OK, I know nothing about furry social interactions, but non-furry cons - comic, scifi, etc., are all generally quite welcoming.
The best advice I got as an introvert who moved to a different country was that I don’t have to be outgoing, I just have to pretend to be outgoing. Acting, essentially. It was surprising how easy it was to fake sociability, to the point that I made a few friends.
I’d love to experience the Mass Effect trilogy for the first time again. Especially since I started with 3 so I already knew the ending when I went back to the other games.
Signup safeguards will never be enough because the people who create these accounts have demonstrated that they are more than willing to do that dirty work themselves.
Let’s look at the anatomy of the average Reddit bot account:
Rapid points acquisition. These are usually new accounts, but it doesn’t have to be. These posts and comments are often done manually by the seller if the account is being sold at a significant premium.
A sudden shift in contribution style, usually preceded by a gap in activity. The account has now been fully matured to the desired amount of points, and is pending sale or set aside to be “aged”. If the seller hasn’t loaded on any points, the account is much cheaper but the activity gap still exists.
When the end buyer receives the account, they probably won’t be posting anything related to what the seller was originally involved in as they set about their own mission unless they’re extremely invested in the account. It becomes much easier to stay active in old forums if the account is now AI-controlled, but the account suddenly ceases making image contributions and mostly sticks to comments instead. Either way, the new account owner is probably accumulating much less points than the account was before.
A buyer may attempt to hide this obvious shift in contribution style by deleting all the activity before the account came into their possession, but now they have months of inactivity leading up to the beginning of the accounts contributions and thousands of points unaccounted for.
Limited forum diversity. Fortunately, platforms like this have a major advantage over platforms like Facebook and Twitter because propaganda bots there can post on their own pages and gain exposure with hashtags without having to interact with other users or separate forums. On Lemmy, programming an effective bot means that it has to interact with a separate forum to achieve meaningful outreach, and these forums probably have to be manually programmed in. When a bot has one sole objective with a specific topic in mind, it makes great and telling use of a very narrow swath of forums. This makes Platforms like Reddit and Lemmy less preferred for automated propaganda bot activity, and more preferred for OnlyFans sellers, undercover small business advertisers, and scammers who do most of the legwork of posting and commenting themselves.
My solution? Implement a weighted visual timeline for a user’s points and posts to make it easier for admins to single out accounts that have already been found to be acting suspiciously. There are other types of malicious accounts that can be troublesome such as self-run engagement farms which express consistent front page contributions featuring their own political or whatever lean, but the type first described is a major player in Reddit’s current shitshow and is much easier to identify.
Most important is moderator and admin willingness to act. Many subreddit moderators on Reddit already know their subreddit has a bot problem but choose to do nothing because it drives traffic. Others are just burnt out and rarely even lift a finger to answer modmail, doing the bare minimum to keep their subreddit from being banned.
But like I said in the post… It’s not about “internet points”, it’s about visibility of “minority” and niche content getting completely eclipsed by the majority.
As the Fediverse grows and more people come with their own niche interests, there will be more and more smaller groups. If the people on the majority side thinks it’s fine to downvote because “they don’t care about that”, then it stands to reason that every minority will be outnumbered and then the whole system becomes a popularity contest, only “common denominator” topics will get enough traction. This makes the whole system super bland and boring for everyone.
It is supposed to, but it isn’t working. Niche communities are still outnumbered by posts from more active ones and people in the larger instances see content from smaller communities and use the voting system like they are training some algorithm.
Perhaps I misunderstood your intent. So youre trying to control other peoples behavior but its for their own good because theyre too naive to know whats best for themselves and you know better what is right for them. Now that I understand youre in fact a savior with good intent I retract my former criticism. Youre far too clever for all these fools you must suffer surrounding you but yet you soldier on educating the unwashed masses on how to live “right”. Carry on brave warrior. I would suggest you read up on another brave warrior philosopher in your lineage. He is written about in “the legend of narcissus”
If only I could tell you how much distress your shipment of “goods” has caused me! I dispatched messengers to you repeatedly about the state of my delivery, but you have not responded. My household is in disarray, and our workers are idle due to the absence of these phallic dingdongs shaped like … unusual objects.
