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This post is back on the front page, which demonstrates one of my points about downzaps: their effect decays rapidly.
Yes but like any post raising the globally significant but hugely censored topic of Greater Israel, it was downzapped off the front page almost immediately demonstrating the ineffectiveness of anyone spending real money to raise an important issue here on Stacker News.
Downzapping enables effective and anonymous censorship and is being used to repeatedly suppress this topic on Stacker News.
Clearly that's the case but the implication isn't obvious.
Stacker News is very small and the cost of suppression is probably close to 10k sats per lost reader. If we ever scale to something like other news aggregator sites or social media platforms, that would be very expensive.
I hope you are right.
In some ways SNs being small in scope at this state is an advantage- it allows experimentation and fine tuning of the V4V censorship resistant model.
If SNs can develop ways of enabling coverage of issues to be raised that larger platforms mostly fail to raise, even to a small audience, then that is a success, IMO.
Still don't see why downzaps, and even upzaps cannot identify the originator as this would provide improved transparency.
Why, afterall, would anyone except a malicious actor wish to conceal their up and downzaps?
Sure, as @Scoresby points out people could still create new accounts to enact such malicious zaps but at least it would be visible that the zapper is probably concealing their real identity...and in the case of sybil boosting it would lessen the effectiveness and convenience of such deceitful practices...the sybil boosting would be more visible than currently...credit for, and thus incentive for genuine up zapping would also be increased!
Amongst other reasons, consider that there are places in the world where you can be severely punished for expressing certain views. Anonymity protects people in those situations and allows them to support what they want to.
I agree with you on that but linking zaps and downzaps to a nym does not cause any increased risk of state force being applied to the nym involved.
If the state can identify a nym to their citizenship identity then anything that nym says is already exposed to risk.
How would attaching zap/downzap to the originators nym actually increase that risk? It doesn't! The nym is already a pseudonym.
All identifying the nym zapping or downzapping does is link that nyms social standing within the community and provides some accountability for their actions within the community.
Perhaps they're careful about what they say and use the freedom of anonymity to support what they really believe.
Anyway, there are good reasons for anonymity and it doesn't take a ton of sleuthing to figure out who the main downzapper is. His bloodthirsty views are well-known and he doesn't seem particularly shy about them.
I do not know who the primary downzapper is though have made every effort to find out.
Perhaps I am missing something but would suggest if I do not know many others do not either.
If you know why not reveal who it is?
Not linking downzapping to the nym doing it allows ongoing covert censorship without any effective accountability within the community.
Identifying zaps/downzaps improves transparency and accountability and credit for zapping!, without in any real way increasing risk of exposure to state interference...at least for people who already openly and honestly speak their mind.
You are effectively defending someone who you say does not speak openly and truthfully but who hides behind a cloak of anonymity and uses it to censor the dialogue on SNs.
Have asked @denlillaapan if it is him.
Asked if he would post his recent SN wallet spending graph to prove it is not him and offering 10,000 sats for his trouble.
The downzapper has their TOP stats concealed and so does @denlillaapan- he is by far the highest earning content provider to conceal his SNs TOP stats.
He has also posted disparagingly about war posts.
He initially did not respond but after several comments asking the same question and getting others claiming I was harassing him he responded by claiming is not him but ignoring the request for showing his recent SN wallet spending graph.
Whoever the downzapper is they are not prepared to stand up for and admit their actions and the reasoning behind them.
They are determined and deceitful.
20% of stackers support the war.
#1462037
Stacker News staff seem unperturbed by the effective censorship of posts questioning the war.
There appears to be no way to verify who the downzapper is without access to internal SN data as the downzapper chooses to conceal their TOP data and SNs devs have shown no enthusiasm or will to do anything about it, at least in response to requests from me which have mostly gone unanswered, if not responded with personal attacks and trolling primarily from @Scoresby, but I bet 10,000 sats it is @denlillaapan.
I asked three times of @Scoresby-
'Is downzapping 300000+ sats to silence dialogue and discussion of The Greater Israel Project and other war related posts while concealing your identity behaviour that you endorse and encourage here on Stacker News?'
He three times refused to answer instead continually attacking me for even raising the issue and claiming that my asking to see a stackers SN spending wallet graph was unreasonable as it could lead to doxxing. He knows very well this is apologist nonsense as only a stacker who has chosen to conceal their SN wallet TOP data does not already share this data.
SNs is actively enabling Zionist censorship.
It doesn't matter who it is. That's irrelevant and leads us down the wrong path.
What is relevant is that Stacker News downzapping can't work this way. I'm not going to stay long-term on a platform on which it is absolutely trivial to completely censor a post - no discussion, no nothing - so that nobody can see it, because they disagree with the politics.
I'm not sure what the answer is. But the fact is that now, with enough sats, you can downzap anything to completely disappear it.
I know there's a lot of game theory here, that I may have not thought about. But this at least needs to be discussed.
Let's see how long this is up, until it's downzapped to oblivion.
I don't know what the solution to the downzap problem is but we definitely don't have it yet. At this point almost all posts that are anti Iran war or anti Zionist are downzapped completely off the main feed, without any discussion or commentary.
Everybody - I encourage you to regularly check these links, which show the most downzapped posts. You should know what you're being prevented from seeing.
Daily downzaps: https://stacker.news/top/posts/day?by=downsats
Weekly downzaps: https://stacker.news/top/posts/week?by=downsats
You can also check out this post, which has info on how to install an browser extension that makes downzaps more visible: #1473885.