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Apparently, you can't downvote if you have no comments/posts in your account (lemmy.today)
submitted 6 months ago by to c/yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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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.

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[–] 9 points 6 months ago (5 children)

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 🤷

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  • [–] 8 points 6 months ago (2 children)

    If you actually understand how to implement all that maybe you should go contribute to PieFed.

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  • [–] 19 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    Piefed already tried exactly that and had to revert because it's indistinguishable from vote manipulation

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  • [–] 6 points 6 months ago

    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.

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  • [–] 4 points 6 months ago* (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago

    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

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