everyone’s responsibility to respond but… It doesn’t really make sense as just a tool to show disagreement and provide diversity in the comments.But someone making an opinionated statement, sure at the top level the votes just act as a miniature poll but beyond that I’m not sure I see it’s usefulness as a conversationary tool.
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I do not find upvotes and down votes to be very guaranteed to match facts and using it as a checking tool would require a very different user ase that would likely not be human. But I understand you said to an extent. I just… Give it less slack. But hard down voted, sure, needs way more reservations.
I am just saying the point of these forums is more the conversation and less the voting and it’s really not very useful as a tool, while not being useless.
Imagine a substack post, as these forums were based on, where someone asks for support with a batch script and someone suggests using a sticky note taped to the monitor. It gets downvoted but no one offers any countering support.
No one would use the site for support anymore. It’s clearly not with helpful information, and the person looking at it would not know but just see what looks like an unkind user base.
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It depends. If there’s certain types of content you don’t like that a community mostly deals in, you downvoting it effectively means you’re downvoting almost everything on there - and at that point, it’s just little more than a very crude attempt at community vandalism.
Your voice matters. Downvoting can be useful to prevent echo chambers (ex: downvoting lemmy.ml bs)
Now if the thing is just not fundamentally wrong like it’s just subjective and you don’t like it, yea it could harm, but the most likely is that less people will do it than people liking this type of content will upvote
Its only really problematic on smaller instances or if you do it continuously for every single post without a good valid reason
Its only really problematic on smaller instances or if you do it continuously for every single post without a good valid reason
And that’s closer to what I am referring to. If someone just hates movies or TV and doesn’t want to see it on their feed, they should block it rather than downvote every post from movies and television communities. They aren’t somehow mitigating an echo chamber by signifying how they hate movies and TV content. They’re just vandalising it.
Yea for sure
I believe most “vote manipulation” bans aren’t really on that case though
It’s mostly “you strongly disagree with us? Fuck you!”
Yeah, I mean I wouldn’t call it “manipulation”. Just vandalism in this case.
Haha, just noticed I got banned from 2 communities, presumably for commenting in here (they are both dead communities I’ve never been to). Someone is a very petty and now blocked mod.
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I also got banned from some communities for “systematic downvoting”. I’d estimate I’ve downvoted maybe 5 or so posts by a moderator promoting a harmful diet, which was apparently enough for being “systematic”. The mod also banned me from other random communities I had never interacted with in the first place. But oh well, nothing of value was lost for me. Just kinda sucks that mods can use this to make it seem like their statements are less controversial than they are.
Lemmy (and Reddit) are a collection of little dictatorships. But dictatorship is bad, I think, maybe.
The true power of the fediverse is that little dictatorships should, in principle, balance out each other
That’s like vodka with a vodka chaser. It’s the opposite of balance.
Often a larger problem can be solved by lots of smaller problems being at cross purposes
Do you think that is the case here?
I think it sometimes can be the case
That’s wishy-washy as heck.
If you want to have a debate about my diet, I’m open to that - but just downvoting every post you see because you don’t like it… that doesn’t work for me - that isn’t the kind of community I want to grow.
I don’t want to debate your diet, just want to add my voice of disagreement to it (i.e. downvote). There was nothing systematic about any of my votes. I came upon your posts without seeking them out, read them and thought they shouldn’t be promoted, so I downvoted them to reduce their algorithmic visibility and voice my general opposition. I upvoted people who argued against your points, as I agreed with them and wanted to promote their viewpoints. In my opinion, that’s quite a normal way to use this platform. Otherwise, do you also ban people who only upvote you without stating why they agree with your points?
That is a fair way to use the platform, since private communities are not yet a thing we have this weird disconnect between small communities and people who don’t like small communities.
My view is I’m trying to create a safe space for people to talk about a thing, but random people keep looking around at all activity and exporting their negativity since they don’t like the small community. So this weird “please block things you don’t like” state is the best option we have until subscriber only communities become a real feature.
Let’s say you don’t speak German, when you see the german posts in the ALL feed do you downvote them each and every time because they are in a language you don’t understand?
Let’s say you don’t speak German, when you see the german posts in the ALL feed do you downvote them each and every time because they are in a language you don’t understand?
That’s not a very good comparison, they were specifically stating they down voted something they thought was harmful and shouldn’t be promoted.
For your example it would be closer to seeing a post written in German but it’s a post saying positive things about Nazis or something.
Then yeah, I would hope people would down vote it.
