Not only does it still exist, newgrounds is unique in that it is a long-running website from the early days that is still being run by the same person (never bought out or sold), still has no ads (despite funding issues), still has the same basic focus, still hosting the same content, and is still more or less exactly the same despite some UI changes.

Granted part of that is there hasn’t been any real pressure on it, but still.

Genuinely, it is the kind of thing that I would want to put behind glass, because it is an abnormality in this wasteland we call the internet. It’s this beautiful little corner that has been allowed to remain as it is, unmolested by the terrible bullshit around it.

They were supposed to destroy these when they closed the locations, to prevent exactly this.

Which is a tall order for minimum wage restaurant workers. The fuck they gonna do? Take it down to the local steel mill and T2 it?

Downvotes are part of the whole curation aspect of the site, and it’s a valid part of the democratic system. For all the whining about being “censored” because you got downvoted, there’s countless cases where downvotes influence the sorting algorithm positively.

Garbage shouldn’t sit on the same level as fluff comments no one bothered to vote on.

I’d 100% donate to them if they accepted donations.

If they accepted donations, you wouldn’t want to.

The reason uBlock Origins surpasses all the others is because of who the lead dev is, what they believe, and why they do it. They are absolute hardline and believe in what they made. It’s not a job.

You don’t need to be that kind of person to be a good developer, but when it comes to something like an adblocker and privacy protection, you want people like him who won’t falter or sell out. You want those true believers.

If he accepted donations, then he wouldn’t be the kind of person that made uBlock Origins what it is.

You’re lying, because uBlock Origins refuses donations. They are adamant about the purity of the project.

This is more or less how it worked on Reddit. The admins handled vote spam or abuse, there was absolutely no expectation for moderators to have that information because the admins were dealing with the abuse cases. Moderators only concerned themselves with content and comments, the voting was the heart of how the whole thing works, and therefore only admins could see and affect them. Least privilege, basically.

I think a side effect of this, though, is that it increases the responsibility on admins to only federate with instances that have active and cooperative admins. It increases their responsibilities and demands active monitoring, which isn’t a bad thing, but I worry about how the instances that federates openly by default will continue to operate.

If you have to trust the admins, how do you handle new admins, or increasingly absent ones? What if their standards for what constitutes “harassment” don’t match yours? Does the whole instances get defederated? What if it’s a large instance, where communities will be cut off?

I don’t ask any of this as a way to put down this effort because I very, very much want to see this change, but there’s gonna be hurtles that have to be overcome

Ultimately I think the best solution would need assistance from the devs but I’m lieu of that, we have to make due.

Admins only. Letting mods see it just invites them to share it on a discord channel or some shit. The point is the number of people that can actually see the votes needs to be very small and trusted, and preferably tied to a internal standard for when those things need acted upon.

The inherent issue is public votes allow countless methods of interpreting that information, which can be acted on with impunity by bad actors of all kinds, from outside and within. Either by harassment or undue bans. It’s especially bad for the instances that fuck with vote counts. Both are problems.

Sure, but by the same token, mods are just as capable of manipulation and targeted harassment when they can curate the voting and react based on votes.

On reddit, votes are only visible to the admins, and the admins would take care of this type of thing when they saw it (or it tripped some kind of automated something or other). But they still had the foresight not to let moderators or users see those votes.

Complete anonymity across the board won’t work but they’re definitely needs to be something better than it is now.