Brought to you by the Department of Erasing History.

  • r3df0x ✡️✝☪️
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    02 years ago

    Reddit also has vote fuzzing where you can get the number of votes, but it’s always manipulated for some reason.

    I don’t understand the point, and tbh it’s a serious case of social media mind fuckery. It’s a real problem for anyone who creates an incredibly specific subreddit for use by a group and then everyone is left wondering who keeps downvoting them. That can have real life consequences for anyone who doesn’t understand what is happening.

    • @kent_eh@lemmy.ca
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      02 years ago

      Reddit also has vote fuzzing where you can get the number of votes, but it’s always manipulated for some reason.

      The stated reason is to prevent abuses like “piling on”.

  • Flying Squid
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    02 years ago

    I was wondering what was going on. The Internet Archive is an incredibly important asset beyond archiving websites because it has things like the Prelinger Collection, which is the largest archive of industrial, educational and other ephemeral films, which would be only accessible via commercial sites like YouTube otherwise.

    And that’s really the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the audio, video and texts available.

    I hope this gets resolved soon.

  • @Snapz@lemmy.world
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    02 years ago

    The attack on the few remaining services that the “every person” openly benefits from is so disheartening.

    Not the save structure for org, but this feeling made be remember The Consumerist in it’s heyday and when it was bought and silenced effectively… you know kids, the internet used to be a thing that actually helped and supported us without the ready acceptance of 51% “hallucinations” in information. It was actual people, in small, quiet corners, that didn’t demand subscriptions and micro transactions at every turn. It wasn’t that long ago.

  • @OpenStars@discuss.online
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    02 years ago

    Who would downvote something like this, without leaving a comment to explain why!?

    Sometimes I wish I could see that info, in rare circumstances like this.

    • @redcalcium@lemmy.institute
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      02 years ago

      Due to how federation works, downvotes are actually somewhat public because instance owners can query them in lemmy database, though instance owners probably won’t tell you if you ask due to privacy reason. If you’re interested in something like this, you can run your own instance.

      • Dark Arc
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        02 years ago

        Yeah, it’s actually … a bit creepy.

        Federated voting in general seems like it could use some rethinking to enable private voting but also to protect against vote manipulation. Right now the fediverse is arguably incredibly vulnerable to vote manipulation campaigns.

        • @fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          02 years ago

          Open (and distributed) and private are two very difficult things to intermingle. You can mitigate some issues, but at the end of the day the two ideas have to butt against each other.

          • Laurel Raven
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            02 years ago

            I hate to suggest it but I wonder if a blockchain would work here

              • Laurel Raven
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                02 years ago

                Yeah, I’d imagine not, though I’m fairly confident any solution to this would be nontrivial

            • capital
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              02 years ago

              What aspect of the points mentioned in the thread do you feel are addressed by blockchain?

              • Laurel Raven
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                2 years ago

                Openly distributed while being private(-ish; I know blockchains aren’t truly private but it could at least obfuscate it adequately against casual or semi serious attempts to identify someone)

                I’ll admit I’m no expert or even particularly well versed in blockchain technologies, but my (limited) understanding of them suggests this might actually be the kind of thing it’s good at (as opposed to how it could seemingly do anything a few years ago and everyone was trying to shoehorn a blockchain into their products)

                And to underline part of my comment, I did say “I wonder if…” rather than asserting that it would work or even that I bet it would work

                • capital
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                  02 years ago

                  Fedi technologies are already distributed. That’s literally what federation is about.

                  Blockchain isn’t private by default although some have gone that direction. Bitcoin, for example, is pseudonymous - all transactions are public to the world though no tx is tied to an identity on chain.

                  Any privacy features you’re imagining can be built for a blockchain solution to this problem could be built into a “normal”, web 2.0, federated solution that would be far less expensive to run, resource-wise.

                  It’s almost always the case that when someone comes up with blockchain as the solution to some problem, they mean distributed or maybe self-hosted. Neither of which requires a blockchain.

                  Check out videos involving crypto on the Cartoon Avatar’s youtube channel such as this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xq721IAqBo&t.

