Comment on Why do .ml users get a bad rep?

• marx@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  I’ve enjoyed piefed a lot so far. I think it’s a good choice.

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  • AmazingWizard@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    The thing that is funny about Piefed vs. Lemmy is the level of authoritative control the admin has over what you see and whether votes count or not. Specifically, they can open each instance connected with them and add a vote weight to the instance. So if they didn’t like ML, instead of blocking the instance, you can set the weight to 0, and then those users would have no idea that their votes do not contribute to a rank at all. You can take an individual user and set their account to ban comments, ban posts, or both, which effectively shadow bans a user. If they’re remote, the comments, or posts never arrive at the piefed instance. None of this is visible to the end user, by the way, no alerts that this is happening to your account. You can be kicked from a community by moderators, an action that you will not even know is happening to you.

    It leaves you to wonder how much of what you’re seeing is an accurate tally of votes and score. It seems driven purely to keep out opposing perspectives and stifle thought. None of these “tanky” instances have this level of user and content manipulation at their disposal. The Admin of a piefed instance can shape the feed silently, and without users even knowing it is happening, through the use of vote weights. Which is a pretty nasty feature if I’m being honest. One of the things people assumed was happening on Reddit was that the feed wasn’t an honest representation of user activity, that the feed itself was ideologically bias (one way or the other), and yet piefed explicitly gives you those tools.

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    • rimu@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      I have just added code which makes the instance vote weight visible in the UI - https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/commit/04b54e25f44f54420c247152323c90c4a3360a02

      You can go to https://piefed.social/instances and check the vote weight of any instance. It’ll be very boring tho because they’re all set to “Votes are weighted at the normal level.” Yes, even lemmy.ml.

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    • Skavau@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      The thing that is funny about Piefed vs. Lemmy is the level of authoritarian control the admin has over what you see and whether votes count or not. Specifically, they can open each instance connected with them and add a vote weight to the instance. So if they didn’t like ML, instead of blocking the instance, you can set the weight to 0, and then those users would have no idea that their votes do not contribute to a rank at all.

      Are any Piefed instances doing any of this right now?

      You can take an individual user and set their account to ban comments, ban posts, or both, which effectively shadow bans a user. If they’re remote, the comments, or posts never arrive at the piefed instance. None of this is visible to the end user, by the way, no alerts that this is happening to your account.

      I’m not aware of this.

      You can be kicked from a community by moderators, an action that you will not even know is happening to you.

      When you say “moderators” do you mean admins here or community moderators?

      The Admin of a piefed instance can shape the feed silently, and without users even knowing it is happening, through the use of vote weights. Which is a pretty nasty feature if I’m being honest. One of the things people assumed was happening on Reddit was that the feed wasn’t an honest representation of user activity, that the feed itself was ideologically bias (one way or the other), and yet piefed explicitly gives you those tools.

      I can see a valid use-case for smaller instances that might want to elevate their own communities within their own local feeds. I think it would be pretty poor if any larger instance used this tool, but I am sure that all of these toggles can display publicly - so users on an instance would know if their experience is being gamed or curated by the admins of a local instance.

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