socsa

They are conservative because they are stupid

It's ugly and trashy

It can annihilate any kind of police

There will always be content you don't want to see on the fediverse. For all you know your "ragebait" is another person's valued content and they feel the same way about you down voting it without engagement as you feel about others voting in your community. The best option is to ignore it or block it at an individual level, not rely on a system which seemingly exists on the razor's edge of perception over what constitutes a "valid" vs "invalid" down vote.

Well the whole thread is about steering the development meta, right? My entire point is that people get really worked up about down votes, and down votes seem to be a big point of contention over a bunch of different issues, so let's advocate for a different approach.

Ragebait will trend either way. If you don't want to engage with it in other communities then ignore it. If it doesn't belong in your community then remove it.

I'm not saying disable down votes. I'm saying make them placebos. Let people "do an engagement" or whatever to give them a sense of pride and accomplishment, but just eliminate them from the actual engagement calculation. There are plenty of other metrics for ranking posts.

Right, so we are going to twist ourselves in circles and allow/enable censorship just for using the site, over a single mechanic which doesn't need to impact anything in the first place? Am I taking crazy pills here? This is such a dumb issue with an easy and obvious solution.

"It's really annoying how this door shocks me every time I use it. I could just disconnect the power source, but whining about it is easier."

I do not want people banned for voting activity. How is this even an idea with traction? Votes are not real, they can't hurt you. If we are so concerned about the impact of down votes on communities then just remove them from the rank calculations.

If we need to ban people for using the goddamn site mechanics then perhaps those mechanics are just flawed.

Why not just remove down votes from the post ranking algorithms entirely, since they seem to be the cause of a bunch of consternation anyway?

One voting agent per user. Banning the voting agent is as easy as banning the user. There is literally no difference here in terms of combatting vote manipulation besides the "feels" of not knowing a particular text string. This is literally just politics and has no basis in any real problem. I could just as easily make my own second "voting user." The only difference is the ergonomics of that workflow.

"Vote manipulation" doesn't even matter since there is no karma. Just remove down votes from rank and engagement metrics. Problem solved. I really cannot believe how much y'all are twisting yourselves in circles to make this seem like a bad idea. Again, fuck the politics, I thought we were focused on the tech?

Bring back pseudonymous voting agents. Literally the killer feature of piefed, killed by stupid forum politics.

I do not give a single goddamn fuck about brigading or vote manipulation whatever nonsense the fediverse admin cabal has convinced themselves matters on their discord stovepipe. Vites are not real. They cannot hurt you. I do not want my plaintext voting activity to be hoovered up by anyone listening to the activitypub feeds, which is already used to foster censorship and will inevitably be used to enable targeted astroturfing. Rimu, please be more brave about this.

Mark my words, this will be the "hindsight" issue a few years from now. "How the fuck did anyone think public voting was a good idea" will be the postmortem of the fediverse.