Quick random thoughts about Lemmy's voting model

Related to recent events:

So Lemmy, for some reason, just copied Reddit's whole model wholesale, which honestly isn't the best. Reddit was a neat design and had the advantage of scalability, but the clever people at Reddit either got driven into the background by the chodes or hounded completely out of existence by the feds, and it stagnated after initially being a successful nice place to converse.

There are better models to draw from. Slashdot was way bigger than Lemmy, and the system was that votes were given out in tiny batches of a handful of votes, randomly, maybe once every couple of months to each one of a big population of active users. Not everyone could vote, and no one could vote on any kind of big scale or control when they had input. The votes on comments on any given post would be determined by a couple dozen randomly selected users, not just whoever felt like being most vocal. That meant the votes on any given comment would generally range from +5 to -2 (they were actually capped to that range), and almost all the comments just sat at 1 (or 2 if you were an established user, I think, or 0 if you were algorithmically determined to be a dickhead a lot of the time). There would be a few +5 comments in the big posts, and it was fine, they were usually worth listening to. Anyway, the point is that they put some thought into how to prevent people from just making 100 accounts and spamming votes, and how to surface good content in a way that couldn't be gamed very easily. There were roles equivalent to "moderators" on Lemmy/Reddit, but they were very rarely used, because the impact of votes was just a lot better managed and so mods weren't needed nearly as much.

Lemmy / Reddit's solution to all of this is to give out unlimited votes to every single free-to-create account, and then put it on the shoulders of the mods and admins to realize when someone's abusing the system in obvious ways, and also trust that those people will never be clever enough to conceal it from the admins (which they will be able to if they are clever). Also there will be some collateral damage in terms of people getting punished for downvoting a dozen of someone's comments one day which arguably they should be allowed to do.

Basically what I'm saying is, there are fundamental problems with the ease of account creation and then letting people make inputs to the whole system that can be friendly or malicious from their free accounts, and then after the fact making all the admins play whack-a-mole with anyone who wants to abuse the system. It's not sustainable. It also causes a lot of drama while the admins are (very valiantly, don't get me wrong) making the attempt.

Another good system that is generally very well regarded is Something Awful. An account costs cash money, a one-time $10 fee I think, and if you're a douchebag to a sufficient level you can get your account permabanned and then of course just like Lemmy there is no way to prevent you from making another one, but you're out ten bucks. That seems to work very well; the SA forums generally are known to have very lively discussion but it stays generally on the rails. They're also extremely strict about some things that I really wish the Lemmy mods would be more strict about: For example, if in order to keep an argument going you start pretending someone else in the argument is saying something that they aren't saying, just so you can scream at them and into the void about this thing you're pretending they're saying, you get banned. It's wonderful. That's one of my least favorite things that a certain Lemmy contingent loves to do. I think it's generally a temp ban when you do it on SA, you're not out your $10, but it's not just an encouraged and protected and celebrated thing like it is on Lemmy. (I actually have been playing with the idea of making a politics forum on Lemmy that works that way, my only hesitation is that (a) it sounds like work (b) Lemmy already has a sufficiency of politics forums.)

Anyway, I don't think any of this is realistic to do on Lemmy. It seems like we're pretty much set on what the system is, objectively bad though it is. I'm just throwing out ideas for whatever the next thing is, and for people to keep in mind when they're dealing with any of the inevitable drama that's associated with the current system.

(Oh, also making people put in their emails when they sign up for a Lemmy account isn't much more than a speed bump to someone who wants to abuse things. It doesn't stop anyone who has even the vaguest motivation to try to fake up a bunch of new accounts (because making new emails takes seconds), but it does stop someone who wants to have solid privacy and anonymity when they're using Lemmy (because making new emails that are totally divorced from your identity if some agency really wants to come after you is actually a little difficult.))

That's all I got, cheers mate