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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 15th, 2023

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  • 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.



  • 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”.



  • 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.




  • I have mixed feelings on it.

    When I was putting out games, publishing on Steam would mean a guaranteed 1 million impressions on the “New releases” list. That’s incredible exposure for an indie title, which often succeed or fail on exposure alone.

    But 30% can be a lot for those same indie teams, especially combined with taxes. You can put years of work into a title and lose half the money it earns to groups that didn’t directly contribute at all. It can easily be enough money that long-term support or follow up games just aren’t viable. It can be your entire outsourcing budget or a whole employee for a year.

    And after that initial exposure, you’re not getting much for your perputual 30%. The value of Steamworks can vary greatly game by game so you could end up paying $30k for $100 of bandwidth and minor marketing through things like sales and rich presence.

    I would much prefer to see something like “30% after the first $X in sales”. Their cut would kick in only after they’ve demonstrated their value as a platform and small teams wouldn’t have to watch a company with billions of dollars take a very large bite out of their very small pie.



  • Isn’t it cool how many red flags he managed to sneak into that one sentence?

    The fact that he used the word “clandestine” makes it sound like he convinced himself she must have a secret dildo she was using to destroy her genitals, because a 13 year old boy told him that’s how vaginas work and he never grew out of it.

    It’s really easy to imagine him being the problem. He decides she has a secret horse dildo hidden away somewhere, accuses her of it repeatedly and when she tells him to fuck off, decides she is “cluster b” for having reasonable reactions.

    4chan will not help this person.


  • Did anybody say admins aren’t entitled to block stuff

    His “defederation bad (except pedos)” isn’t exactly wet with support for blocking instances for spam and extremism.

    User just wanted a system to see everything and block what they didn’t want.

    That system exists. It’s the “run your own server” that I explicitly mentioned. But let’s be honest, he doesn’t want that system (which again, he already has) for himself, he wants it for everyone else.

    It’s the same bullshit that “free speech absolutists” push in every single thread about defederation – admins should be hands off and users should dig through through slurs, racism, homophobia looking for content worth engaging with.

    It benefits exactly one group of people but apparently doesn’t set off your “bad-faith” radar.