booly @ booly @sh.itjust.works

Posts

2

Comments

492

Joined

2 yr. ago

Reddit does have vote manipulation, but reddit admins can easily see much stronger indicators of the same person behind multiple user accounts: Server logs of user agent, IP address, interface/API key, script support and activity that tends to give away browser type and history, etc.

Most of that information is only available to instance admins, so admins of one instance can't see when external votes are coming in from the same users who already voted using accounts on your instance.

What's the mechanism by which an admin would be able to tell if one user voted more than once on the same post? Instance admins can't see the votes of the accounts on other instances.

Fundamentally, though, how can it be stopped? The two instance administrators can only see part of what's happening, and can't directly determine that the votes are coming from two alts of the same user. Maybe over enough times, the patterns can be guessed at with heuristics, but this kind of vote manipulation is going to be a problem for federated communities. Especially if we don't get better moderation tools developed.

At the highest quality setting, the iPhone 14 Pro captures video footage that is 6 GB per minute. At USB 2.0 speeds, files can be transferred at around 3.6 GB per minute. Typical wifi direct/Airdrop speeds are about 3-5 GB per minute. And thunderbolt speeds are 100 times faster, at 5 GB/s or 300 GB/minute.

For some purposes that USB 2.0 speed would be a significant bottleneck. It's up to the buyer to decide whether those use cases are likely.

Oh come on you don’t actually believe we should structure the entire system around such a minority use case

Minority use case? I'm talking about how downvotes are useful for communities to enforce their own norms, or ensure that erroneous information is excluded. Someone who insists on a proof that the angles of a triangle add up to more than 180º is probably going to get downvoted, especially if he's being an asshole about it. Same with someone who insists that the common cold is caused by exposure to cold air, or that the earth is flat.

Or there are broad consensus beliefs about what is or isn't off topic for a discussion, what types of insults break the forum rules on civility, etc. When a community largely agrees that someone is being an asshole for using racial slurs, downvotes quickly sort that out. In other words, toxicity can get filtered out through the downvote/hide mechanism, as well.

Even for beliefs that are simply matters of opinion/taste/preference, the community can decide what's actually up for debate and what's not, within that space. A forum dedicated to fans of Real Madrid doesn't have to tolerate trolls coming in and saying "Real Madrid sucks" or "lol soccer is a stupid sport you Europeans are so stupid" or "sports are dumb." Same with a vegan forum downvoting someone's brisket recipe (or a BBQ forum downvoting a "meat is murder" manifesto). These "echo chambers" are just how people organize with people who share their interests, and it's weird not to be able to see that there's value in those communities.

So yeah, I think that you have a problem with people's desire to organize into groups of similar interests, not with the actual mechanism by which those groups enforce those norms. It wouldn't be any better with a mod-enforced echo chamber, either.

Agreeing with the dominant mentality is rewarded.

And I'm saying that some communities have a "dominant mentality" that's pretty obviously correct. The only thing worse than a person who says "just because it's popular doesn't mean it's right" is the person who swings the pendulum too far in the other direction of saying "it's unpopular so it must be right."

All this does is bury comments regardless of quality

But if downvotes (and upvotes) are well correlated with quality, then what's the problem? Your complaints are about community culture around downvotes, not about the mechanism itself.

I'd love to see a system where votes can be correlated between users so that the ranking algorithm weights like-minded voters and deemphasizes those voters you disagree with, but that would probably create a pretty significant overhead for the service.

It is functionally a “I don’t like this” or “I’m right” button.

Sometimes comments are just wrong, and detract from the community. Downvotes (plus an interface that hides negative voted comments) clean things up without need for formal moderation.

Whatever can be said about downvotes (an automated system for marking one's disapproval) is probably true of reporting (a human reviewed system for marking one's extreme disapproval), too.

Well it's obvious that Musk wants X to be a bank, so this isn't unexpected.

Notice that your comment is framed from the perspective of what Libertarians believe, and analyzing from that context. Mine is different: analyzing a specific type of personality common in tech careers, and analyzing why that type of person tends to be much more receptive to libertarian ideas.

I'm familiar with libertarianism and its various schools/movements within that broader category. And I still think that many in that group tend to underappreciate issues of public choice, group behaviors, and how they differ from individual choice.

Coase's famous paper, the Theory of the Firm, tries to bridge some of that tension, but it's also just not hard to see how human association into groups lays on a spectrum of voluntariness, with many more social situations being more coercive than Libertarians tend to appreciate, and then also layering Coase's observations about the efficiencies of association onto involuntary associations, too.

Then at that point you have a discussion about public choice theory, what the group owes to defectors or minority views or free riders within its group, what a group owes to others outside that group in terms of externalities, how to build a coalition within that framework of group choice, and then your nuanced position might have started as libertarianism but ends up looking a lot like mainstream political, social, and economic views, to the point where the libertarian label isn't that useful.

I think technical-minded people tend to gravitate towards libertarian ideologies because they tend to underestimate the importance of human relationships to large scale systems. You can see it in the stereotype of the lone programmer who dislikes commenting or documentation, collaboration with other programmers, and strongly negative views towards their own project managers or their company's executives. They also tend to have a negative view of customers/users, and don't really believe in spending too much time in user interfaces/experiences. They have a natural skepticism of interdependence, because that brings on extra social overhead they don't particularly believe they need. So they tend to view the legal, political, and social world through that same lens, as well.

I think the modern world of software engineering has moved in a direction away from that, as code complexity has grown to the point where maintainability/documentation and collaborative processes have obvious benefit, visible up front, but you still see streaks of that in some personalities. And, as many age, they have some firsthand experience with projects that were technically brilliant but doomed due to financial/business reasons, or even social/regulatory reasons. The maturation of technical academic disciplines relating to design, user experience, architecture, maintainability, and security puts that "overhead" in a place that's more immediate, so that they're more likely to understand that the interdependence is part of the environment they must operate in.

A lot of these technical minded people then see the two-party system as a struggle between MBAs and Ph.Ds, neither of whom they actually like, and prefer that problems be addressed organically at the lowest possible level with the simplest, most elegant rules. I have some disagreements with the typical libertarians on what weight should be assigned to social consensus, political/economic feasibility, and elegant simplicity in policymaking, but I think I get where most of them are coming from.

It's not a negligible difference. The race results for that specific race are correlated with temperature during the race. The horses naturally hold back on their speed when it's hot out, to prevent running to exhaustion. This is borne out by statistical results comparing speeds for horse races generally, not just the human versus horse race.

Note that horses generally are much faster than humans, even over distance, so the trend lines wouldn't cross unless very hot, to where it would literally be dangerous for either species to be running.

Human V Horse race in Wales

When it's hot out, the human wins. When it's cold/cool, humans can't stand a chance against the horses. Similarly, wolves and dogs can easily outrun humans in the cold, but lose to humans when it's hot.

That's because the biggest comparative advantage that humans have is actually thermal management while running, not the act of running itself.

Humans sweat. This means we can actually perform intense exercise even in heat, without overheating as easily as most other animals. Most quadruped mammals pant to cool, and have their breaths tied to their steps while running, so they can't cool themselves efficiently while on the move. Persistence hunting doesn't tire out prey, but actually overheats the prey to where they can't run any further.

Throw in the fact that we can throw, handle weapons while running, climb shit, talk, invent things, etc., and we really have been a deadly species for long before industrialization.