        • r3df0x ✡️✝☪️
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          02 years ago

          I was wondering about this. If they didn’t keep track of who is voting, manipulation would be easier then it already is. The problem is that rogue instance admins could make votes public.

          • Dark Arc
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            02 years ago

            One possible answer is to allow anyone to see votes categorized by instance, so you know where they’re originating from.

            Small/single user instances could be aggregated together/anonymized or maybe that’s just the price you pay for having a single user instance.

    • WalrusDragonOnABike [they/them]
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      02 years ago

      Sometimes people miss-tap while scrolling. Also, on kbin at least, you can who downvote things if they’re on kbin. I think if you run your own instance, as an admin you can see who as well?

      • Dojan
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        02 years ago

        This is definitely something that has to be thought about in terms of UI/UX design. I recently developed a Outlook calendar-esque interface, and we’ve had on-and-off discussions for a couple of hours about how we best implement a way to “click” an empty spot in the calendar to create an event there.

        I’m championing “we don’t on mobile, but use double-click on desktop.” I think I’m winning.

      • @OpenStars@discuss.online
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        2 years ago

        Kbin: Not anymore, at least last I checked. I have an old account there that I left behind due to the enormous amount of technical glitches it kept having, and checking in on it recently (maybe last week?), not one of my comments has even a single downvote there - even older ones. iirc the “reduces” tab was still present, just entirely empty. (I was looking for a particular comment, but then while there noticed the effect was much wider.) Edit: I took another look, and I the only downvotes I see are from kbin itself (example post), so it seems to not be federating downvotes from outside of itself.

        In the past when it did used to work, it also would not show downvotes from instances that it had server-wise defederated with, although someone can still get downvotes from personally blocking an instance, on a Lemmy server running v0.19.3 or greater, that the server itself had not server-wise defederated with. So there was always a very large gap there.

        The reason I thought of this all was due to the OP title: e.g. someone could mass-downvote things on the Fediverse to attempt to control the conversation by de-emphasizing things that they did not personally agree with, but outside of moderator or admin reporting that offers a degree of trust behind it. Obviously that is its intended purpose, but I mean maliciously subverting that like have 10 accounts and log into all of them to influence a post.

        About once a week lately I keep blocking some spammer accounts that randomly shill products or videos throughout the Fediverse, rather than wait for an admin to do it, but if an account(s) was more subtle and merely downvoted, then I doubt such a thing would even be noticed?

        I should add that I respect some people’s decisions if they want to be on a server that doesn’t even record or reveal downvotes - that’s fine bc it’s their choice. But otherwise it is basically public knowledge, except as you say you need to fire up an instance of your own to view them, and then protect that instance from intrusion efforts even if you use it for nothing else (or possibly there is some API call, but I doubt that knowledge would be so easy to find, and for one thing it would have to access a database that has sent out past updates, not merely listen for new ones unless it had been running prior to the downvote event).

        Anyway, I hoped people would see this post, and it seems that is happening, so this time the downvotes did not detail any conversation about the topic (with many tens-fold greater up- than down-votes), but if there had been sufficient number of downvotes delivered quickly enough… then how many of us would have even seen this, sorting Subscribed or All by Hot? So it points to a liability in the Fediverse, which at some point, someone somewhere is going to exploit.

      • Melkath
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        02 years ago

        I didn’t know know you could see who voted on kbin.

        I just knew lemmy, mbin, and some others don’t get counted, so the troll down boats don’t matter.

        • WalrusDragonOnABike [they/them]
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          2 years ago

          If you click “more” and then “activity”, its listed in the “reduces” tab. Kbin only includes kbin downvotes though, which is why downvotes look so rare on kbin.

      • GreatAlbatross
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        02 years ago

        Admins that access the post through their instance can currently see the votes.

        Someone explained it to me that a lot of the downvoting is people browsing all, then getting annoyed and downvoting when they see things they’re not interested in :|

        • @atrielienz@lemmy.world
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          02 years ago

          Which doesn’t make sense on Lemmy because it’s not algorithm based. But is probably a muscle memory reaction from using Reddit or similar.

          • @Dave@lemmy.nz
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            02 years ago

            Lemmy has algorithms, it’s just that they aren’t designed to maximise profit.

