genuinely helpful and honestly meaningful (especially if you’re going to invest any level of your mental health in posts (which i don’t recommend but is natural if you try to post what’s on your mind)) being able to see like, oh even if 20 people downvoted me, 7 people agreed with me, i have seven fighters. it’s so much better to see that and get a fuller picture of how your comment was received.
i remember seeing reddit make that change out of nowhere for no reason and thinking…jesus, this is the beginning of the end
Nah you can’t really trace vote manipulation, because someone manipulating votes can work across multiple instances while admin can only supervise their own instance. They could develop a network of trust (ie user data sharing) between instances, but that would undermine the principles of federation. Even with such a network, there would always be an inherent trust needed for small instances to take part.
Like I say, the best solution is to just accept that internet points don’t really matter.