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?
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.
When you ignore all the downsides and concerns everything looks amazing.
I wish I had your confidence in it being positive
And when you only focus on the edge cases every tool seems insufficient.
About my confidence: you’re not on Piefed, so you don’t experience the system as a user. If you give it a try, I’m quite sure you’ll see it works as intended 80-90% of the time.
And again, if a legit user gets flagged as toxic, there’s no other consequence besides the warning, that doesn’t prevent anything from being seen.
Yet