That’s why I’m a proponent of a a truly federated system where for any community you would be able to choose which are the people in charge of moderating/curating your feed.

You need to be able to criticize moderators, and moderators need to be able to accept criticism, both good and bad. Some of those bans really speak towards really insecure moderation. I’m also not a fan of them being able to get complete anonymity while doing so. What usually happens is the problems is a bad apple within the mod team but the rest will still get defensive regardless when the only one you can blame is the entire group, it’s group psychology 101.

Even “ACAB” cops all have an ID number that can identify them, and on lemmy it’s even easier to create an alt. Heck, if you go over to their Matrix chat and talk to lemmy heads, they don’t consider unfair abusive lemmy bans a big deal because “its ok if people are forced to create a new alt, if they aren’t culpable they won’t get banned again”. Literally fucking shit logic, specially considering if a ban was actually justified you would not want to lose track of who that person is masquerading as.

The same reddit double standard is here, and I see that the modlog doesn’t even seem to be displaying who the particular admin or mod who performed the action was anymore while still providing only the most minimal explanation with no chance for individual users to contest it. Seriously, all it took was for mods to create a mod alias, but even that was too much?

People left Reddit because of the API problem, but the problem was there long before. Subreddits like modsbeingdicks and others got banned even though their moderation did a top notch job at making sure personally identifiable information was removed from posts and comments in comparison to other subreddits that still remain. The future of Lemmy may very well be limited to becoming a poor man’s Reddit. The Stanford prison experiment, read up on it, and if you find it too uncomfortable, jump on the bandwagon of trying to find something to nitpick about the study as it has become customary to do so, doesn’t change how relatable it is.

A VPN is just essentially a change in ISP.

Users could also be doing and reporting the checking up - if votes were transparent - and they would be able to do it on far wider scale. Oh those leopards, eating your faces, vote obfuscation proponents.

If those are your examples, then you are misunderstanding my proposition. Some of the reasons you suggest to downvote are not good reasons to me, but that’s point, everyone has their own criteria and their own preferences for the comments they would like to be reading over others. By denying them the ability to choose, you are imposing an arbitrary and fallible karma system. Hiding it really doesn’t fix it, you are denying the alternative because you feel the absolute worst case will occur. Yet right now it is possible, and does not happen.

I know that’s probably why you do, like I said, people feel really insecure about it. I don’t really respect irrational insecurity though. Your comment history could also lead to witch hunts, yet no worries there… If it does need to be handled, it should be done by automatically deleting your old up/downvotes and comments. But no one is asking for that with comments either… They only take in issue because they don’t want to be held accountable to their votes, even if the probability is practically zero and extremely exceptional.

If you really don’t want to explain why you are downvoting, I really don’t think people should be downvoting. I very rarely downvote, and there are plenty of comments I neither upvote or downvote simply because not everything should be rated nor am I capable of doing so. It is toxic.

You already have a system where people with alts and moderation privileges decide what you see and don’t see, this will happen regardless with information saturation. What I want to have is putting that in the hands of the users. Whether it will be good or bad will depend on the users, and because it would be complementary, you could still accept the traditional or default method. More choice is not bad, it is the users that make it bad, and in this case, they would make it bad only for themselves. But it would also be easy to work this system into something like https://ground.news , where as with a homogeneous imposition you don’t have a choice nor even an idea of what is being censored if you don’t go out of your way to find out. If it’s completely transparent, you could even look through the eye of another user’s moderation settings to see the sort of content they are getting.

Not sure where you are pulling the “new users get filtered out as untrustworthy”, the system I’m proposing would do not such thing. This seems more like a projected insecurity without specific examples that can be countered.

Without a karma system, the problem then goes back to which comments show up first and which might not show up at all. That’s just a traditional forum thread, where the newest comments do.

That would be an argument to support alts natively in regards to the sub and instances you are participating in, and isn’t that compromising as it can already be checked.

I don’t even think generally anyone even tries to reveal any personally identifiable details to social network account on reddit let alone lemmy. Maybe influencers and people seeking recognition, but they are going to be using alts anyway.

Forget downvotes, if you are anyone of note and people know your username, they are going to spend hours searching through your comment history, and that’s going to be far more incriminating than an upvote or a downvote.

Sorry dude, maybe you can read other better worded comments in this thread that share the same sentiment.

