Fediverse

I would imagine this is the same with bans I imagine there will be a future reputation watchdog set of servers which might be used over this whole everyone follows the same modlog. The concept of trust everyone out of the gate seems a little naive

People may not like it but a reputation system could solve this. Yes, it's not the ultimate weapon and can surely be abused itself.

But it could help to prevent something like this.

How could it work? Well, each server could retain a reputation score for each user it knows. Every up- or downvote is then modified by this value.

This will not solve the issue entirely, but will make it less easy to abuse.

I wonder if there's a machine learning technique that can be used to detect bot-laden instances.

I wonder if it's possible ...and not overly undesirable... to have your instance essentially put an import tax on other instances' votes. On the one hand, it's a dangerous direction for a free and equal internet; but on the other, it's a way of allowing access to dubious communities/instances, without giving them the power to overwhelm your users' feeds. Essentially, the user gets the content of the fediverse, primarily curated by the community of their own instance.

I‘m not a fan of up- and downvotes, also but not only for the aforementioned reasons. Classic forums ran fine without any of it.

Assuming a users upvote history or karma ever meant anything, this demonstrates perfectly it's useless on Lemmy.

Here’s an idea: adjust the weights of votes by how predictable they are.

If account A always upvotes account B, those upvotes don’t count as much—not just because A is potentially a bot, but because A’s upvotes don’t tell us anything new.

If account C upvotes a post by account B, but there was no a priori reason to expect it to based on C’s past history, that upvote is more significant.

This could take into account not just the direct interactions between two accounts, but how other accounts interact with each of them, whether they’re part of larger groups that tend to vote similarly, etc.