Your representative, whom you sent to me, had the nerve to claim that they were “fine”! But I can assure you, Ea-nasir, that not one of them has been fit for use. The artisans in my workshop are all laughing at these absurd objects and have not been able to work on any serious projects due to the interruption. Even the guards who were supposed to keep an eye on them found the sight too amusing!
I implore you, Ea-nasir, to send a new shipment of proper ingots immediately! I want no more of these … er… “unique” items that have caused such embarrassment and ridicule for my household. My reputation depends on it.
If you are unable to remedy this situation, I will be forced to take my business elsewhere. You would not want that, now would you? The people of Ur would surely hear about your inability to deliver quality goods.
In the meantime, please instruct your representative to cease and desist from any further attempts at delivering these … unusual objects.
If I can see it and I view it as bad content it’s getting downvoted. Especially since such content usually is inflammatory political post from niche politic subs that have no problem espousing their politics in a “either you agree with us 100% or you’re wrong/the enemy”. The rest of the time it’s weird fetish porn.
I browse by all because it’s a good way to see communities/content I wouldn’t otherwise see if I stuck to a curated community list. Not being part of the community doesn’t matter because I’m still seeing the content and still behaving consistent with using the downvote button to collectively filter it out.
I think a better option is these communities opting for the post not to get sent to all. Which won’t happen because a lot of previously mentioned post; the target isn’t the community who already likely agree with them, it’s everyone else. Better yet these communities could implement rules against post that are clearly inflammatory/flaming but then where would they grandstand?
I put some examples on another comment: I’m talking about the most inane, sports-related posts.
Also, if you think that your policing is going to help the other communities you think are “bad”, then why not just block the posters or the whole community and solve the problem once and for all?
I don’t view inane content as bad. So that rules me out for that case.
Me using functionality of a website in its intended fashion isn’t “policing”. I usually do that afterwards if it’s bad enough but usually a sub has to have a pattern of doing it before I filter it. I know sport subs that were just match/race titled would cop downvotes on reddit, which again sounds like an issues better addressed by the community it’s being posted too.
Look, I’m upvoting you here because you are at least trying to have an open conversation about the post. I don’t even necessarily agree with you, but I don’t think your post is something that should be silenced or pushed away from view of other people.
On the other hand, you:
downvoted this post
started your argument based on an incorrect assumption.
accepted that some people end up misusing the voting system
I appreciate the first part of your comment and the overall candour. However:
Which post? Because I only downvoted the OP because you essentially imply all people downvoting content In communities they aren’t in are doing so because they just don’t like it. I’m asserting people sometimes do with reason, like the flaming I mention. Also the OP isn’t really asking a question(imo), it’s stating your views with the question in the title as a means to do so. The rest, even you disagreeing with me I have not.
What assumption? My initial reply is explaining why people may downvote content when they aren’t in the community in cases outside the ones you’ve provided.
I don’t see how this is worth mentioning that I accept the reality that people don’t use vote mechanisms as they’re intended? Edit: if this is in regards my sports post on reddit remark that was me essentially saying “yeah sometime people don’t use it correctly which sucks” not “deal with it”. Though again said communities could avoid it by not allowing post that are just match titles etc.
Why would I when my issues with the OP still stand? Edit 2:
Definitely not advocating for downvoting content you just don’t like. For me content I don’t like doesn’t means it’s inherently “bad”. Bad for me means inflammatory, trolling, rule breaking, low effort etc.
The one vote against OP is offset by my upvotes of your other comments and engagement with the post; and is likely weighing it up more than down at this point.
So you are downvoting because you disagree with something, or because you don’t like how I phrased it.
You really don’t see that is exactly (part of) the problem I am describing?
My point is: the votes on a post are not a poll. Downvoting the post does not work as a way to signal you object to the content. By downvoting my post, you are just trying to silence this conversation down and make it harder to reach other people that might be interested in it.
I mean if you want me to be specific then unfortunately I can do so. It’s more than I just disagree with you. It’s that I think your reasoning in the OP is very flawed and misrepresents the situation you are attempting to portray. Which felt dishonest initially but given your attempts to engage people who disagree I now assume misguided, sorry to say. Also I think people stating their views under the pretence of a question should be discouraged due to proximity behaviours like concern trolling (not implying that’s what you’ve been doing, just an example). Lastly, I super strongly oppose being shown content on a site like this that I can’t interact with. For your case it may make sense but I can super easily see it being abused by the cases in my example; where people can grandstand shitty politics(again as an example) but then the onus is on me for some reason to not engage with said content.
