They’ll scream for blood, but it won’t be the blood of billionaires.

They own the largest communication networks across the globe, both traditional and digital. They have access to the most cutting edge AI technology that’s fast becoming indistinguishable from reality. They’re cooperating with the man in charge of the most elaborate troll farm ever created.

They’ll use that power to keep breeding angry, violent reactionaries who blame minorities and swallow whatever their cult leader tells them to. But that will be rookie shit a decade from now. Forget social media sock puppets, our entire chain of knowledge is about to be undermined. Bullshit, agenda pushing academic papers will be published, filled with bullshit, agenda pushing statistics, fawned over by bullshit, agenda pushing media and cited in bullshit, agenda pushing books. It will spew out at a rate far faster than anyone can possibly debunk and even if they try, they’re indistinguishable from the AI-powered, sock puppet “experts” they’re arguing with.

Laws, regulations and life-altering punishments are the only way to stop them so they’re working hard to ensure that never happens.

As much as you possibly can. Remember that in a neoliberal utopia, each week you’d bring tens of thousands of dollars in for a company, be compensated with minimum wage and then hand those wages straight back to the nearest billionaire in exchange for food and shelter. If you have any money left at the end of the week, that’s abhorrent to them.

Don’t be coy, tell us what you think we should be using it for.

The slimiest form of whattaboutism. Tankies don’t control a major political party, the highest court, giant media networks or any of the smaller institutions that support those. You may as well be shouldering yourself into a conversation about misinformation and education and drooling “but what about flat earthers”.

Come back with a real problem.

Because “extreme liberals” push things like equality, respect, social progress and accountability and “extreme conservatives” push bigotry, violence, greed and shit that fixes nothing.

I think more broadly, it happens whenever there is the mentality of “more X, no matter what”. Usually that’s profit, but I don’t think it’s mandatory.

The best way to encourage adoption is to be miserable as fuck about every topic and event.

After reading your exciting new definition of the placebo effect and being asked to “name some advantages” that have been in every comment I’ve made, I think I know everything I need to about the quality of your opinions.

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.

Thanks.

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”.

It’s not technically possible with any model. Votes on Reddit are only kept private from other users – staff could look them up or reveal them to someone any time they wanted and you’d never know.

Even if you allowed voting without an account (which would be so easily manipulated that it would be worthless), you’d still be identifiable from your IP.

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.

Or they’re just not interested in wading through far-right extremists for 3 shitty memes.

After all, if your theory about “open spaces turn into Nazis and pedos because most people are secretly Nazis and pedos” were actually true, those sites would be the biggest sites in the world, not tiny little bubbles that last 6 months.

If you want to see far-right content and spam, join a far-right server or run your own, rather than trying to shame server owners into doing what you want.

Admins are entitled to decide what they platform and what they don’t. On top of that, the user experience of “just block 100 servers of Nazis and incels to get to the content you want to see” is complete dogshit.

This “it should all be user level” is just apologist bullshit.