this post was submitted on 27 Apr 2025
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Where in this post do you describe the ethics of such a tool?
This is what needs discussion. It is this tool which will lead to harassment due to the way someone votes. And the threat or spectre of harassment will lead to the Chilling Effect, ie. self-censorship (of voting) to avoid harassment.
The chilling effect this causes will make communities even more like echo-chambers, as dissent will be pre-emptively squashed.
Without a tool like this existing, people have to go out of their way to find out this information (setting up their own instance, or finding someone who already does this surreptitiously). By making such a tool available to the lemmy community at large, you make it extremely easy for anyone to do this, and so the chance of harassment occurring is much higher.
You might think you're being clever, or on some kind of crusade to educate the uneducated. But actually your actions are making this (community-built) platform worse. Compare your actions to releasing a 0-day exploit for a security vulnerability instead of responsibly disclosing. It doesn't help, it just causes chaos until the people who do the actual work can figure out a solution.
Think about how your tool existing now changes the dynamic of Lemmy as a whole. Is it better, or worse? How would you actually solve this problem in Lemmy, instead of exploiting it?
This is already a thing that happens currently. Some admins/moderators don't like being downvoted and ban people for "vote manipulation" because they vote on things in their feed.
It is leading to exactly that, where people are worried that using the voting system as intended will lead to exclusion from participation in some communities.
I've personally been banned from one community for downvoting too consistently.