I’m a proposing a guideline, not a law. I don’t want to forbid you from doing anything. I’m just saying “hey, Lemmy doesn’t have any type of recommendation engine based on your voting history, so maybe consider the context of the community where the post is coming from before voting on whatever it is?”
If you think that you are gaining anything by voting “shitty politics”, ok. You do you. But when there are people saying “our non-english community has a bunch of downvotes from english-speaking people”, and you understand that this might be an issue, perhaps it would be a nice gesture if you voted this up to help this message reach others?
That’s fine and I’m saying that it is not a good idea to do so. I had figured my providing you with examples how intended voting behaviour can violate your proposed guideline would demonstrate that. Non English communities getting downvoted for… not being English is not intended or desired behaviour and deserves a more direct fix than a guideline.
No because that has nothing to do with why I downvoted the OP. Also, as I pointed out in an edit, my engagement with this post has likely driven it up in this specific instance anyway. Even if it doesn’t this went from being engaged by 2-3 people to a lot more real quick despite the OP largely neutral votes for the first hour, and now being -10 so clearly it doesn’t just drop the post off the face of the planet due to downvoting and probably other factors are considered.
Anyway, throughout this I’ve done my best to address every point you’ve brought up. Yet I’ve had multiple questions, some even asking for clarification, go ignored. So I think now is probably a good time for the old “agree to disagree”.
Non English communities getting downvoted for… not being English (…) deserves a more direct fix than a guideline.
What would you say of “people downvoting posts about football and basketball because they don’t care about it”? Or my posts that were on the emacs community, which has about 10 active users per month? Or some other niche TV show that someone wants to talk about and is trying to bootstrap the conversation?
The thing is, your argument is that “big communities can have bad content. I don’t want to see that, therefore I should be able to downvote it”. And your assumption was that my post was talking about this case. I replied to tell you that this is not the case, and that it’s the smaller communities that are hurt the most by those doing drive-by downvoting. You seem to understand that we’re are not talking about your case, but you still want to keep your downvote based on a flawed assumption.
my engagement with this post has likely driven it up in this specific instance anyway
Engagement, probably. But would you agree that there is still a lot of herd behavior in sites like this? The people that see this post being at -10 are primed to downvote it further. I’m not saying that you downvote is responsible for every other downvote, but I am saying that it certainly didn’t make people more receptive to the idea I’m talking about.
Alright and then this can be it for me as I’m pretty sure we won’t reach a consensus.
What would you say of “people downvoting posts about football and basketball because they don’t care about it”? Or my posts that were on the emacs community, which has about 10 active users per month? Or etc
I would say the edge cases for this don’t justify the blanket guideline and if they did it could be worded (and likely similarly ignored) like reddit did. I would also say situations like the language one can be implement with a UI fix. Plenty of small communities both here and on reddit grew despite being “niche” or even just not popular.
You seem to understand that we’re are not talking about your case, but you still want to keep your downvote based on a flawed assumption.
No. You don’t seem to understand that you’re providing guidelines that are incompatible with voting. You want to talk about edge cases in which your guideline can function and makes sense. I’m providing you far more likely and apparent cases where it doesn’t. Your guideline means someone would be breaking them even if downvoting content that breaks the rules of conduct I.e using it directly as intended. I’d consider guidelines for not downvoting stuff solely because you don’t like it for “reasons” before your guideline. Which I’d argue being a lot of former redditors, Lemmy largely inherited.
The idea of even a guideline against shielding communities from negative engagement while affording all the benefits of positive engagement isn’t worth the odd niche community post being spared a couple downvotes from people who don’t know how to use it. If individual communities want to only display upvotes, then goes nuts since that makes way more sense. I doubt I was the first but I’d guess most votes are from people who share my numerous strong views on it. Anyway, as I alluded to before if you can’t understand my position after this many paragraphs then we probably better call it a day. Have a good one.
What you call “edge cases” is all that I’m seeing. I don’t browse by all and I don’t go around chasing communities which I know I won’t like. I find all the popular ones (news, technology, meme ones, etc) boring beyond belief.
situations like the language one can be implement with a UI fix.
