Vote manipulation is getting more common. Some recent examples:
While the accounts were banned, the malicious voting activity stuck around.
Should admins have the ability to discard votes, and if so, which admins? Should community mods have that ability? Can you think of any ways that tools like this could be abused?


Every single time I see someone with a low reputation warning, they are toxic users.
It’s an imperfect tool, but it helps identify trolls and sea lions.
Except it appears designed for that not actually detection of the bad users. And does nothing when the toxic users just say on their own instance or comm. (like goat, pugjeasus and with recent db0 votes the feddit.org admin)
If “going against the hivemind” is insulting people (which is what I’ve seen most of the time with users with both warnings), then it works as intended.
Also, giving a lot of downvotes is usually a sign of toxicity, and that’s only based on the user’s actions, not the downvotes they receives.
As I said, it’s not a perfect tool. To solve toxic users creating their own communities where they reign alone would require admins stepping in. And in the case you mention, when the person is an admin themselves, there isn’t a lot you can imagine, no tool would be able to address that.
There has been many times on lemmy and reddit where that is not the case, just saying what people didn’t like was enough. From games to politics people love to dogpile. Making a system that helps do that is asinine.
Blaze you do so much for the fediverse but defending this type of system is very disappointing to me.
I said it above, but I’ll rephrase:
The point you are making with people going against the hivemind is related to people receiving a lot of downvotes, but doesn’t explain people giving a lot of downvotes.
I indeed do a lot, and I’ve seen toxic users going rampant at a few moments. The lemm.ee shutdown due to trolling and toxicity is a sign that we needed a way to identify bad faith trolls and toxic users better to avoid mods and admins burnout.
Because it’s treated differently in piefed but still an example of how the software is designed to punish those who do not act the way the creator wants.
It just doesn’t seem like a way to actually address bad faith trolls or bad actors just make it easier to purge. Especially with instances that love to keep those types around, see world and shit just works.
Then Piefed is fine?
Instances who tolerate bad faith trolls or bad actors are going to do so with or without tools such as Piefed’s.
If the part after the but is ignored sure. But that part is also the issue so 🤷.
The point is the tools of piefed will amply the bad actors by allowing them to do the worst parts of reddit in the fediverse.
Piefed system doesn’t punish those who do not act “the way the creator wants”.
Downvotes given are only actions from the user, no interaction from the Piefed dev.
Downvotes received is feedback from other users, no interaction from the Piefed dev either.
Trolls are already around, as you pointed out in another comment. I would rather have a tool that works 80% of the time to detect trolls than no tools at all.
While we are talking, example of a user with the two warnings: https://piefed.zip/u/[email protected]
And here’s an example of a bigger troll who it surprise surprise doesn’t get flagged https://feddit.online/u/FiniteBanjo
Would discard a tool that identifies 90% of trolls just because it doesn’t reach 100% accuracy?