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 5 points 1 month ago (10 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.

[–] REDACTED 3 points 1 month ago (3 children)

Vote manipulation is done in both directions

[–] lemmyng@piefed.ca 1 points 1 month ago (2 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 1 points 1 month 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 1 month 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.

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