The accuracy of the votes (lack or vote fuzzing) and the ability to view the split of upvotes and downvotes individually, as well as who voted for what
The latter point can be seen as a kind of disadvantage though. I don't like the fact that anyone who is an admin on any instance can go to another instance and see the identity of every voter on any post.
It's honestly a big downside. I can see it being useful for admins on their own instances to detect brigades or vote manipulation coming from different servers, but I don't like that they are public, because it could discourage people from voting honestly on topics where they could potentially be harassed for engaging
I can see it being useful for admins on their own instances to detect brigades or vote manipulation coming from different servers, but I don’t like that they are public, because it could discourage people from voting honestly on topics where they could potentially be harassed for engaging
Well, if someone gets harassed for voting then the harasser should be banned, just as if you get harassed for any other reason. So it's not any different than posts or comments in that way.
While you can vet and audit votes, it's trivial to set up a voting ring on Lemmy. There's no CAPTCHAs and shadow banning like Reddit does for suspicious behaviour, defederating is the only solution.
There was one server that had a couple thousand "accounts" for a voting ring, got a post warning about voting rings up top, and then got defederated. Someone who's less obvious about it could easily use a hundred votes to get any post they agree with to the top of most ranking algorithms, or get them to the bottom if they disagree, because Lemmy just isn't as big as Reddit.