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.
This is a valid concern. Our procedure for voting requires that a user comment Aye/Nay. Therefore, anyone is free to view the user profile to assess whether they might be a bot.
We will continue to assess whether we can better protect the decision making process from bots, but due to the small size of this forum, it would seem fairly tricky to influence the vote just yet.
Rest assured that we won’t be fooled by one guy in his basement running 1,000 alts.
No. We will not be accepting 10,000 votes from Lulzsec.troll in our Agora threads. This is an easy problem to solve.
Then you will need to check every single votes profile. Ensure they have a valid history, with active comments and post. And then you will still likely be dealing with power users who maintain a dozen or more alts.
Bots can mimic this type of thing very easily BTW. You can write scripts to just repost top reddit post, hacker news post.
There are so many ways to game the system I just don’t understand what you actually expect to accomplish with votes.
I will check every profile. If people have dozens of alts with active, legitimate comment histories within a month of the platform forming, then I commend them for their activity.
We are following a democratic process here. We aren’t delegating the decision making to an oligarchy, even if it would simplify things.
There is no example of the system being manipulated thus far. Wait until you have evidence of that occurring before fearmongering like this.
Yes you are because the people swaying the vote will be users with dozens of accounts aka the Oligarchs.
Your example of a “democratic process” is one user having 50 votes and another user having 1. If one user is 50 times more powerful than the other that isn’t democracy is it? That is apartheid.
To prove it I would literally have to do it myself.
So no one else is doing this? If it’s not a thing that’s happening, why are you here trying to undermine the voting process?
You’re the only one here threatening to abuse the voting system.
Oh yeah because people usually warn others before attempting to manipulate others
:/
Find people that are clearly using bots. It’s easy to do. It’s only hard if those user do not exist.
I can do it myself and show you it’s possible. It’s not hard. Actually I can walk you through it
I understand it can be done, what i’m saying is that it’s hard to be done without evidence. I don’t want you to shot a man to see that he can be shot, i’m just saying that it’s hard to find place where you can shot them without witnesses.
What is your goal on this server?
If your intentions are pure, there is no reason for you to do something like that. If you witness people manipulating votes, by all means, come forward. But what is the point of posing this hypothetical, and suggesting that you would manipulate the vote?
Read and post content? What is your goal?
Ok. Go right ahead.
Do you want to decide how we make decisions here or do you want to read and post content?
I just want to build an alternative to reddit. And I want it to be enjoyable for the users.
This is in fact an example of me reading, posting , and commenting.
Maybe stop locking threads within a couple days if you want a decent democratic process instead of just whoever jumped on the vote first