I support you. Stay strong against the serial downvoters and don’t let them bully you.
Honestly. Doing this when someone makes dozens of downvotes is ridiculous and stupid. Doing this with a single downvote is… I can’t even begin to fathom how unimaginably stupid and ridiculous that is.
You mean “dozens of downvotes” specifically directed at a single community?
I don’t even have downvotes on my instance but would that really be unusual? I often see a lot of people on a thread making the same wrong statements. I could see how that kind of thing would lead to a lot of downvotes in the same community and I was never very heavy handed with my downvoting.
In this case I’m referring to the hypothetical of a single account, consistently downvoting almost every post on a community with zero interaction history. And they keep doing it.
I can’t speak for whatever you’ve done or been accused of, but those accounts do exist and it’s completely justifiable that some community owners ban them.
I don’t think votes should be an actionable metric in any circumstance. Bots should be banned, but real people should be allowed to vote as much as they want on whatever they want. Otherwise you’re just cultivating an echo chamber.
Disagree. If I run a metal music community, and someone who doesn’t like metal continually goes in there and downvotes everything because, well, they don’t like metal music. What use are they to it? Why wouldn’t I ban them? All they’re doing is hurting the visibility of the community. This is the context in which I would ban downvoters from my community. Serial mass downvoting by people who never otherwise engage with the community, don’t like the topic of the community, and in some cases - the accounts have zero comment history and purely exist to downvote.
I think this is quite different to just ‘wanting an echo-chamber’.
Ok, I guess that it was just “dozens” threw me off. That isn’t that much.
Depends on the time between the downvotes. Believe it or not there are accounts that exist that exist purely to downvote. They do nothing else.
12 downvotes in 5 minutes is normal. 50+ in a day is not.
Only deliberately antagonistic types of posts collect that amount of downvotes that quickly on lemmy in my experience tbh.
That is not normal for innocuous posting
That mods/admins can even see who is downvoting is, by far, my least favorite thing about Lemmy.
It is an invariable aspect of lemmy though. It is open source. Anyone can make a server. The servers need to have a database for the up- downvotes and they need the info specific to the user, so it can’t just be said by another instance “heres 1000 downvotes, deal with it”.
E.g. on reddit and any other corporate social media the admins can also see exactly who up- and downvoted stuff.
Admins, not mods. Enormous distinction here. And I don’t understand why that information can’t be anonymized or attached to a user identifying number rather than username, but I will admit I’m not a develop not a sysadmin so I am a layman speaking outside my field here.
As anyone can spool up an instance and become admin there, this information is inadvertently available.
If it would be some anonymized information, it would make it more difficult to validate it. Again any server then could just toss around numbers without any meaning. If the numbers are static, it won’t be too difficult to de-anonymize them.
I feel like this is a solution in search of a problem. Has faulty or malicious vote manipulation via instance federation actually been an issue before?
yup many times, sock puppets exist in abundance on dedicated instances or derelict instances. We have gone through many rounds of spam/vote manipulation cleaning at the admin level. This can be done through pinging the admins incase they missed it, or defederating from instances that are not behaving well.
The reason it doesn’t seem so bad now is due to the attention the admins are paying to the blatant methods. (i.e. 300 votes from a instance in a minute from randomized user names)
Think of the most basic spam:
Advertising something, then give it a bunch of upvotes.
Alright, fair then. As a layman I am not privvy to that so I’m lacking that context in my understanding. I appreciate you sharing and will think on this more, thank you.
Lets ask the other way around: Has transparency over up- and downvotes actually been an issue before? It would require dedicated development effort to make this custom solution, that would require a rewriting of the activity pub protocol and a change to the philosophy of activity pub in general https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActivityPub
One could argue this very thread and similar anecdotes shared are the issues you’re inquiring about.
And I’m not out here asking for Lemmy to be rewritten, I’m discussing the topic. It is my least favorite thing about Lemmy, yes, but that doesn’t mean I’m disatisfied. I think mods seeing voting is less than ideal, but to be clear, I also think it’s fine.
Nothing is perfect, and if that’s the compromise for the benefits of Lemmy, it’s an acceptable one.
Just before this turns into something where people think I’m outraged or calling for change.
We can discuss things in the abstract.
I appreciate your well-balanced tone and explanation. A rare thing on Lemmy lately.
These comments are an eye opening experience for me; and I’m not sure I like that feature. It seems whatever the good it does, it’s open for endless abuse because at the end of the day, we are all human and petty at times.
