I’ve not studied the ActivityPub protocol much, and certainly not examined the voting API. My question for those who have:
Is it possible or easy for a platform to suppress downvotes from users who have not first satisfied either of these preconditions:
- created a comment in the thread being downvoted; OR
- upvoted a comment in the thread being downvoted
?
And perhaps more complex, cancel the downvotes of cheaters who would circumvent the above policy by making a temporary dummy comment, downvoting, then deleting the dummy.
Voting is a shit-show on Lemmy. I wonder to what extent the ActivityPub API is the culprit or if it’s an implementation specific problem.
So we should engage in a comment so we can downvote spam?
Downvote is the wrong tool for spam.
Also: spam is so rare in comparison to other downvoted content that in the off chance that the proper tool falls short, of course you can unsilently downvote the spam for the greater good. But as well, when you trigger “report spam” functionality, that is engagement. The server could of course cast a downvote in that circumstance while awaiting moderator action. That would be the most sensible of course.