First I must say I’m impressed by the post editor.

One problem with Reddit is the ability for bots and people to censor or harass/stalk and manipulate what appears as popular. All they need to is to upvote or downvote based on the name of the poster.

This leads to problems such as original good content posted being downvoted but reposts being upvoted. Because of people who do not like your opinion stalking you.

I think I have a very good idea for how to prevent this.

If a posters name could be hidden for a day or more than it would not be possible for users to simply downvote or upvote a post based on the posters name. That would make post manipulation much more difficult.

It would increase the probability a lot that the votes are not simply based on the name of the poster.

I suggested this to reddit years ago, but they ignored it.

I think lemmy could really gain tracktion if it protected users from vote manipulation more than reddit.

I also do think that it is a serious concern that anyone can see a users post and comment history. Even though this work both ways. It can also help people detect trolls by looking at the users previous posts.

So hiding the post history perhaps ought to be limited somehow.

If possible I’m willing to support the development a little of those features. Especially the first.

  • BforBrian
    1·
    4 years ago

    I like this. I’ve made a post on Reddit with a question, not taking a political stance. 2 or 3 people scrolled through my profile and tried to personally attack me. I’m not a snowflake so it didn’t work of course but still, they tried.

    I think it’s pathetic that people do that, but they do. So yeah, I support this suggestion. :)

  • Kinetix
    1·
    4 years ago

    Have you made the feature suggestions as issues on github?

    I think your 2nd item regarding user post & comment history could potentially be a user-settable feature, but probably shouldn’t be forced across the board unless it’s how an admin wanted to run their instance.

    I completely understand what you’re trying to accomplish with your first suggestion, and I agree with the premise of it, but I think it would be a pretty odd and very obviously artificial user experience to have for everyone who behaves like a decent human being, and could feel punitive to them to not know who posted what in that initial time frame.

    I personally think a better way to manage that would be to have an admin feature built that detects and reports on that to instance owners (I think managing this is probably complicated a bit due to federation). If lemmy could track suspicious voting patterns over a short period of time and report to admins what it thinks might be suspicious (user123 has downvoted every one of userXyX’s posts this week), then an admin to evaluate and hopefully have a feature for taking action. Maybe a vote manipulator’s votes get nullified for a period of time, and the user gets a warning. Maybe the user gets banned from an instance. Maybe the user is simply sent a warning message and given a chance to rectify their behaviour.

    I think it’s probably a pretty advanced admin feature, but I think dealing with the problem rather than messing with the user experience would be how I’d like to see that feature go.

    However, like I say, I think the best path to get things going in any direction (or to at least have the request tracked) is to file an issue on github.