There is already a “UI fix”, which is to let people to determine which languages they accept. Thing is, most people don’t use it.
The “browse by all” is a similar situation. The system was not designed for it. It’s just because the Lemmy network is still too small that people are still using it like that. As soon as the network grows, most people will hopefully realize that it will be impossible to follow the firehose on any instance that is reasonably federated.
I think our misunderstanding is not about the values, it’s just a matter of perspective. If you value the same type of content / interaction that of the average Redditor, then you will want different things from those that used to like Reddit because of its niche communities.
Either people browse by all because there is not enough content in the communities to follow, or there is already “too many” of the things that they don’t want to follow on all, and they should start curating their feed by browsing their subscribed communities.
It’s even worse, because I’m not enforcing anything. I can not enforce it. I am saying “The current way of doing things seems bad. How about trying something different?” and instead of trying to take a look, people are responding by doing exactly the bad things that they deny to exist.
Perhaps it’s because they think there are too many of them in the all feed?
That’s not the fault of the all feed. That’s the fault of the user for either not subscribinng to communities they are interested in or not blocking communities they are disinterested in.
New hardware causes problems, old hardware causes problems.
Almost everything is harder to troubleshoot on Windows than Linux.
I have several test servers set up at my current workplace, they are old decommissioned desktops that are 10+ years old. I use them for messing around with Docker, Ansible, Tailscale, and random internal company resources like Bookstack and OpenProject.
All run Linux, all are a head and shoulders more stable and functional than the majority of much newer and more powerful Windows machines at our company.
Debian, Mint, CatchyOS, they all are far more dependable than most of the Windows machines. They install fast, on any hardware I use, decade+ old Quadro cards and Intel CPUs, doesn’t matter, they all run nearly perfect. And the rare times I have an issue, it’s so much faster to figure out and fix in Linux.
I switched over one of the computers in our department to Linux Mint. Threw it on a random laptop I had laying around. I did it just as an experiment, told the guy who was working on it to let me know if he had any issues using it. I planned on only having it out there for a week or two… It’s been 4 months and he loves it.
He says it’s super fast and easy to use, he doesn’t have any problems with it. Uses Libre office for documents, Firefox for our cloud-based ERP system, Teams and Outlook as PWAs installed on Mint.
I use Ansible to push updates to it once a week, Timeshift in case something ever breaks. It’s great. About a month ago I told him I would probably need to take it back because technically, it wasn’t an official deployment and the experiment I was doing had long since passed. He put up such a fuss that I decided to just let it stay. I’ll probably clone the drive, put it on his old tower, and take the laptop back, and let him keep using it indefinitely.
Linux absolutely isn’t perfect, no technology is. But in my years of experience with both, Linux on the whole is far less finicky, and far easier to fix when it breaks.
Linux absolutely isn’t perfect, no technology is. But in my years of experience with both, Linux on the whole is far less finicky, and far easier to fix when it breaks.
I agree 110% but it’s also worth mentioning that windows isn’t as finicky as we complain about. If it was, companies wouldn’t by and large rely on it. People are delusional if they think Windows is only around because of some conspiracy or historical precedent. “It works” plain and simple. As you scale you’re going to run into issues regardless of the OS. It’s naive to think Linux is the be all that end all. As much as anyone I want to be Linux only. My home computers have been Linux for decades now. I’m a realist. There’s value and challenges with every OS. I hate the industry trend of Windows over Linux but I get it
It’s important to acknowledge that desktop Linux was much jankier even 5 years ago. I don’t think Windows 7 & Windows 10 would have been worse experiences on average than desktop Linux back in their heyday.
But times have changed pretty drastically. Desktop Linux has improved massively across the board. With so many applications going into the cloud and becoming web-based in recent years, Linux is more viable than ever.
Combine that with the fact that Windows 11 has become so bloated, so clunky, and just straight up unpleasant to use and maintain.
Historical precedent makes a big difference too. When an OS is dominant for so long, the ecosystem around it morphs to fit.
People are raised using Windows, go through school and college using Windows, get a job where their apps are all on Windows. Companies write software for their largest install base…which is Windows. And because the vast majority of companies and orgs use Windows, the IT ecosystem is based around managing Windows systems.
