- I am not saying you shouldn’t shame people for their voting choice as a demonstration of lack of critical thought or moral compass. You should.
- I am not saying that all the political parties are equally guilty. I am obviously talking about Trump as the much greater evil of the available evils.
- I am not saying that votes never count or have impact. They sometimes do.
All I really want to say is that blaming your friends and family for the election outcome is misguided and probably serves to benefit the political machine in its current form more than it serves to affect voter choice.
I exceeded the character threshold, so here is a part 2, if it’s not too annoying to have this long of a response. Definitely read the other one first though.
There are also indicator labels applied to user accounts, to distinguish between e.g. brand-new vs. established accounts, who may be unfamiliar with the way things work. There are already labels on Lemmy though iirc solely for yes-I-am-a-bot vs. not, whereas PieFed is extending that much further to include suspected bots, suspected trolls, etc. e.g. if someone receives more downvotes than upvotes, or especially like a week-old account whose sole claim to karma is 10 downvotes total, that account absolutely gets labeled. Now mind you, it’s merely a label - not a “ban” or anything - and it’s possible to come back from such.
Again, it’s up to the individual users what to do with these labels - ignore them? Remove them entirely from their display? Filter content using them, so as to avoid wasting their time? The latter would be someone who would likely downvote the content in any case, so perhaps it’s better for both parties involved that they can simply filter it out. In short, good fences make good neighbors, especially among the most judgemental people who rush to such without thinking.
You can read more about it here: https://join.piefed.social/2024/06/22/piefed-features-for-growing-healthy-communities/.
Now maybe in the future these indicator labels will go further and be used by instance admins or community mods to render judgements. But that isn’t even possible now (yet), and someone can always spin up their own instance regardless, or as PieFed and Mbin (well, rather Kbin) did, even make their own entire implementation of the ActivityPub protocol. And on those instances, they could go back to the human moderation model, with appropriate tools provided to make that happen - if someone will put forth the effort to make those ofc. In short, we can do whatever we want, but so too can others. But anyway, for now they are merely labels, and some Lemmy apps already do similarly (e.g. put a label next to “new accounts”), which seems quite helpful to proffer that additional information in case it helps guide someone to how they want to position themselves based on users’ measured “reputation” - which people do irl anyway.
I would worry more then about vote manipulation at that point: would corporate types spin up their own instance and make a bunch of bots that would downvote every post or comment that negatively mentions their product? If we had a large enough userbase, then they would be remiss in their profit-seeking strategies if they did not. There are definitely things to worry about for the future, but there’s little point planning an endgame for Lemmy when it looks as though it will literally never reach mainstream like Mastodon has. We can either accept that, or work to change it.