1. It would be extraordinarily easy to bot it and just silence anyone you want.
  2. I agree, moderation is absolutely necessary to maintaine civil discussion, but silencing people, because they have unpopular opinions, is a really bad idea.
  3. I love lemmy because it is the ultimate embodiment of decentralised free speech. This destroys that.
  4. If I were a bad actor, hypothetically, let’s just say lammy.ml or haxbear and I decided I wanted to silence anyone who disagrees with what I have to say. Then I could just make a fork of this project to only value my instances votes and censor anyone who doesn’t agree with what my community thinks.
  5. This tool simply acts as a force multiplier for those who want to use censorship as a tool for mass silencing of descent.

Yes, I’ve read the Q&A, But I can simply think of more ways to abuse this bot for bad than it can be used for good.

  • 🇦🇺𝕄𝕦𝕟𝕥𝕖𝕕𝕔𝕣𝕠𝕔𝕕𝕚𝕝𝕖@lemm.eeOPEnglish
    0·
    5 months ago

    You can try. Make a bunch of accounts on one of those instances that doesn’t police their signups very well, downvote everything I’ve ever done with all of those accounts, and see if I get banned. I think it’s more difficult to accomplish this than you think.

    challenge accepted!

    I got some questions tho:

    • Do instances have rankings or are all users considered equall? i see issues with both cases.
    • Are all upvotes equall?
    • how does instances with disabled downvotes work?
    • what about single direction federation?
    • can u give me some number on the effectivness of upvotes per account downvoting on a user.

    My contraversial opinions got me banned by the bot and unbanned recently i assume due to tuning of some parameters of something.

    I saw that post i think it will definatly help alleviate some of the concerns. Open sourcing it sounds like a good idea till u realise anyone can then use it to purposely be malicious so thats an even worse idea its a complex issue that thankfully i dont gotta solve.

    I do t see how its a privacy violation all the raw votes are public anyways i guess its just ur bots judgements that are private. Ur welcome to post my results publicly since its all open anyways.

    I mean u can always anonimise the data use a cheap locally hosted ai to paraphrase/extract the relevent points from the text and hash + salt usernames etc.

    I will try it if i can get away with using my own instance then creating accounts on an industrial scale is easily doable. Thx for the info do instances have ranking or can i manufacture heigh ranked accounts on a single instance (even if i cant doing it across many instances is just a matter of purchasing a hacked account list.

    Im greatfull for you licence to develop a system designed to try abuse ur bot. As long as i dont get defederated it should be doable without resorting to illegal practice’s (buying stolen accounts etc).

    I can print about 1k upvotes per 5minutes with 200accounts each account will have about 1/200th that many votes per 5minutes (rank building). Is this pace significant enough to influence ur algorithm?

    Currently just proof of concept on my own server (although it is federated). Can easily be defederated to block this but thats only cos i dont wanna be botting someone elses server. Accounts are created with significantly real enough data to feed to an llm/image generator to make them indistinguishable from real account activity to farm votes for rankings or disseminate propaganda or whatever.

    • auk@slrpnk.netM
      01·
      5 months ago

      My contraversial opinions got me banned by the bot and unbanned recently i assume due to tuning of some parameters of something.

      You are banned again, and have been for a couple of weeks. You accrued a lot of negative rank from the “is (blank) a slur” comments section, but not enough to ban initially. I think generally, you’re near the borderline, which is why you drift into getting banned from time to time, as you did when some of your earlier participation aged out of the 30-day window, and it became chiefly that one comments section to go on. I think at the present time, it’s mostly that you do not have much participation, outside of that one thread, and so the negative rank from that thread is pushing you over into getting banned.

      As with almost everyone who gets banned, it’s not your opinions that are the issue. It’s your delivery. Here’s an example that worked very much against you:

      Is the n word a slur if it isn’t directed at black people or the f word?

      Can a black person call themselves an nword tho? Or are you going yo tell them what they can and cant do like the old days?

      That has nothing to do with the topic at hand. It’s just inflammatory for no reason. You didn’t answer the question or acknowledge the point that the other person was making. You just tried to continue and inflame the bickering.

      You could have posted a calm and reasoned attempt to make the exact same point you were making, acknowledging the question and feeling confident enough in your point of view that you were willing to have it probed and challenged. Instead you opted to ignore the comment, and make a counterpoint while dismissing the question.

      Like it says in the FAQ, most of Lemmy is highly tolerant of a wide range of points of view. Like most people, though, they will disapprove across the board of someone who is both unpopular and hostile and argumentative about their unpopular opinion. You can get away with one or the other, but not both.