This is a copy and past from my reply another community, sorry if you are reading it again:

I’m at the completely opposite end of the spectrum of most people, they should be public to all. It makes it clear whether the guy downvoting you is doing so maliciously or as a non-participant. Same for upvotes. Otherwise, just get rid of it and find some better mechanism. The people saying “NO!” or that they should be anonymous don’t really have a reason, your comment history is already giving you away and no one has a problem with that.

The worst thing public upvotes/downvotes might lead to are the same things your comments are already profiled for by the same people that would and perhaps a random getting mad at your downvote or upvote and voting back, which doesn’t matter that much with the current karma system. The benefits, however, are a clear vision of where those upvotes and downvotes are coming from, without it you are a blind person in a social networks but with it you can tell who is interacting with you and you can investigate why and even make judgement calls because you can see whether they interact like a jerk.

No drama witch hunts, accountability for the way you are interacting online, the the benefits outweighs the drawbacks, but people don’t want it because they feel insecure about it. I specially favor it because it could be a first step for a form of crowdsourced moderation (speculated on it here), where you can choose the people you think are voting comments to your taste to eventually have a select group large enough to determine which should show up first and which shouldn’t show at all, and it could be completely complementary to existing systems. Don’t want to see “yes, I agree” comments sorting as the most relevant? You might choose people who do not upvote but have engaged with the rest of the thread for comments you consider more informative.

No one from kbin/mbin instances can check out the downvotes you make, since this attitude has been so widespread many don’t report it to those instances. They can see people who upvote, and the sky hasn’t fallen because of it. Anonymity largely only helps the minority making the drama remain hidden.

I’m at the completely opposite end of the spectrum of most people, they should be public to all. It makes it clear whether the guy downvoting you is doing so maliciously or as a non-participant. Same for upvotes. Otherwise, just get rid of it and find some better mechanism. The people saying “NO!” or that they should be anonymous don’t really have a reason, your comment history is already giving you away and no one has a problem with that.

The worst thing public upvotes/downvotes might lead to are the same things your comments are already profiled for by the same people that would and perhaps a random getting mad at your downvote or upvote and voting back, which doesn’t matter that much with the current karma system. The benefits, however, are a clear vision of where those upvotes and downvotes are coming from, without it you are a blind person in a social networks but with it you can tell who is interacting with you and you can investigate why and even make judgement calls because you can see whether they interact like a jerk.

No drama witch hunts, accountability for the way you are interacting online, the the benefits outweighs the drawbacks, but people don’t want it because they feel insecure about it. I specially favor it because it could be a first step for a form of crowdsourced moderation (speculated on it here), where you can choose the people you think are voting comments to your taste to eventually have a select group large enough to determine which should show up first and which shouldn’t show at all, and it could be completely complementary to existing systems. Don’t want to see “yes, I agree” comments sorting as the most relevant? You might choose people who do not upvote but have engaged with the rest of the thread for comments you consider more informative.

No one from kbin/mbin instances can check out the downvotes you make, since this attitude has been so widespread many don’t report it to those instances. They can see people who upvote, and the sky hasn’t fallen because of it. Anonymity largely only helps the minority making the drama remain hidden.

Happened to me with an even bigger instance because of an asshole admin making shit up. A solution might be to divide up the host of the user comments versus the moderator agents versus receiver of the comments. If your host bans you, that’s it, but if the receiver bans you, that only affects their users, and if a moderator agent group bans you, that only bans you from their distribution group of moderator agents but could be read by other groups.

If a community / group-of-moderator-agents-under-a-community-tag-for-a-particular-host bans you, you’d have to find another groups of moderator agents or accept all that are allowed by your host. Accepting all allowed by your host could only realistically exclude the worst offenders - spammers, doxxers, etc - so you’d really be incentivized to find a better block of moderator agents if you want to avoid certain types of comments. People who want to live in a bubble could live in a bubble but people who want to prioritize the greatest participation would try to find the most lenient host and the most lenient moderation agents, at least to their particular sensitivities.

It would be a truer federated model, but this is not lemmy as it is.

It might be my localization, but it doesn’t seem that bad to me, and I generally use duckduckgo. But forced localization is enough.

He was busted only because of tax evasion. Now think about that.

They are going up against billionaires paying for free busing and events to fringe supporters. Hell, they have spent way over that busing the poorest migrants all the way from Texas to New York. There’s a lot of money being spent to turn the US into a completely corrupt oligarchy, and it’s way more than $50 million and even the 500-400 million that Trump owes, all coming from the business empires making their record profits from screwing people.