Along with demands for Congress to display their willingness to suck it, and shaming those that didn’t.

Same. The matching fancy side collects dust. The silly side gets used til things break.

Not necessarily puppet accounts, just brigading in general.

It’s the rationale many instances used to defederate hexbear. (Even though iirc hexbear disables downvotes, so they’re defederated for users mass posting, usually that hogshit image, instead of mass voting.) It wasn’t puppets or bot accounts at any rate.

But then there’s repost communities where users share comments (especially in places they or their audience is banned from) or DMs for a group response.

Not to mention the whole ‘block and downvote all .ml on sight’ mentality. But hopefully that might be something this tool could catch.

I guess I approach it inversely. I encounter what looks like a troll post and I’ll only check profiles when either I am interacting with them, or there’s such deep downvoting already I’m just doing a morbid dive into someone’s history.

Most of the time though the user just has a deeply downvoted argument but otherwise normal and/or low engagement posts, so they wouldn’t be flagged by this.

So I understand that it can save some time with some niche cases.

But I can’t help but note that the system seems intentionally blind to targeted harassment, which can be a source, if not cause, of bad faith accounts. (And likely those need different approaches since those are also niche cases themselves.)

And maybe it’s all just because of my instance’s Local feed, so that’s what I see as a prominent problem on Lemmy.

That’s an interesting example of a user this is designed for/around.

The general system of up/downvotes seems to be doing its job quite as intended: their views appear routinely unpopular and there’s a seemingly pretty strong community consensus around that.

It looks like their threads have comments that solidly and clearly refute the garbage manosphere stuff. For some people it’s the opportunity to express a refutation of it publicly and directly. The public viewer gets to read those responses too.

So with that example: what do the flags do that the content of their posts don’t already communicate?

Are you saying that because they would get more upvotes, they could offset the downvotes they receive? Potentially, but this is where the second metric comes in (giving a lot of downvotes), and as we said, the two are almost always present at the same time.

Right, though it’s a mitigating factor. I guess there’s something I don’t know about piefed: Lemmy comments all have a default upvote from the user that makes it. But it can be revoked by the user. Does Piefed work the same way? My thought only applies if that’s the case.

giving a lot of downvotes is usually a sign of toxicity

Emphasis mine. When is it not a sign of toxicity? Rules are defined by their exceptions, so I am curious as to how this exception is navigated, if at all?

Essentially someone who posts with high frequency has a capacity to issue more downvotes without compromising this admittedly imperfect tool.

Now I was never really a reddit user, but the problematic karma farming of accounts associated with that place was directly linked to these kinds of tools and metrics, no?

I have felt there needed to be a specific type of vote available only to the original poster and to the users individual reply.

An up/downvote from the OP or the user I responded to I think should be differentiated from another user who isn’t either.

If the OP or commentator votes that should be noted alongside the X number of random votes. It isn’t an anonymous vote, but those votes would be public acknowledgements tied to the user making the public post/comment.

Forgetting all about Thirteen Monkeys.

That’s kind of why I like the casino model. Local tribes put here have been buying their land back bit by bit and the casino goers gladly shovel money at them.

I just wish we could rope corporate entities into it. Imagine if casino losses could be a corporate tax writeoff. C-suites would be stumbling onto the floor with the company cards. The overnight wealth distribution would be staggering.

current_user.reputation -= 1

So what exactly is going on there?