Yeah I would like it if it weren’t the case, but I’m not sure it’s actually technically possible given the design.
It’s incredibly helpful and helps cultivate a high-trust culture. On Reddit, many posts get swarmed with downvotes right off the bat, no matter what they are, due to voting anonymity.
They should really just remove up/down -votes.
Beehaw actually does remove down voting, so that you are forced to actually find things you agree with and upvote them to curate.
And how would content be organised and curated?
lets just do forums where everything is sorted by recency of comments and instead of bitching about voting people bitch about 25 year old threads getting necroed
It could be organized by community and I don’t believe curation is necessary.
Edit: Posts. Posts could be organized by community.
How would they organise it?
What do you mean by “how”? Maybe by time posted or by last reply in that community, that sounds like an okay choice.
BUMP
SAGE
THIS
NECRO
It’s a shit choice, many of us have grown up experiencing it via forums and boards. The community curated stuff is so much better than the ‘last rando to spam something’ system.
yeppers, the whole original appeal of reddit (digg) was the voting system lol we wanted community curation instead of BUMP
That would mean there’s zero quality control and larger communities new posts would flood out older posts. No-one supports this idea.
Yeah, you’re right about the larger ones. But smaller ones don’t really need quality control, in my opinion. So perhaps they would add a toggle?
My first lemmy account was banned from the fed. Because I spoke ill of Israel. I figured this place isn’t much better than Reddit.
this place isn’t much better than Reddit
It’s 95% enthusiastic Reddit users/former users! The advantage (which has pros and cons) is the structure not allowing top down control of the entire network. I prefer this to the monolithic Reddit for the most part.
The .world experience
It was .futurology.
Yeah. I’ve been banned from certain communities on Lemmy for “vote manipulation,” or “not pruning my feed.” -Because when I browse “all,” I downvote a lot of the creepy stuff that seems (in my opinion) to promote rape and/or pedophelia.
I only have one lemmy account. I don’t even know how to “manipulate” votes, and if I see creepy pedo stuff while browsing “all”, I downvote it.
I would explain what it is that I feel is promoting pedophelia, but since Lemmy seems to have a lot of fans of that particular genre, I’ll keep it to myself. Let’s just say it involves illustrations and animations of big eyes, small mouths, and childlike physiques.
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did you get an instance wide ban?
Yup. I was originally in futurology. Guess you can’t call genocidal monsters a genocidal monster.
.world is no better than reddit.
Go join a better instance, such as this one (db0).
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Nope! Don’t speak ill of the genocidal monsters or you will be banned.
They are not so much punishing you as cultivating a vote farm. You are just a weed here.
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My first interaction with davel@lemmy.ml was him threatening to ban me over downvoting his comments.
One of the first things which made me look into what this power tripping bastard is and yeah, a Russian pretending to be an American who’s since been avoiding any communities they’re not a mod on.
Dude says things like “reality has a well known Russian propaganda bias” while pretending to be American while supporting Putin.
Lemmy is infested with Russians
Lol same. It was my first and last interaction and the most pathetically sad threat that’s ever been directed at me.
“Stop calling me out on my bullshit or I’ll… I’ll… ugh… I’ll… …”
The continuation is meant to be “or I’ll ban you,” but since you’re not on his server and he has 0 social capital outside that little environment to leverage against you, he is impotent.
https://snyder.substack.com/p/the-weak-strongman applies equally well to Trump, Putin, and the Lemmy.ml mods. I wonder why the similarity.
Can this admin see these votes without diving through the database because he’s an insecure douchebag? Like Mastodon only shows some things even to admins without being gross and unethical by digging into the database directly.
any instance admin can see all upvotes/downvotes on any message from the web UI
That feels gross, like if I could see poll voters on Mastodon.
Makes it feel like Lemmy was written by some insecure folks.
It’s not lemmy, it’s just how the fediverse works to prevent double voting
Mastodon also being on ActivityPub, that’s really likely the same thing, except maybe not implemented in the UI, but that could be accessed by the API or in the DB
I’m well aware, I run an instance and know it’s in the DB. But on my instance I’d have to trawl the database for it instead of getting a nice UI look. That’s what I meant.
lemmy devs probably thought it was important enough to add then
It’s easier to
censormoderate lemmy.ml this way
Mastodon shows you the votes just by clicking and seeing who liked the thing. No admin access necessary.
This is one among a few different reasons why hoping for votes to be private on Lemmy is a lost cause.
Is that a fork? Or just the newest update? The instance I run doesn’t have that.
