this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2024
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Can users from my instance still downvote with the API on other federated instances if I turn off downvotes on my instance? (vegantheoryclub.org)
submitted 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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I want to make signing up to my instance as unattractive to bots and vote manipulation as possible. If I could turn off all voting on Lemmy I absolutely would. I think activitypub votes are spam and just because reddit used them doesn't mean that it should be required. I used forums and other websites for a long time before Reddit even existed without voting and my time with Reddit and now Lemmy has left me unconvinced that it is worth while. I think engagement with comments is the only thing worth anything on this platform and some day I'd like to see a sorting algorithm that only took traffic and comments into account for scoring.

Anyway, I try my best to review the users who sign up and the comments that are made to my instance. I typically deny new applicants with disposable email addresses as well.

But there are some accounts that were created that have no activity that I can see easily from lemmy-ui and I'm not really at the point where I am reviewing SQL database. I want to confirm disabling downvotes at least prevented that kind of bot activity and I was wondering if there is anything else I can be doing? I can see how upvoting fascist and western centric points of view can also be problematic by boosting a state actor's propaganda in a mirror of downvotes silencing minority views.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I tested it using the api on this instance /api/v3/post/like and I was unable to downvote any post. I also tried /api/v3/comment/like and it would also fail due to {"error":"downvotes_are_disabled"}⏎ .

I made sure to try and downvote a comment/post on an instance with downvotes enabled.

Not sure why people are saying you can, unless I've completely screwed this up, but it seems that downvotes don't work at all via the api if it's disabled.

curl

curl --request POST \
     --url https://vegantheoryclub.org/api/v3/post/like \
     --user-agent "Mozilla/5.0 (X12; Linux x86_128) Gecko/19840101 0.821/xoferiF" \
     --header 'authorization: Bearer REDACTED ' \
     --header 'content-type: application/json' \
     --data '
{
  "score": -1,
  "post_id": 362154
}
'

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 days ago

Thank you SO MUCH for testing this!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Downvote are an important method for controlling misinformation. We do need better info in side bars informing users what the button is for and what it is not for

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

If you are basing your understanding on misinformation on downvotes that are easily manipulated or driven by people with agendas, then you already failed being a critical thinker.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Its just one useful tool

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

It doesn't seem very useful. What I see it used for is silencing opposing view points like veganism or anything that isn't popular on Lemmy and boosting US military industrial propaganda.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Mods should be banning people who downvote content that is well-cited and high effort

I haven't even seen an instance with a sidebar that explains what the downvote button is for.

It has gotten much worse in the past year, but I blame the instance admins and mods for not even trying to educate their users

[–] Die4Ever 3 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Yeah I think of downvotes as like micro-moderation, or crowd sourced curation. It's generally a good feature. They can be annoying sometimes but it's better than the alternative of bad/spam posts/comments flooding your feed.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Yes they can. The vote will not show up logged in from your instance but it will show up on the instance the user votes from.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago

That's the user downvoting the copy of the post on their own instance. If OP doesn't have downvotes then those votes won't federate.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

Right, thanks. I clarified the title of the post a bit.

What about users on my own instance? There are 50ish users now. I personally know about 30 of them and the other 20 are random sign ups, can a sign up use the api to downvote on another instance when I have downvotes disabled on my own is my question?

I'm not really a developer but I will try and put it into activitypub words I just looked up at w3, can an actor from my instance vegantheoryclub.org use the api to do a downvote activity on a community on another instance

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Cool post.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I got the answer I was looking for so I think so

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Any chance vtc will also turn off up votes some time in the future?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

requires code changes to Lemmy so not any time soon. I'd like to fuck around with it though

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Yes. If you want to block this, you either have to edit the source code or, at the load balancer/reverse proxy, block /api/v3/comment/like if the POST body's JSON content contains like with value -1.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 days ago (2 children)

I found someone who is more familiar with programming than I am and we tested this. If downvotes are disabled posting -1 fails. Good news for me! Thanks for clarifying for me what I needed to be looking at

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago

Huh, last time I checked that didn't work. Guess they must've fixed it at some point! Good to know!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago

Good to know!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago

Thank you, I will turn this on for sure. Good idea, I'll check the load balancer logs for this as well.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Not familiar with the API, and I'm not entirely sure if it's not just a bug in Eternity (fork of Infinity), but lemmy.one doesn't have downvotes and I don't get the option to downvote anywhere.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago

I would be careful about lemmy.one

The admin has been missing for some time, a few people posted to the meta community and never got any answer

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Disabling downvotes is a feature of Lemmy, I have it disabled on vegantheoryclub.org from the admin preferences. I don't know though if that just disables them on Lemmy-ui and compliant apps or if it actually disables them completely. What I am concerned of is someone creating an account, not using a reputable app, and sending API calls directly to my instance to federate to others.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 days ago (1 children)

You can have a look at reddthat.com or Lemmy.blahaj.zone communities from other instances and see if the downvotes count are consistent

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago

I would prefer a way to detect the manipulators from my SQL database then doing detective work to be honest. Someone else mentioned that they can actually do this so I will have to research this.