Maybe it could be addressed with cryptographically-signed votes
That is how it works, I believe. Each vote has to be signed by the actor of the user that voted.
There have been people who did transparent vote-stuffing by creating fake accounts en masse and get detected, because they were using random strings of letters for the usernames. Probably it's happened more subtly than that and not been detected sometimes, too, but it's not quite as simple as just reporting a high number.
Apology accepted. Have a good one.
I propose to give this article the zero amount of attention it deserves, and instead, to spend the comments talking about how to help get people out to vote.
I signed up yesterday with votefwd.org, and I'm planning on spending some time on it, as soon as they verify my signup. I've already turned in my ballot, but there's still time to motivate some other people, and influence the outcome that way.
Edit: Somebody reported my comment. "Spam or abuse." I think that means I'm doing something right. I downloaded my first packet of 5 letters to send out, but I don't think this is the most efficient way to have the impact I'm trying to have.
I'm going to send them out, but it feels like grabbing the voter registration data for registered Democrats in swing states, and randomly sending out hand-signed but machine-printed letters that I've crafted, is going to be a lot more efficient. That, I can do by the hundreds. I don't really know what I'm doing. Is there some other good way to do what I'm trying to do?
I propose to give this article the zero amount of attention it deserves, and instead, to spend the comments talking about how to help get people out to vote.
I signed up yesterday with votefwd.org, and I'm planning on spending some time on it, as soon as they verify my signup. I've already turned in my ballot, but there's still time to motivate some other people, and influence the outcome that way.
Edit: I don't think this is the way. Does anyone know how to volunteer for text banking? I think I did, a while back, but I never did it. I looked at https://web.kamalaharris.com/forms/take-action-for-kamala-harris but the prospect of having to go outside and meet people is terrifying.
I already sent it. It's here:
https://ponder.cat/wp/wp-sources.zip
Edit: You don't need to do the import initially, since there's already a sources file with some small modifications. The import is the only complicated part. Use categorize.py to categorize a source, or lookup.py to run a quick command-line test.
On a different topic: It sounds like jordanlund is saying that if he tried to remove the MBFC bot from the politics sub, he might be removed as a moderator, and replaced with someone else, and the bot would come back.
https://lemmy.world/comment/12825768
Is that true? Is the admin team mandating the use of this bot, and if so, why?
Here you go:
https://ponder.cat/wp/wp-sources.zip
It's in python, suitable for sticking directly into the bot if the bot is in python. There are docs. It's a first cut. How did you envision this working? I can make a real API, if for some reason that makes things easier, but it's not immediately obvious how it would get integrated into things.
Running it on the last 50 articles posted to /c/politics, we see:
It's more complex to use this than MBFC, because there's a lot more depth to the rankings, and sometimes human judgement is needed to assign scores. There's a category "needinfo," meaning it's necessary to know what topic is being discussed or when an article was written, because of an ownership change or similar factor. I've applied that judgement above. That, to me, is a good thing. It means the bot is grounded in something, and not just blithely spitting out arbitrary scores without bothering to ground them in any reality.
In practice, I think it would be realistic to assign a single reliability ranking to most of the "needinfo" sources. You can manually edit the .json data to do so. Almost all of the posts are going to fit into one of Wikipedia's categorizations or another. Newsweek is unreliable, The Guardian is reliable, and so on.
I think most of the mixed-consensus sources can be used without a second thought. Mostly, the questions about them boil down to open partisanship of the source, which for a political community is perfectly fine as long as they're trustable factually.
If you want me to boil this down further, so that it gives a single "yes" or "no" score to each source, I can do that and probably keep almost all of the accuracy of the rankings, now that I've looked at it for a little while.
When you talk about "adding" this to the bot, are you proposing to still have MBFC be the main source, with this as a footnote? A lot of the criticism of the bot is on the grounds that MBFC is a very bad source for judging reliability, so I would question the idea of keeping it on as the primary source.
Why is it admin level? Are there admins that tell you what you can and can't do with the politics community, in this case? Or does the politics moderation team have the ability to ditch the bot if they decide to?
This is such a strange situation. If you're stuck in that former position, though, it would make a lot of your responses in this comments section make a whole lot more sense.
You don't have to go back 20 years. They also committed a fairly big oopsie, not that long ago.
The Guardian: I don't think this one article about renters from 2020 proves its case very well. Personally, I'm not convinced. MIXED
New York Times: You really think someone would do that? Just go on the internet and tell lies? I don't think so.
"This magazine is not receiving updates" is why it's out of sync. It's no different than a Lemmy instance which isn't syncing updates from a community. You'll be able to see the community, and sometimes see some content on it, but it'll be missing most of the votes. Also, when you first subscribe to a community, you'll get a handful of recent posts, but none of the votes, so you'll see content with the voting all wrong.
Mbin might also be flaky about syncing with Lemmy instances, but that's not the reason in this case that the votes are out of sync.
I looked over the votes for a couple of the posts in !world@quokk.au. I've seen voting in that past that seemed faked, but nothing in this community jumped out at me.
As much as I'm in favor of a !world community that isn't on lemmy.world, because there's clearly some kind of rot going on there, I'm not sure how good an idea it is to have someone who's habitually gotten their own stuff banned in the past be the boss of a new community. He didn't get banned for tangling with the mods, he got banned for advocating violence, abusing the report feature, and things like that.
Of course, diversity is good, obviously. Let's see what he does with it.