this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2026
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Vote manipulation is getting more common. Some recent examples:

While the accounts were banned, the malicious voting activity stuck around.

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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[–] deliriousdreams@fedia.io 2 points 1 month ago

I think the other place tried to solve this by weighing a certain number of votes up or down.

So if a post got 10 upvotes, the 11th would weigh less in the algorithm, meaning that it was harder to burry something that was already perceived as upvotable. If a post of comment got 5 downvotes, the 6th etc would "weigh" less in the algorithm making it harder to bury posts just by downvoting them. They also labeled posts as things like "controversial", "popular" etc.

I don't know that this is a solution, in part because our "algorithm" doesn't really function on a karma system, and in part because I don't have the kind of knowledge it takes to understand the finer details of how this arm of the fediverse works under the hood.

But I do like the idea of limiting the number of downvotes an account can make per day, and also perhaps automodding accounts that do upvotes or downvotes at a rate that a human user couldn't.