            If you have the sort type set to Hot, posts are ranked based on score (upvotes minus down votes) with a decay based on post time. Active is the same but based on the last comment time.

            If you are on the website, there is a ? next to the sort option that will take you to a page explaining how the different options work.

            But long story short, most sorting options are affected by down votes.

  • @elliot_crane@lemmy.world
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    02 years ago

    I was briefly able to get to https://archive.org/donate - I’m going to kick them a few bucks and recommend anyone else who can afford to also do so.

    There’s also this, copied verbatim from the site:

    Other ways to donate Mail your donation to:
Internet Archive
C/O Philanthropy Department
300 Funston Avenue
San Francisco, CA  94118-2116

    In order to ensure you receive an acknowledgement of your gift as quickly as possible, please include an email address with your mailed donation. We regret that we cannot accept cash or check donations in currencies other than USD.

    Stock or Wire Transfer:
If you would like to make a stock or wire transfer gift, please contact us at donations@archive.org

    I say we go full Streisand effect on whatever dickhead is trying to censor them.

    • LeadersAtWork
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      02 years ago

      @dogsnest Thanks for the heads up.

      OP thanks for posting this.

      Donated what little I could. Free access to information is absolutely one of the most important things we as a collective can support.

      • @Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world
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        02 years ago

        As someone who doesn’t have head above water, and has no financial room to donate even a penny, I feel bad. But I can at least thank YOU for donating. So thanks!

        • KillingTimeItself
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          02 years ago

          the best thing you can do is to spread word and knowledge.

          There are likely other people out there that don’t already know of the utility of IA.

        • @realbadat@programming.dev
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          02 years ago

          Nobody (worth caring about) would look down on you for not being in a situation to donate.

          Besides, there are lots of ways to help that don’t cost money, like telling people who do have money that they can donate to the internet archive. Equally valid effort.

    • @Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world
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      02 years ago

      What I like about Lemmy is, I can see not only score, but also up AND downvotes. On reddit, I can see the score. On Lemmy, If I see you have a score 7, I can also see you have 10 upvotes and 3 downvotes. 10-3=7, and I can get a better idea if a comment is controversial, or popular.

      Your post, that I’m replying to has 69 (nice) upvotes, and zero downvotes. THIS IS HOW IT MUST STAY!!!

      • @Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world
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        02 years ago

        …did I just find a time traveler from the 1950s??? It’s been pretty well established since the 1970s that the government CONSTANTLY lies and witholds information. Or did we ever find those WMDs in iraq? And maybe Carter was the one who freed the hostages? And maybe Reagan wasn’t selling weapons to banned countries? Whats a watergate? It sure would be crazy to get a blowjob in the white house,. Too bad nobody ever has, or ever will. Hell, even during the opening stages of covid, until Biden got elected, trump was trying to say covid was a hoax that would be gone by April. Then May. Then it didn’t matter. Then it was a hoax, until Biden was elected.

        • @ripcord@lemmy.world
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          2 years ago

          And THEY are attacking the IA to prevent it…? Otherwise what does it have to do with anything here?

    • @General_Effort@lemmy.world
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      02 years ago

      I doubt this has to do with “powerful people”. A DDOS attack does not remove anything from the net, but only makes it temporarily hard to reach.

      There are firms that specialize in suppressing information on the net. They use SEO tricks to get sites down-ranked, as well as (potentially fraudulent) copyright and GDPR request.

      There must be any number of “little guys” who hate the Internet Archive. They scrape copyrighted stuff and personal data “without consent” and even disregard robots.txt. Lemmy is full of people who think that people should go to jail for that sort of thing.

      • @stillitcomes@lemm.ee
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        02 years ago

        Oh that’s true. I’ve seen a lot of cancel/call-out documents archived on IA, some of which were directed at children or had false accusations on them. It would be funny but not that surprising if all of this was over obscure Twitter drama.

        • r3df0x ✡️✝☪️
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          02 years ago

          That’s one of the problems with archiving everything. I lean in favor of the IA, but there are still issues.

  • @anticurrent@sh.itjust.works
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    02 years ago

    I very rarely go to the internet archive, but the moment I needed to get a safe copy of very old software, shitty people decided to DDOS it. shitty humans. find better hobbies losers