Don’t be coy, tell us what you think we should be using it for.

After reading your exciting new definition of the placebo effect and being asked to “name some advantages” that have been in every comment I’ve made, I think I know everything I need to about the quality of your opinions.

Also, never said unranked… I meant simply hide the rankings

Sounds trash to me. Fortunately it would be trivial for me to add them back in because again, all you’re doing is making the information inconvenient.

It also means that people don’t mindlessly upvote posts simply because there were a lot of upvotes

Is that how your mind works? I’ve never once done this and I’m extremely skeptical that anyone does. Sounds to me like you don’t like the content and have decided that nobody really does, they’re just upvoting it because it was upvoted.

Showing Upvotes/downvotes doesn’t show whether they are bots are not. It just means they’ll upvote/downvote more random shit and mess around wit the rest of the posts, so more crap rises to the top because they’re interfering with the rankings.

A log of votes is the data you need to discover bots. It doesn’t magically reveal them, nor did I claim it would.

Voting on random shit might make a slightly more plausible voting log for a bot but that’s going to be far more obvious than you think, won’t actually interfere with the rankings if it’s truly random and once again, not having rankings shown doesn’t address this problem either.

Votes and rankings are always knowable, even if you hide them from the UI. If there is a pressure to make bots plausible through random voting, that pressure exists regardless of it being shown on the default UI. All you’re doing is misleading users about what information they’re exposing.

There are easier ways to identify bots

Describe them.

And, it just aids abusive people

You’ve already claimed to be a victim of them and your solution does nothing to address it. You’re just adding another value to the list of poorly obscured information, because it’s what you personally want.

Thanks.

Problem is, it actually encourages a hive mind. I’ve already had 2 people try to bully me.

Then tell those people to get fucked.

I’d go one step further. Upvotes down votes and totals should be hidden entirely.

Unless you have an actual implementation of how that would work, telling us “what you’d do” is just a fantasy. You can’t “hide” things from federation – they’re either included, removed or made inconvenient to access.

Does “posting without external influence” even have any value besides sounding cool? The entire concept of Lemmy and Reddit is that external influence floats and sinks content. If you want unranked, anonymous content, you want 4chan (which is of course riddled with extremists and good content is almost entirely drowned out with worthless shitposts).

Personally, I’d rather that “external influence” was as fair and open and accountable as possible, rather than “I wonder if 500 of those votes are just Russian bots”.

It’s not technically possible with any model. Votes on Reddit are only kept private from other users – staff could look them up or reveal them to someone any time they wanted and you’d never know.

Even if you allowed voting without an account (which would be so easily manipulated that it would be worthless), you’d still be identifiable from your IP.

Yes, and there’s no genuine argument otherwise.

If you want Lemmy to grow and not be completely overrun with bots posting propaganda and signal boosting extremism, showing votes is the only way forward. It’s the only mechanism by which independent parties can discover and expose things like “every post and comment by this account is upvoted by these 20 other accounts that have never posted and whose names follow the same formula”.

The privacy you’re mourning never existed in the first place and it can’t exist on any platform. For Lemmy, it’s required for federation. On sites like Reddit, you have privacy from other users, but not from the company or anyone they sell that data to.

Since true privacy isn’t an option, it would be far better to be open about that lack of privacy. This thread is already riddled with people who thought their votes were private, rather than just inconvient to look up. That’s far more dangerous and deceptive.

This needs to happen, regardless of the ill-informed tantrums it may cause. If you want to upvote pornography without it being used against you, create accounts that are strictly for pornography and properly compartmentalize your accounts.

Yeah, how is this a shock to people? If they can’t have their own neoliberals in office, they would absolutely prefer to lose to another neoliberal than win with a progressive.

America desperately needs preferential voting.

They’re not mutually exclusive.

What progressives? There’s about 3 of them in politics. They don’t have the power to stand in the way of anything because they’re hopelessly outnumbered by “neoliberalism but you can have crumbs and social things”.

People like you need to wake up. You’re not going to get “slow progress” out of the lesser of two evils, you’re going to get a negligbly slower slide into fascism. There is no protecting your comfortable bubble at this point.

Who do you think I am?

They accomplished the majority of it by simply showing up. They didn’t need their guns or elaborate criminal conspiracies, they just applied for positions of power (however minor) and used that power to push their agenda and support their dogshit friends doing the same.

Meanwhile, progressivism on the internet has been taken over nihilistic neckbeards that just sit back and watch it all happen, making worthless promises about how if it gets too bad, their for-profit firearms will bail them out.

We used to get arrested.

Or they’re just not interested in wading through far-right extremists for 3 shitty memes.

After all, if your theory about “open spaces turn into Nazis and pedos because most people are secretly Nazis and pedos” were actually true, those sites would be the biggest sites in the world, not tiny little bubbles that last 6 months.

If you want to see far-right content and spam, join a far-right server or run your own, rather than trying to shame server owners into doing what you want.

Admins are entitled to decide what they platform and what they don’t. On top of that, the user experience of “just block 100 servers of Nazis and incels to get to the content you want to see” is complete dogshit.

This “it should all be user level” is just apologist bullshit.

The best thing about his deeply fuckheaded comments is that it’s a perfect example of the sick way the ultra wealthy operate, presented in a way reddit users can absolutely understand.

The act of building early reddit was a group effort. I have no idea how much Spez contributed to the concept, but he did code it – a task that realistically millions of people also would have been able to do.

But a platform without users is nothing. It was the users creating content that truly built reddit and the unpaid moderators who stopped it collapsing under the weight of spam and extremism.

While that was happening, spez shit the bed over and over again. He sold out too early. He openly advocated platforming extremists. He got called out for the bigotry he tolerated in his company. He alienated his most important users so he could sell their content to AI companies.

And now here we are. He makes an absurd amount of money, despite being shit at his job, despite being a clearly bad person and despite his accomplishments being ordinary. Meanwhile, the people he needs, who are critical to his business, are paid nothing.

This is the same setup as Amazon, Walmart, Uber and a million other businesses, distilled down to its very essence.

Yeah I didn’t read any of that (and I’m not going yo read your reply to this one either) but I just realised how dogshit your DGU stats are and wanted to share.

There are 82 million (legal) gun owners in America and 100,000 DGUs a year.

That’s 0.1% of gun owners. 75 million children have to wonder if their school is next so that 99.9% of gun owners can have guns that are never used for anything except fun with their buddies.

Thanks, I’m definitely going to be using this.