What? Sure it does. Upvote a comment from Lemmy, then go to Mastodon and look at the same comment, and you’ll see a “like” from the Lemmy user that upvoted it. Right?
I think what seals it for me is that mods and admins can see how you vote, but the mod log just says “mod”.
Mod log shows admins which mod was involved in the decision.
I will agree that the whole dichotomy where some information is federated freely across the network, but then hidden from some users because they are not very special people in our very special club of special people, is ridiculous. The thing is though that it’s hopeless trying to keep “who voted on this” or “which moderator moderated this” secret in any genuine sense. And so, I think it should just be shown.
The whole “moderators act in secret” “votes are secret” thing is just an inheritance from Reddit, and emulating Reddit was always a terrible decision done by people who apparently dream of running a little fiefdom where the users have no power. There just shouldn’t be an informational gap between the virgin user and the chad admin. We can all just be people, sharing the network.
I agree completely.
You can see the details if you use the Tesseract front end for Lemmy when you check the mod log, if your instance supports it.
Ah, that’s good to know thank you.
Unfortunate follow up: the dev of Tesseract just announced today that he’s quitting and it’s not going to be supported any longer 😔 I imagine instances that already support it will continue doing so for a while, but unless there’s a fork it’ll probably eventually break.
No idea.
Pretty sure Davel is just a mod, so that’d be a “no”, but again, “no idea” is my more reliable answer.
I did downvote several of his comments, but not like “spam downvoted”, but from honest disagreement. Not my fault everything he writes is bullshit. So after I downvoted a few comments while replying to him, he replied "oh see, here on ‘whatevercommunity’ we ban people who downvote others for no reason’, as if I had no reason.
They’re just extremely silly and see through and you ought to question everyone on Lemmy about it. Because while opensource open platforms are great, they’re also super easy to infiltrate.
Tbf, they’re pretty easy to spot and they’re much less over here than the bad place. They’re on a schedule too, so you can kind of be ready for them.
Some are super easy to spot yeah, others less so. And seeing how they obviously wish to pretend they’re something they’re not, you can’t assume you can “always” identify them.
That’s kinda like saying “I can always tell a trans person”, just because you don’t notice a person being trans when they are passing.
Whenever I’m suspicious, I like to just ask people to confirm that Putler has an ICC warrant out for him for his war crimes. Their reaction to that is often very telling, but sometimes they’ll go with something like “well, Putin, like all world leaders are inherently blablablabla”, sort of faking out admitting to Putler’s bullshit while similarly not criticising him personally, but also pushing ideology that is not opposed to Russian goals (ie basic whataboutism)…
I post this because it makes me laugh every fucking time and watch the downvotes pour in: https://youtu.be/TlUsMuz9_RU?t=37
To be fair, at least the guy actually performing is possibly ‘one of the good ones’, along with a bunch of other members of the orchestra, insofar that 1) they’re not fighting, they’re singing, and to do that you got to apply to the musical company in the military and 2) they’re singing western music, and they probably listen to quite a lot more than they’re singing.
Idk they may have actually bought the propaganda, who knows, but like if you’re just wanting to do conscription as it’s kinda hard to avoid, going to the music companies would allow you to avoid actual fighting usually and western music historically was listened to by progressives in Russia.
But like yeah, it is funny. Especially those old guys in the back.
It’s amazing and never fails to lighten the mood.
This guy especially:
Man’s looking tired, bruv.
Those sacks under his eyes looking like a hog’s scrotum.
I have a backstory for him that I’ve made up. He went along with all this because his grandson is the lead singer. He’s proud but unhappy because he doesn’t understand why they like this song. He also has no idea of what anyone is saying in the song, but his grandson seems happy enough.
So, is this legit, or a very well done pisstake?
There’s also a similar video of them covering “sixteen tons”, featuring a man with the deepest singing voice I’ve ever heard.
It’s real. If you look around, they preformed it for one of the morning shows.
I couldn’t find a video of the sixteen tons, that sounds great too. I need to expand my repertoire.
Different event at better quality https://youtu.be/Pdm4YF9A7QM
thank you, thank you, thank you. So. awesome.
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PTB
I’ve had very inconsistent moderation experiences on dbzer0
I’m sure some were because of this guy.
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The same user quietly banned me from all their communities for being a “Zionazi apologist” (which couldn’t be further from the truth) and it took me over 3 months to even notice.
They are just a special kind of idiot and I hope they don’t ever get to mod communities that are actually relevant.
