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The mod banning these users is the same mod who made the posts they downvoted. This is mod abuse, turning the downvote button into an auto-self-ban button.
The message is "If you disagree with me, you will be banned"
Monitoring and banning users for using lemmy as intended to signal boost your opinion should be grounds to have all mod privileges removed. This behaviour undermines the integrity of the server and the wider fediverse.
Some of those accounts are antiyank alt accounts
I also temp ban some accounts that are obvious alt accounts in my community, only ones where I can verify that the account is an alt. Honestly, downvotes should just be removed entirely.
I still want a placebo downvote button but I don't want it to do anything. Othet than that, I agree - public votes are cancer and 90% of the cancer involves down votes. It's a shame piefed caved to forum politics on this issue.
I doubt the devs will ever listen though, they're too busy ranting about the validity of RT News as a reputable source. Maybe Piefed devs will?
Piefed's original surge in popularity was arguably due to the main dev quickly implementing a voting agent function for pseudonymous voting. It wasn't perfect but it worked quite well until a bunch of other admins got butthurt about it and basically convinced rimu to abandon the idea in some discord back channels.
I have been vocal about my opinion that this was a mistake, and that public voting is the number one biggest issue with the fediverse at the moment (besides tankies, but that's a problem which will wither away with more users). Nothing good can come out of public voting though. People have this idea that it's some panacea for vote manipulation, but there are way better ways to handle that than IMO
Piefed's urge came from crossposts comments consolidation, keyword filters, posts flairs, community migration and lemm.ee shutdown
The private voting was marginal
It was absolutely the reason why I switched. I know several other people who made accounts for the same reason.
No, the original surge in popularity was a combination of its features and collapse of lemm.ee. I don't think the downvoting policy had much to do with it.
I regularly get vote manipulation in my community and on my account. What are some ways to better handle that?
Mostly I'm talking about various algorithmic ways to diminish or eliminate the influence of downvotes for post ranking purposes. Nothing that can be done without forking Lemmy or piefed unfortunately. Even something like downvotes don't actually rank posts, but enough of them will auto-report content would be better than what we have.
It's unfortunate that nobody wants to put serious effort into this kind of thing though, because it feels like admins are addicted to the tiny amount of insider power which comes with watching public votes, so there's no incentive to implement features which might allow closing that obnoxious privacy hole.
Seems like an easy abuse case: once the threshold is known, people can create auto reports using puppet accounts, that can't be identified due to anonymous voting
The voting agents can still be identified and banned. As with all of these imagined issues, a single permanent voting agent introduces no actual vulnerability above normal sockpuppets without voting agents. Misbehave in the votes, ban the voting agent. Misbehave in the comments, ban the user. In terms of just vote manipulation, it literally does not reduce the effort of the troll or increase the work of the mod.
Doesn't that defeat the purpose of the agents?
IIRC @MrKaplan@lemmy.world also showed that it was trivial to map the voting agents with the user based on the comments
If you can't change your agent, then a patched version of lemvotes can do that mapping
If you can change your agent, you have puppet accounts on steroids
the implementation that piefed used to use made it trivial to link them to the original users, yes. this was an implementation flaw that could easily be addressed, which would make it less trivial to do so, mostly turning it into a probability assessment when correlating with other activity, provided that the pseudonymous identity is permanently tied to the real user.
The next step is for people who don't want anonymous proxy voting in their community to simply ban every proxy voting account. This is the approach dubvee.org used.
With a moderately careful user and a slightly more robust implementation it would have done exactly what it was meant to do, and what my ultimate goal is - which is to enable (but not guarantee) a longer term, archival level of privacy. The concept is not perfect, but it is a massive improvement, which could lay the groundwork for a future framework where user privacy and community management are both handled in more elegant ways. Without going into too many details, I am extremely well aware of how data gets linked to users in this way, which is why I am so adamant and vocal about this particular threat. I am not just sounding an alarm to keep my skin smooth.
Piefed has an open issue to look at improvements to the ranking/scoring algorithms. So, we are open to improvements on that end if there are suggestions.
Too often are the devs busy with moderating and removing content critical of their ideology instead of development
Not the case for Piefed
mighty tempting