Everyone I have something very important to say about The Agora.
The Problem
Let me be super clear here to something people don’t seem to understand about lemmy and the fediverse. Votes mean absolutely nothing. No less than nothing.
In the fediverse, anyone can open a instance, create as many users as they want and one person can easily vote 10,000 times. I’m serious. This is not hard to do.
Voting at best is a guide to what is entertaining.
As soon as you allow a incentive the vast majority of votes will be fake. They might already be mostly fake.
If you try to make any decision using votes as a guide someone WILL manipulate votes to control YOU.
one solution (think of others too!)
A counsel of trusted users.
The admin, top mods may set up a group to decide on who to ban and what instances to defederate from. You will not get it right 100% of the time but you also won’t be controlled by one guy in his basement, running 4 instances and 1,000 alts.
Now i’m gonna go back to shit posting.
While I like the idea of the agora, and have seen genuine debate on the issues presented there. I can’t help but also agree with this. It’s hard for multi-billion dollar companies to keep bots from ruining their services, and comparatively lemmy has little defense. I don’t know if I like the idea of blocking it off for only a few moderators to make the decisions either, but at the same time I can’t think of a better alternative.
I’m not really sure what the best solution is but open voting is obviously not going to work with open federation and users not being validated as real humans. If someone wants me to write a bot and prove what i’m saying I can totally do it. In fact I probably will if votes are used in the future just to prove how easily it is to manipulate things.
Check this guy’s post history and consider his motivations.
This is kind of just ad hominem, “that guy believes ‘X’ so he can’t be right about this!” Doesn’t really work. If you read the post they’re not saying voting is bad, so much as that voting this way can easily be flooded (and influenced heavily) by bots which is bad for everyone. The solution in the short term could just be not to hold votes, but longer term would likely be better served with just better voting platforms.
But once you know their motivations it becomes clear why they want to limit voting power. We can’t let this site/instance become another ignorant right-wing circlejerk. OP is suggesting this in bad faith to further their own agenda.
I don’t think it’s in bad faith. They’re engaging with others offering solutions and giving their own cents in.
What motivations? Not wanting other users to be manipulated? My shit posting history does not disprove an obvious logical/technical flaw.