Make votes more transparent

[Nutomic]

Requirements

• Is this a feature request? For questions or discussions use https://lemmy.ml/c/lemmy_support
• Did you check to see if this issue already exists?
• Is this only a feature request? Do not put multiple feature requests in one issue.
• Is this a backend issue? Use the lemmy-ui repo for UI / frontend issues.

Is your proposal related to a problem?

We are seeing cases where spammers are creating accounts on instances with open signups, and using those bot accounts to mass downvote posts:

Posts and comments are completely public, so if there are any bot posts they are quickly reported and removed. This is not possible for votes as they are essentially anonymous. Even worse, votes from a tiny, unknown instance count exactly the same as votes from trusted local users. To resolve this we should provide some transparency into voting, without making individual user votes public.

Describe the solution you'd like.

Implement a new sort option which only considers votes from local users. These are generally much more trustworthy and harder to manipulate. In this way vote manipulation from remote instances would have less of an effect.

Additionally it would be useful to show which instances upvoted or downvoted specific posts/comments. Then it would be obvious if an unknown instance created lots of votes. For privacy reasons this information might only be visible to admins, or instances with less than 10 total votes could be grouped as "other".

[phiresky]

I think having instance votes as a detail view would be great. I had this idea a while back:

Maybe that + a button to see per-instance votes.

[dessalines]

@Nutomic would you be willing to restrict this to adding an admin-only endpoint (with paging) to view voters on a post / comment? This is something that wouldn't take me too long to do.

[Nutomic]

Im not completely against it, but I also think it would be pretty useless on any post with more than a few dozen votes. How about returning the votes per instance instead, something like:

lemmy.ml: upvotes: 100, downvotes 50,
lemmy.world: upvotes: 150, downvotes: 70,
...

[dessalines]

The instance aggregates would only help if the goal is to block the instance.

Specific votes tho, (Probably sorted by score, instance), would help you both find malicious instances, as well as downvote trolls.

[Nutomic]

Do you really think that any admins would go through hundreds of votes for that? Or even cross-reference individual voters on different posts to find trolls?

[dessalines]

The main use case for me, would be finding downvote trolls / downvote stalkers. So if you see -1 on every comment in a post, or -1 on every one of a given comments, it would take only a minute to find the troll / stalker. Especially if we sort by downvotes first.

Currently the only way to find that, is through the DB.

[Nutomic]

Okay that sounds fine, if its only for admins there is not much difference to the way its currently handled. Plus it would allow other developers to further analyze the voting data, so we dont have to implement it.