PSA: Lemmy votes can be manipulated
The best part of the fediverse is that anyone can run their own server. The downside of this is that anyone can easily create hordes of fake accounts, as I will now demonstrate.
Fighting fake accounts is hard and most implementations do not currently have an effective way of filtering out fake accounts. I'm sure that the developers will step in if this becomes a bigger problem. Until then, remember that votes are just a number.
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How else would you rank the content?
You don’t. Ranked content is a solution for owners of social media platforms to avoid paying moderators. It’s a no brainer if you want a cheap automatic advertising platform but isn’t great and requires constant intervention if you’re not monetizing somehow.
Getting rid of voting would do nothing to combat spam. There would be plenty of other ways communities could (and would) get spammed, not to mention how impossible interacting with and navigating communities with thousands of users would be even without the spam that would absolutely happen without content ranking.
Spam will happen on large platforms, and thankfully ActivityPub gives instances the ability to defederate/federate however they like to deal with problem instances. Personally, if Lemmy were to get rid of voting, there is no chance that I would use Lemmy whatsoever, and I feel pretty confident that most users wouldn't either.
If we could run microcommunities with single mods, that lock when we sleep and are invite only to post or comment, it'd be a pretty fun experiment. I could invite a dozen interesting people and we could just slowly chat away, id ban em if they break the simple rules and delete their post/comments. Anyone would be able to view it, like a blog and if they want to comment they can always make their own post for comments in their own microcommunity. You could be subscribed to stuff you actually care about, although it'd take a while. Some people could make content copy microcoms where they just solo post from reddit or whatever.
You’re commenting in a thread about vote spam. How can there be vote spam without votes?
If you’re worried about content spam why not look to the uhh 40 years of solutions to that problem.