I’ve not studied the ActivityPub protocol much, and certainly not examined the voting API. My question for those who have:
Is it possible or easy for a platform to suppress downvotes from users who have not first satisfied either of these preconditions:
- created a comment in the thread being downvoted; OR
- upvoted a comment in the thread being downvoted
?
And perhaps more complex, cancel the downvotes of cheaters who would circumvent the above policy by making a temporary dummy comment, downvoting, then deleting the dummy.
Voting is a shit-show on Lemmy. I wonder to what extent the ActivityPub API is the culprit or if it’s an implementation specific problem.
Why do people fear downvotes so much? Let people add their votes to whatever is in their feeds.
If you don’t like the downvotes, you can use a sorting algorithm that ignores them. Otherwise, they are a general indicator of how people feel about content on Lemmy, and that’s not entirely useless data
It’s questionable as it is that being banned from a community means you can’t vote on the content at an instance level.