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

I think more broadly, it happens whenever there is the mentality of “more X, no matter what”. Usually that’s profit, but I don’t think it’s mandatory.

If they don’t already, they will. The insatiable desire for profit means that even if you paid them $1000 a month for their dogshit rag, they’d sell your data to make $1001 dollars.

Regulations are the only answer and they have to be both enforced and punished heavily enough to not make it worth risking.

The best way to encourage adoption is to be miserable as fuck about every topic and event.

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.

Oh I understand those far-right “others” just fine. They’re all the abusive partners, parents and bullys we’ve all known. The ones who will torture their own family members for doing something, anything, without their unpredictable stamp of approval. The ones who eagerly twist and lie and manipulate people to get what they want, saying vapid shit about “empathy and understanding” that they have no intention of following themselves.

The Republican party is indefensible and by extension, so are those that support them, from Fox News all the way down to fuckstains at the local bar. They’ve made themselves a shining beacon for the worst people in America and I’m comfortable writing every single one of them off.

Because if they were actually capable of empathy, understanding or reasonable discourse, they wouldn’t be far-right in the first place.

Yep, you’ve outed yourself. Better luck next time.

The worst people you know vote and have social media.

The right: “I think we should deport anyone with brown skin, incarcerate the LGBT community until they learn to stay closeted, execute black people without trial and force raped children to give birth, all the while gutting environmental protections, welfare and anything else that might cost my rich friends money”

The left: “Then you’re a cunt”

You: Both sides so divisive!

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.