Not my account, but want to advocate for it. Because of, personally, I find it hilarious.
So, it seems like a mod with username MysticMushroom1776 @lemmy.dbzer0.com has some interesting policies about interacting with their content.
I agree that this user called PyroRondo has no content for 5 months straight. This is unusual but totally isn't against any rules of Lemmy.
As I suspect, they reacted to a few posts of MysticMushroom1776 @lemmy.dbzer0.com during random session of content scrolling. No brigading or any other types of harassment. I even suspect that these reactions were in communities connected to mod's AI art, not political ones.
And this for some reason triggered a ban in all comunities. Not in 1 or 2. Moreover, it seems like this mod uses specialized tools, that allow to track downvotes on their content made by other users with ability to get their usernames. I may be wrong, but I don't think that such tools are basic for moderators on Lemmy.
Edit: typo.
Yeah unless there's an actual attack where a bunch of throwaway accounts mass-downvote certain posts, banning a single individual for daring to downvote is wild
It's also my first time seeing that vote-viewing website and it's honestly a bit insane that this quirk is part of Lemmy design ngl
Federated voting means both up and downvotes have to be shared.
Yes but it doesn't have to share usernames to anything but the originating server for the vote and host server for the content. All others only need the sum.
This does still mean instance admins can do broad bans. There's other privacy techniques if that matters like cryptographic blind signatures for voting, etc, where you can know each user only cast one vote (and can see totals per originating server) without revealing the specific users.
In theory you could also make this ban compliant (such that you can't vote if you're banned, but if you're not and cast a vote you still can't be identified).
If you do extra fancy stuff like transparency logs with anonymous credentials and secure multiparty computation (MPC) you could do it while still allowing abuse detection. Although for now that's very complicated and compute heavy 🤷
If the receiving instance cant view who votes, you open it up to extreme vote manipulation.
It's trivial to start your own instance, and one could fork any code to counteract bans on their end or mass send votes without a set user behind them.
instance admins could reject votes from abusive instances and you could let mods see totals per instance
There's other possibilities like using private set intersection and more to detect possible abusive patterns without sending raw data over between instances
If you actually understand how to implement all that maybe you should go contribute to PieFed.
Piefed already tried exactly that and had to revert because it's indistinguishable from vote manipulation
People just need to accept that on platforms where votes determine ranking, or worse, user reputation scores. Vote manipulation will be a real problem, and it needs to be managed or people are allowed to suppress and destroy smaller communities with alts if they so choose.
Theoretically, couldn't instances have been designed to count the sums of upvotes and downvotes by their users for any given post or comment—those counts being federated with each increase or decrease—so that a tool such as lemvotes would only be able to output a list of instances for voting activity, rather than their individual users?
Doing so would remove the ability for moderators to see individual voting patterns unless that data were also sent separately in an encrypted manner that could only be accessed by moderator accounts, however.
That would make it easier for a malicious instance to send extra votes, or otherwise manipulate vote counts.
it's a sockpuppet account used to mass downvote. likely ran by the person who just created OPs account. literally the only thing the account has done is downvote all but a single post.
Actually yeah that might be it, https://lemvotes.org/user/PyroRondo@lemmy.world shows that they essentially just mass downvoted every post of Mystic Mushroom in like a span of a minute.
Nevermind then
yeah, this happens probably once a week to Mystic. @db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com @flatworm7591@lemmy.dbzer0.com can we get some mod action on this account, it's def a sockpuppet.
If this account doesn't look like a downvote troll account then wtf does?
I don't quite see why up+downvotes wouldn't be public. Everything you post is public, up/downvotes can be used by bots (and posts are actually heavily influenced by them on reddit), so it makes sense that you can see who down/upvoted what.
Of course it's an additional tool for people to abuse, but if they're the type of people who do that, then they're going to find some way to abuse something anyway.
It's kind of in the nature of the fediverse.
For the most part though it just proves that you don't know why people upvote or downvote something until they post. Otherwise it just reveals chronic haters.
Like, I got a couple haters that downvote my post history periodically. I know it's just primarily just a proud german nationalist and an australian racist that can't stand to see my username.
But I do see that people use vote lookups to provoke fights and, well, pursue people for their votes, which is kind of silly.
ikt?
I bet 10 dollars, that mod hasn't even send a message to that person asking what that was a thing.
One time I sent a dm to someone who was mass downvoting in my communities and just asked what was up. They then commented somewhere in some thread, saying that it was so inappropriate for me to send an email asking them why they were downvoting so many things. And lots of people were agreeing with them. So in my experience, sending a DM is not taken very well. So I don't. I just ban.
But hey, if you hate every single thing in my community, then you shouldn't be upset about being banned from it. You hate it anyway, right? :)
They hate it, spam it, then get mad they can't look at it more.
Really telling they want to harass and spew hatred, not wanting to "support muh artists" or "stop trump only by voting for diet trump" or whatever else these Brave and Noble Knights of being shitheels.
When I DM people who are engaging in vote manipulation the best response I've gotten is silence and the worst responses I've gotten is lying, hostility, and slurs. And since so many people have decided to harass me personally over moderation, or just over AI. I won't DM people over bans.
Why, when they're clearly a troll? Fuck em.