I assisted admins, caught and got banned over the past week a user noobda, who created accounts noobde, noobdaREBRN and now noobrao.
A few hours later now, I see 3-4 downvotes on every single comment of mine in the past week, and have gotten repeated death threats in PMs, likely by this very person.
Is an IP address or IP range ban a good solution, that admins should consider implementing besides report option?
I feel incredibly harassed here at Lemmy, though nothing common, where reddit users have abuse reported me to seek suicide prevention helpline, among many things.
Banning IP ranges is a terrible “solution”. It hurts innocent while malicious actor could always circumvent it easily by using proxy/VPN/Tor.
My crude suggestion would be to restrict voting for new accounts (until certain karma threshold and time passed) like on HackerNews (one of the most civilized and helpful comment sections I’ve ever seen, lemmy has a lot to learn from it).
Additionally it could cost you karma to downvote, so unless you bring something useful to discussions once in a while, you can’t downvote others.
Another option is to disable visible vote counter for everyone, so there would be little point in downvoting as means of harassment
Not having karma numbers is helping a lot here, so that might work. Also there should be X number of comments made before voting rights are obtained, because that is what is allowing these sockpuppets to act hideously, manipulating and derailing discussions.
Complex problems will start to arrive, as Lemmy becomes bigger. The concern here is also preventing Lemmy from becoming a cesspool, and to avoid what happened to me.