Vote manipulation is getting more common. Some recent examples:
While the accounts were banned, the malicious voting activity stuck around.
Should admins have the ability to discard votes, and if so, which admins? Should community mods have that ability? Can you think of any ways that tools like this could be abused?
The upvote you give yourself is there, but IIRC it doesn’t count for your score.
While we are talking, this is the kind of users who gets the two warnings: https://piefed.zip/u/grimreaper@sopuli.xyz
That’s an interesting example of a user this is designed for/around.
The general system of up/downvotes seems to be doing its job quite as intended: their views appear routinely unpopular and there’s a seemingly pretty strong community consensus around that.
It looks like their threads have comments that solidly and clearly refute the garbage manosphere stuff. For some people it’s the opportunity to express a refutation of it publicly and directly. The public viewer gets to read those responses too.
So with that example: what do the flags do that the content of their posts don’t already communicate?
It warns other users that this commenter may be a bad faith user / troll.
Usually when I encounter a troll, I check their profile to see if they are indeed a troll. The warning saves some time on that, and is accurate the vast majority of the time.