Reddit Is Restricting Luigi Mangione Discourse—but It’s Even Weirder Than That
The website is attacking the users that made it the front page of the internet.
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I am literally here, now, commenting on this because I am reading the article to this on reddit and ..... I can't believe they are going to start punishing upvotes! That is the final stray for Reddit. Its dead. Gone the way of Digg. I am literally here now to start moving over to Lemmy.
I just realized - and must keep in mind, with a federated platform like lemmy, all of your upvotes and downvotes are broadcasted across the network. ANYONE could track your upvotes and downvotes in THIS system.
I had no idea how much I valued voting privacy.
Here is an example of an instance admin abusing the privilege of being able to see who voted for what content. OTOH, this incident was noted, and people started abandoning whole entire communities there and moving them elsewhere.
THIS is the freedom that the Fediverse offers: not that you can do whatever you want, but that you don't have to remain beholden to anyone else (like spez), and instead can move elsewhere at any time, while still accessing the entirety of the Fediverse (unlike Reddit which gates it behind their API limiters, for the sake of profit).
You don’t have voting privacy here on Lemmy though, and theoretically instance admins could “punish” you based on voting patterns.
But decentralization helps that
If an instance becomes oppressive, nothing is stopping you from going to a new one. You can’t do that with Reddit. Let’s say my instance Lemmy.ca becomes awful, I can make a new account on another and still comment on this community. That’s the beauty of the Fediverse.
On the other hand, harvesting that sort of data is as simple as creating an instance and Federating with whatever sub you want to spy on
whatever sub you want to spy on
Is it really considered spying if the sub is pretty much shouting the information freely to whoever wants to request it?
I have intercepted this communication to say yes, it’s still spying! 🕵️
If I post to a public website in a plaintext protocol and my ISP also intercepts+logs that transmission, is it spying since the post was public anyhow?
So keep that in mind when interacting with the fediverse
These are public forums, it's almost the point for things to be public. You could argue that votes shouldn't be part of it, but ultimately due to the decentralized nature they must be communicated to all servers
I mean any organization that's a risk to use my data maliciously is one that can afford buying it, so I actually prefer this to my data being equally easy to access but reddit gets paid for it.
My comment isn't too say that Reddit is good, but rather that we might be able to do things on Lemmy a bit better for user safety/privacy. Aggregating upvotes to an origin seems good to me
But then they would be easier to spoof and thereby enact vote manipulation.
PieFed was doing some experiments along those lines. Personally I don't like the idea of fully anonymous voting and would rather go the other way and make them fully public - that would give people pause before doing things like downvoting every single reply to a post or every post in a community, or following people around and downvoting everything that they do.
Voting ideally would be a 2-way proposition where someone can offer their opinion, and the recipient should have the ability to choose whether to receive it or not - i.e. be able to block someone who is abusive, or whole entire instances where that is exceedingly common (cough Hexbear cough, and their very common alts on Lemmy.ml).
I hate to say it, but if you're that concerned I wouldn't up or downvote anything.
They already do, some instances or communities will ban you for downvoting everything.
Which is kinda fair, why are you here if everything displeases you?
Honestly, I don't even like the downvote/upvote system because it promotes censorship and a lot of the times it's just an agree/disagree button. I feel that no matter how right or wrong someone is, they should always be able to express their opinion in a civil manner (obviously there are mods for removing rule breaking posts/comments). Downvoting just kills any discussion.
I've been places without upvotes and downvotes and they're just garbage piles of spam and useless replies.
The Steam Comminity Forms for instance: if you're trying to get any useful information on a recent release go somewhere else, as half of what you'll find is people complaining that the game is *woke" (because there is a woman or a minority in it somewhere), and the other half is people complaining that the game isn't a completely different genre.
With downvotes the useless, troll, and off topic comments can be filtered out to not clutter up the useful posts.
Absolutely: the voting systems were out there for a reason:-).
Not really, it's removing the comments that isn't violating is the real problem. There are definitely comments that should be downvoted for many reasons
Well ideally that's how downvoting should work yes. In practice it's abused a lot as a "I disagree" button.
I'd rather people just downvote and move on than engage with trolls or trade insults with each other.
i dont mind downvoted, but auto-removal by mods is kinda worst, because they will just set the filter to remove certain words, and then the account gets flagged.
Well, I don't disagree with you. All I'm saying is that I've personally seen the downvote function being abused a lot. It kinda works for making interesting posts visible but in the comments it usually leads to certain arguments (even civil ones without insulting or trolling) being downvoted and hiding the comment. Karma is honestly meaningless to me, I just enjoy conversations and seeing different opinions even if I disagree with them. I see why it exists and in a perfect world it's a great way to make moderation manageable on bigger platforms (like reddit and lemmy). Sadly we don't live in a perfect world.
Trolling and insults usually break rules and can be reported. Comments like that deserve all the downvotes they get since they detract from discussion and don't add to it. Although honestly most forums I visit deal with that pretty well too (with no karma system in place).
Is it really the fault of the system then, if it was set up with one intention but then was abused?
Btw, reddthat.com has downvotes disabled, so if you made an account there you would never see them again. The downvotes would still affect the sorting of the comments on other instances though, and thereby the frequency of replies.
I for one want downvotes, if I say something incorrect then I deserve it, but I don't want downvotes from people who are just trolling - nor upvotes from them, nor replies either - bc then it takes some of my time and attention to try to guess what is going on, and sort true facts from their fictional views of the world.
So for me, it's not "voting" that I would like to see addressed and fixed, but rather the presence of trolls. Which PieFed (and the Lemmy apps Sync and Connect) provide many tools to help with, e.g. it can block all users from an instance, unlike the Lemmy feature of the same name that merely acts as a community muting but does not actually block the users themselves in any way.
I love how PieFed is heavily pushing towards the democratization of moderation, but that's another subject altogether I suppose:-).
You are not allowed to even nod at a reddit article anymore. The voting system on lemmy is broken though. Your votes shouldn't follow you.
shouldn’t follow you
Do you mean... across communities? PieFed has a community-specific metric iirc, or else it was coming soon, but Lemmy has nothing even close to this.
PieFed also has anonymous voting, but I am personally against that, as it seems too easy to abuse. I'd rather go the other way and make everything fully public. If you want to offer someone a criticism, then why not attach your username to that message being sent? Doing that would make for a much more civil environment IMHO.
There are upsides and downsides to everything. Open votes means it's harder to manufacture consent. That's something someone on Reddit could do, where they bot vote their own content to the top of the feed and nobody would be none the wiser because you don't know how and when someone voted. And it's not really a "could do", it's something that (at least a few years ago) happened regularly.
But on Lemmy voting is open so if someone starts up a bot farm to push their content to the top it is (relatively) easy to discover.
Banning for mentioning Luigi is just absurd. Up voting has been a thing for a while , they just extended what it violated. Before this, up voting excessively or so soon after account creation flags you as a bot
What's Digg?
Digg was a news and comment aggregation site before Reddit existed. It was pretty fantastic for its time. Reddit is like Digg on steroids.
Funny enough, Digg is making a comeback
