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.
You’re not wrong that the integrity of online voting is hard to protect - like, REALLY hard. However:
a) Our last vote on whether voting rights should be extended to members of other instances landed on it being sh.it.heads only. If it comes to a revote (or if the current vote thread is actually still live, it’s not super clear to me how the pre-mod voting threads are being dealt with), that might change, but if it holds this at least cuts out the bot instance vector.
b) While you might be right about bots being in this instance (I have no hard facts to support replacing that ‘might be’ with ‘are’), the community has bandied about different means of evaluating what other factors should matter for counting a user’s vote. There is a LOT of disagreement on this at the moment, but whatever is finally landed on should be designed with bots and bad actors in mind (stuff like age of account, participation metrics [could extend to patterns that suggest human activity* v. bot activity, where/if possible], linked e-mail or donation, manual user evaluation, etc. etc.). I don’t know if whatever’s landed on will be successful, or if anything tried will be useless in practice, but I say shit, why not try? Hell, it’s a long shot, but in the experiment we could land on something that works and could be ported to other instances - who knows?
While SysOp (and Council) as Benevolent Dictator - where there is no vote, but there is a suggestion box, and it is looked at and discussed by a small number of people who aren’t ass-clowns - is the tried-and-tested method for online community governance, I say why not at least entertain the experiment? The absolute worst case scenario that happens is that it goes to shit, TheDude says fuck it and closes shop, and users migrate** to other instances. Sucks, but it’s not life-threatening.
*I don’t know about y’all, but for instance I edited this thing like 7 times over 30 minutes. I do this on pretty much all of my posts longer than 4 sentences. Is this routine practice of a bot or human? Is this information stored somewhere to evaluate my meatiness?
**There’s a lot of hand-wringing about instance migration, as right now it pretty much means “Make a new account elsewhere and start from scratch”. Doesn’t matter all that much to me, but I’m also not the sentimental type - shit, my history here is some of the longest I’ve kept without pruning in a while. But as portability of accounts increases (which is a challenging, but insistent feature being asked for across many instances), this may turn into a complete nothingburger in general.