enkers

It does seem like something that could be fixed with better automated tooling, but should it be?

For tagging it isn’t the post data that needs to be changed, but it’s metadata, which seems more reasonable for mods to be able to change. I’m not familiar enough with Lemmy to know if that distinction exists under the hood.

Sure! I’ll repost someone else’s explanation:

Each comment has a score from -1 to 5 (most comments start at 1), and each user has a score from -10 to 50 (start at 0). Any account that is at least a year or two old, has a high enough score, and has a certain amount of recent activity will occasionally get a package of “mod points” that can be used for increasing or decreasing the score of a comment in any thread to which the user hasn’t already posted along with the score of the user who posted the comment. (Site administrators get unlimited mod points.)

Just to add a few minor bits: Comments that reached -1 would appear collapsed by default. When voting, you’d also choose one out of a preset list of reasons (insightful, funny, etc.), and the dominant reason would tag your comment as that.

This right here. If anything, I prefer Slashdot style mod points to upvotes/downvotes as there is an opportunity cost to voting. I find it fosters more interesting and less echo-chambery discussions.

Most of us are probably guilty of this at least on occaaion, but the down vote button isn’t intended to be a disagree button.

Bastardized version of the name of a Sumerian god, referenced heavily in Snowcrash by Neil Stephenson.

It’s hard to tell if they have some vendetta against the platform or are just maladjusted and want to annoy people having a good time.

Cynical tinfoil hat theory: there’s now a financial incentive to harm alternatives to a certain website that recently had their IPO. The timing does kind of fit, at least.

The short answer is: No.

Each site would need to implement this feature themselves. Think of all the potential platforms out there: lemmy, reddit, pinterest, instagram, linkedin, tiktok, snapchat, tumblr, whatsapp, friendster, quora… this list is long. Like REAL long, and Lemmy is nowhere near the top in popularity. Probably not even in the top 50 yet. Why would site developers implement Lemmy sign on over any of these others?

We did have a concerted effort at some point to adopt openid which was specifically designed to unify all these signons in an open manner, but instead we ran into the Standards Problem: xkcd 927.