Does Lemmy have any moderation tools for dealing with users that always vote down posts because they disagree with a community?
For want of a hypothetical example, say someone created a community dedicated to pineapple on pizza. What’s to stop people who strongly disagree with pineapple on pizza to subscribing, and voting down every post?
Yes we do. Community mods and instance admins can view votes on any comment or post to try to cut down on this. Downvote spammers are currently one of the biggest problems on the fediverse.
is the hexbear solution viable for the whole thing?
You mean allowlist federation? Depends on who you’re federated with. If you’re federated with any larger server it’s still going to be an issue.
I added a site setting to reject federated votes that’ll be in the next release.
I think they meant disabling downvotes altogether.
Ah, yep that’d do it.
It is only a partial solution imo, I had downvoted disabled on vegan theory club but people would still downvote the posts and it would federate to all the other servers except mine and I couldn’t moderate it. We were targeted by shut ins and the threads looked bad on other instances and I couldn’t see or ban the users lol. I guess rejecting federated votes would help but then there would be no federated upvotes either.
I split them out into 4 options: post, comment, upvote and downvotes
yeah i meant just killing downvotes by default
Anyone can see who votes on what.
No they can’t, only admins or mods.
Lemvotes.com
We block that spying tool, so it doesn’t work on lemmy.ml . See here.
Security via obscurity🙄
See the linked thread.
I did! Most of the arguments against basically boil down to ‘make it harder for the average user to do this’. In addition to the unequal access to information, sites like lemvote demonstrate how easy it will be for the average user to bypass the imaginary technical barrier. Sure, you may block it now, but as the Threadiverse grows so will the number of sites and such that do so. Even a browser extension ala RES. Even without the whack-a-mole issue, it’s only a matter of time before somebody sets up such an utility for public access with an obfuscated instance that can’t be easily blocked.
Once a moderator has viewed the votes, and identified a downvote spammer, what happens next? Is it possible to ban a user from a community just for downvote spamming?
Yes, you can give a reason when you ban a user yes.