this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2024
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It hasn't even started yet and somebody is pulling the 'why aren't you just blocking them' shit.
Okay, well, what are your expectations for an (edit: public) online space? What makes blocking unreasonable people an unreasonable option for you?
To be clear, I'm not trying to lay the responsibility exclusively on users here. Trolls and agitators have been around as long as the Internet has. But moderators are volunteers and don't have the bandwidth to diligently police their spaces 100% of the time.
Reputation, whether informed by a voting system or not, has always been an important component of excluding bad behavior in pseudonymous communities. I don't think it is a reasonable expectation that you can participate in a space without spending any effort in keeping it clean for yourself and others (not that I think your position is necessarily that severe.) Reporting bad behavior should be the minimum expectation, and I see the block list as a fallback for when moderation efforts are insufficient or don't align well with the user's expectations.
IMO the problem is not that you can't block them but tooling. It is true that with the appropriate tools and work you can farm the data yourself and get everyone's votes, but realistically most people aren't going to go out of their way to do that. I see no reason why this would make lemmy better and instead just gives ammunition to bad actors. The poster above you is asking why we need to do more things to avoid bad actors as an effect of the change instead of avoiding that outcome. We know there will be bad actors, but we don't need to make things easy for them. Maybe you were never gonna stop the guy willing to make an instance and look through all your votes, but you'd stop all the ones who wouldn't be willing to put in the effort.
I can see the logic in that. I feel like the easier it is for someone to misbehave, the more quickly they'll be weeded out from a community, but I agree that there might be an increase in the effort required by individual users because of something like this.
The fact that downvoting is seen as possible misbehavior is enough for me to be extremely against public votes.