Comics are usually posted in general comic spaces. A comic that has a following is probably better than one that doesn’t, so those ones should still be bumped up in those spaces. Plus, not everyone follows individual creators even if they like and upvote all of their comics when they see them.

I think the best option is to rank things by votes and just put in the best effort to eliminate vote manipulation.

With all of our comments and VOTES out in the open, everyone should definitely have the ability to protect their identity as well as possible. Of course, your instance knows your IP and could in theory ID you by sharing that info with other websites you’ve visited that actually have PII on you.

I want an option to sort by Bottom instead of Top. I wanna see the worst of Lemmy!

I love that the people building Lemmy actually have that incentive finally. I’m excited to see what solutions they come up with.

That could lead to unintended consequences. For example, if a comic series has a loyal fanbase that loves every comic, those votes wouldn’t count for as much anymore.

Well if all the upvotes are coming from tiny instances, that’d be a good indicator. You can’t stop it entirely, but you can at least make it a lot harder. I do wish that instances could’ve been somewhat more “randomly” assigned to new users, as that would make any bias in voting sources a huge and obvious red flag.

Not that much harder anymore. You don’t need a good language model, just one that can spit out believable blurbs of text. Alternatively, you can do what Reddit bots do and just copy parts of other comments.

Using the comment count also promotes rage-bait, making the platform much more polarizing and toxic.