Even more anti lemmy propaganda. Capitalists must be scared shitless.
this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2025
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In what way is a suggestion for improving Lemmy anti Lemmy propaganda?
But it’s trivial to use an external tool to see who voted on what regardless of whose account it is.
It’s also trivial for us to defederate from such tools, which our instance and others have done in the case of lemvotes.
You’re not wrong but you are part of the problem that lets malicious accounts game the algorithms.
Why are you against something that would target bad actors?
Admins can see the votes and identify bad actors, and they can set up automation tools. On lemmy.ml, we consider them spam accounts and ban them.
Yes, I’m aware that instance admins can see the votes. I fully intend to spin up my own instance and investigate. After I complete my report on vote manipulation with evidence and send it to you, will you will ban those accounts?
That depends on the evidence, I suppose, and I’m not an admin for kbin.melroy.org, so I can’t ban them from your site, only mine.
But the what I would normally suggest is to report the post(s) or comment(s) for suspected vote manipulation, and let the mods & admins address them.
Eh, that seems like a shit ton of clutter for no real benefit.
As it is, if someone wants the info, it's easy to get, but doesn't add more junk to the UI
There are several big name accounts on the fediverse that are very likely committing vote manipulation. If you mention it in the thread you will be brigaded. I see it everyday from the same accounts. Those same threads will have highly upvoted AI slop that most times doesn’t even relate to the thread. Not even a Markov chain, just completely unrelated. The same people that upvoted the original post all upvote the same AI slop. Comments that are related to the topic have much lower engagement.
I was going to spin up my own instance to track these people and later put out a report but I am currently way too busy to do that. Maybe in a couple weeks I can get started. If anyone else is as annoyed as me about this feel free to get started tracking these people and share the data with everyone please.
The comments below started me on a trail that led me to a relevant comment from a Lemmy dev:
I want to remind everyone that since users overwhelmingly don't want their votes snooped on (for good reason), we will never add anything like this inside lemmy, lemmy-ui, or jerboa.
Wouldn’t it make more sense to either implement real vote privacy or just open the viewing window up for everyone equally?
Vote privacy can be tricky in an environment where every vote gets sent to thousands of instances and needs to be verified as legit via the ActivityPub protocol.
Piefed does a good job of this I think. If vote privacy is enabled, they create a second account that is used only for votes. Other instances see the votes and can validate them against the vote account but it's not tied to the actual user (except in their home server database).
A benefit of this is that the vote account for the user is always the same, so you can still track vote manipulation, and ban the vote account if needed.
But it’s trivial to use an external tool to see who voted on what regardless of whose account it is
Is there a tool made for this out there? As far as I'm aware, the simplest way for the average user to do that is to run their own instance and then manually query its database directly, which is far from trivial.
This came out a day or two ago, which removes that hurdle: https://lemvotes.org/
Just paste the permalink in. Works on posts, comments, and users.
It was only a matter of time.
That’s been out a couple months now.
Honestly I think you are right. If it were obvious votes were public people would act differently, and while that's not desirable from a content perspective, it is from a user perspective.
People don't know unless it is in their face. Put it where everyone can see it. More drama, more engagement? Whatever.
I think PieFed has anonymous voting as an option. This might affect making vote histories more visible.
If I understand it right, each real piefed account gets an associated "shadow account" used for voting and the piefed instance admin that the account is from can correlate the two if needed.
If the instance admin can still correlate the two, then whats the purpose of this feature?
Wouldn’t they be able to do the exact same upvote/downvote calcs as any other instance admin?
The difference is that voting is not publicly available, so people can't be judged for their voting behaviours, however, down voting bots etc can still be identified and banned by their home instance admin.
That being said, I don't like the feature, and would disable it if I could
I voted your comment up btw
I'm on that honour system now