(the whole fediverse) Mechanism lacking to tag shitty links and sites

A vast majority of the fediverse (particularly the threadiverse) is populated by people who have no sense of infosec or privacy, who run stock browsers over clearnet (e.g. users, the AOL users of today). They have a different reality than street wise people. They post a link to a page that renders fine in the world they see and they are totally oblivious to the fact that they are sending the rest of the fediverse into an exclusive walled garden.

There is no practical way for street wise audiences to signal “this article is exclusive/shitty/paywalled/etc”. Voting is too blunt of an instrument and does not convey the problem. Writing a comment “this article is unreachable/discriminatory because it is hosted in a shitty place” is high effort and overly verbose.

the fix

The status quo:

  • (👍/👎) ← no meaning.. different people vote on their own invented basis for voting

We need refined categorised voting. e.g.

  • linked content is interesting and civil (👍/👎)
  • body content is interesting and civil (👍/👎)
  • linked article is reachable & inclusive (👎)¹
  • linked is garbage free (no ads, popups, CAPTCHA, cookie walls, etc) (👍/👎)

¹ Indeed a thumbs up is not useful on inclusiveness because we know every webpage is reachable to someone or some group and likely a majority. Only the count of people excluded is worth having because we would not want to convey the idea that a high number of people being able to reach a site in any way justifies marginalization of others. It should just be a raw count of people who are excluded. A server can work out from the other 3 voting categories the extent by which others can access a page.

From there, how the votes are used can evolve. A client can be configured to not show an egalitarian user exclusive articles. An author at least becomes aware that a site is not good from a digital rights standpoint, and can dig further if they want.

update

The fix needs to expand. We need a mechanism for people to suggest alternative replacement links, and those links should also be voted on. When a replacement link is more favorable than the original link, it should float to the top and become the most likely link for people to visit.

TootSweet ,

not 👏 a 👏 bug

db0 ,
@db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

We don't need a different up/down per category. We just need a system where people vote about the article once as Funny/Insightful/Important/Troll/Paywalled/Fake etc. Similar to the slashdot model.

Martineski ,

Sound like a better approach. Also allowing for 2 votes instead of one would be good because this stuff often overlaps.

freedomPusher OP Mod ,

Perhaps. Simplicity is important. But what if I circumvent the exclusivity of an article by finding a mirrored copy on archive.org? If the content is quite insighful, would then want to say it is both exclusive and insightful. Those metrics together could then be used to work out whether it’s worthwhile to find a replacement source for the same content.

freedomPusher OP Mod ,

And speaking of replacement links, we need a way to add them and have the alternative links voted on, and ultimately the replacement link should potentially outrank the original link and take the spotlight. I will add this to the OP.

givesomefucks ,

Question:

Your account is 3 years old (strangely almost no posts or comments though) and I've noticed the people that were here before everyone else seems to hate the new wave of people that showed up a year ago

Just childish insults like this:

(e.g. users, the AOL users of today)

Why don't you just convince your admin to defederate?

Or go make you own instance for just people you agree with?

I don't expect a good answer, but figured it was worth a shot.

freedomPusher OP Mod , (edited )

Your account is 3 years old (strangely almost no posts or comments though)

Then your view is being restricted¹. I don’t know how sheltering lemmyworld admins are of their users generally but the Mastodon analog to would be mastodon.social, and mastodon.social is quite loose with the censor button. There have been conversations where people only saw part of the conversation and were confused because they knew someone else was engaged but they could not see the whole conversation. After investigation, it was not a federation issue but in fact the mastodon.social admin simply decided to block a particular person. I would not be surprised if lemmyworld were blocking me in some way because anyone who outspokenly advocates for decentralisation is directly undermining lemmyworld’s position (lemmyworld is centralised both by Cloudflare and also by disproportionate userbase).

and I’ve noticed the people that were here before everyone else seems to hate the new wave of people that showed up a year ago

The fediverse was created out of love for a free world. Centralised nodes like , , , , , etc work against the philosophy of decentralisation. Users on those nodes are either not well informed about the problems of concentrated imbalances of power, or they simply do not care and do not value digital rights; they only care about their personal reach. Fixing the bug reported here addresses the former (uninformed users).

The bug report herein is specifically designed to be an inclusive alternative to what you suggest, which is:

Why don’t you just convince your admin to defederate? Or go make you own instance for just people you agree with?

Locking people out on the crude basis of which node they come from is somewhat comparable to what Cloudflare (and lemmyworld) does by discriminating against people on the crude basis of IP reputation. It over selects and under selects at the same time if the goal is to separate good links from bad links. Anyone can post a shitty link. A majority of shitty links would come from the lemmyworld crowd, but it’s not a good criteria for a spam/ham separation. The fedi needs to improve by tagging bad links appropriately, which should not be influenced by the host the author uses.

¹(edit) you should see over 400 posts and comments. Visit https://sopuli.xyz/u/freedomPusher to see the real figures.

givesomefucks ,

but in fact the mastodon.social admin simply decided to block a particular person.

That wouldn't happen from a block...

I think you're confusing it with banned...

Which is almost as ridiculous as acting like an admin shouldn't be able to ban someone from their instance.

But you've made it clear from the rest of your comment your "freeze peach".

Have a nice life.

freedomPusher OP Mod ,

Which is almost as ridiculous as acting like an admin shouldn’t be able to ban someone from their instance.

The admin did not know why they were suppressing the messages. Apparently they did not keep notes. So they reversed the action. But no one here said admins should not have the power to ban. Quite the contrary: they should. And because they should have that power, it should not be disproportionate. One million people should not lose access to civil posts from Bob because Mallory the admin did not like one of Bob’s ideas. This is why decentralisation is important.

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