I worked at an MSP a few years back where almost every sysadmin there was far more experienced than me, I was the greenhorn. But when one of the sysadmins had their client’s Xen hypervisor go down, they called me because, “We heard you’re a Linux guy.” At that point, I had less than 3 years of Linux experience at all, and had almost zero actual Linux admin experience, I only used it personally and as a hobby. But I fixed their issue in less than an hour, got their client’s Xen hypervisor running which their entire ERP system ran on, all because I knew enough Linux basics to figure out what was going on.
Point is, people tend to become experts in what they use all the time. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. Microsoft experts and admins are a dime-a-dozen where I live, but Linux/Unix admins, I rarely see a job posting that isn’t offering 20-40k more for people with those skills.
At my current company, roughly 50% of folks could be switched over to Linux without any issue. Their jobs all require basic document editing, email, Teams, and web browsing. All tasks that desktop Linux can handle now with zero issues.
It’s pretty incredible how well it works. I installed Arch with Plasma 6 on a 2015 T450 thinkpad and it was so crazy how fast everything was.
Felt like a brand new machine, almost a decade old, and bottom of the line specs for that model, but it still ran cutting edge Linux like it was meant to.
My other desktops are even older, but it’s the same with Debian 12 and Plasma, they are super responsive and stable. It’s pretty wild to see a desktop that’s over 10 years old feel smoother and snappier than Windows 11 on a 3 year old, enterprise grade laptop.
The only thing holding me back from asking for an Ubuntu laptop at work is email certificates that we need to install on windows for outlook. Otherwise I’d love to be able to switch
I feel its a feature not a bug. It theoretically should filter the overall content to a more “average” viewpoint be the one that bubbles to the top this should mean that the more extreme views will be downvoted more and help solve the massive political divide that the existing echochambers have helped create.
Downvotes will always be used as a “i dont like this” and “i disagree with this” thats just what people gonna do when they have an emotional responce to somethibg they see. I recon its fine tho cos all people are going to dislike bad content but only specific groups will dislike other content. Might lead to some groups getting targetted but only the extremists like the nazis, communists, and vegans will be targeted and thats fine they are extremists.
The problem is the opposite of what you are describing: I’m seeing downvotes on content that is perfectly fine on sport-related instances, and people are downvoting it… why? Because they don’t care about it?
There is the technical issue, and there is the social/cultural issue. I really dislike the idea of just pushing blame to one side as a way justify a problematic behavior without external dependencies.
What do you think is harder:
Implementing the recommendation engine that can sort and score things appropriately, and work well for people that are browsing by all vs subscriber only?
Adopting/promoting the simple guidelines that I mentioned?
The first option puts at the mercy of someone else. The second is completely up to the people using it. Seems to me a lot easier to just take some responsibility for my own actions than waiting for the devs to do as I wish.
On Reddit, where downvotes are anonymous, my niche sub (20k members but far fewer active) would continually get someone who would come in and downvote every single comment in an entire post. The time that it started and stopped was fairly obvious too b/c like in a Help & Questions megathread with literally 1000 comments, all of the replies would have a baseline value below the starting one (i.e., they would show 0 rather than 1), up until it stopped after which point they would all start at 1. That’s a pretty clear indicator that they were subverting the rules of Reddit. As a moderator, I repeatedly complained to the Reddit admins, who did not seem to give a shit.
I even had screenshots of people on an associated discord server calling out for such brigading attempts. I offered them to the admins, who never took me up on that. It also happened in a much larger, I guess you could say parent sub of 200k members. Hundreds of thousands of people getting downvoted… b/c of one unhappy kid, or someone acting like it.
At least here in the Fediverse we have tools at our disposal that were not available on Reddit. e.g. if you were to block all of those people, I think they cannot vote against your future posts any more? Though it could also be due to a simple misunderstanding of how to use Fediverse tools. And for someone who made their own instance, you could literally adjust the rules - I would guess? - so as to only show the results of voting e.g. for accounts older than X days, or only by members of that community, or something. Though that would take significant effort, both up-front and then to stay in compliance with future Lemmy updates if it was not integrated into the main code, and it would only benefit members of your specific instance.
For someone who so rarely downvotes anything - I usually either just block a troll entirely or at least ignore someone who looks like they may be having a bad day yet feels the need to share that with the entire world - I might not be providing much perspective here! But I hope these thoughts at least were somewhat interesting.
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