FOSSDLE PieFedLemmy devs are considering making all votes public - have your say
submitted by
Rimu
edited
github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/4967
Probably better to post in the github issue rather than replying here.
No thank you. I've already had one person go off on me because of some perceived offense: https://lemm.ee/comment/13768482
This is exactly what worries me about this idea.
Same, that is my worry as well.
Hard no from me
I don't want some nutjob with too much time stalking me because I upvoted something about climate change or downvoted some bigoted shit. We all know those fuckos are out there
Voting on Reddit-like platforms is soft moderation by a community, and if you disincentive that, the whole model kinda falls apart IMO
I agree with you. I remember arguing about this a year ago when people first discovered votes were public on Kbin. I don't want to obsess over who up- or downvoted me and I don't want anyone else doing that either. Discussions are healthier when voting is anonymous (or at least obscured as is currently the case).
If bots become such an overwhelming problem that all regular users need access to voting records to better report all the bots I'll maybe revisit my stance. But right now the gains seem dubious.
Your votes are already public. It’s a matter of (a) do we want to make it *slightly* easier for the people who aren’t technically inclined to see them too (b) do we want people acting with the awareness that they’re public.
(a) doesn’t have a clear answer to me. The answer to (b), though, is *clearly* yes.
People say this all the time, but it's not really the case.
I don't think privacy is a binary thing that one either has or does not - there are degrees of privacy. Currently what we have is mostly private, requiring either technical skill or admin access to circumvent. This is a pretty high bar which 99% of people would not be able to reach. You're proposing removing the bar entirely because it is not high enough.
What if some troll sets up a website that indexes/publishes this data? What technical skill would be required then?
The data *is* public and ignorance *is not* bliss. People need to be made aware of this. If this will lead to people being more careful about what they post online or how they interact with a *public* social media service, then all the better.
How is the data public? I’m asking in the most technical sense?
This informs an issue I’ve had lately with a group of three people or bots following along my comment chain (All my comments, for a while, were dropping consistently to -2 score in all contexts).
It’s my understanding that votes are not public. Am I wrong?
Every comment/post/vote made in a community is sent as an activity to the community's subscribers.
All votes are public, they're literally broadcast to the Fediverse writ large. You vote on something on your server, your server then tells the server owning the thing you voted on and that server then tells anyone who is interested (subscribers on other servers). That way everyone knows that this comment was voted on, but that information is indelibly tied to you - an entity on the Fediverse.
Lemmy devs just chose not to a) show that information in a UI (plenty of other software out there does) and b) not inform people that was the case. Which leads to the whole point of the thread, hiding this from users merely gives a false sense of security.
Your idea of a nice world and mine are very different.
Yeah, I do my best to avoid cliched references, but this is 100% a "blue pill/red pill" dilemma. The majority of people seem to prefer to live a comfortable lie than face the harsh truth.
Your world does not correspond to reality given that mbin already shows individual votes.
Head over to your comment on fedia.io and see who voted on your own comment.
Do you want to only vote on instances that defederate all mbin instances, and commit to keep doing so in the future?
They already can. This information is not locked away.
They'd get defederated.
How do you know who you're defederating with? When I set up my instance, the list of federated instances was thousands. How do you know which one is scraping the data?
Incorrect. I said that I see no obvious answer as to whether to remove the bar -- that's the (a) part. What I'm proposing to do is definitely to educate people about the existence of the bar and the fact that they shouldn't be voting on porn, or contentious political topics from an account with their real name, or etc etc like that.
More than 1% of the currently active Lemmy users *are* actively running a server (it's 1.4%, 649 active instances out of 45k MAU), so I think the number is definitely less than 99% of people who wouldn't know how to do it in the first place (or find an mbin or Friendica server or etc).
The broader point about it being fairly difficult / fairly rare to have the knowledge, I can agree with, but I wasn't saying necessarily that we *should* make it easier for the 98.6% of people to do; just that everyone should be aware that it's possible so they can make their voting decisions with that knowledge in mind.
Except that it is, people with the skills already bridged that gap for everyone.
https://kbin.earth/m/fediverse@lemmy.world/t/267356/Lemmy-devs-are-considering-making-all-votes-public-have-your/favourites
Hmmm I see a bunch of my friends have not upvoted my post. I will contact them to ask why not and ensure that they do.
Yeah, just like rglullis actually dragged downvoters into the public on a few occasions, to pressure them to explain their downvotes.
You say that, but you simply have to be using something that isn't Lemmy and that information is there (doubly so if you're an admin on any of these systems)
I agree with the general point that privacy isn't a binary thing, but I don't think the bar is nearly so high, as it simply takes opening the post in the right kbin(/mbin?) instance. This requires neither technical skill nor admin privileges.
piefed is already extremely redditty maintaining behind-the-scenes 'karma' and 'attitude' for users whether they signed up for it or not. why shouldn't this info be public instead of in the hands of admins only?
https://join.piefed.social/2024/06/22/piefed-features-for-growing-healthy-communities/
Oof, I'd rather just stick to Lemmy and let people see my votes rather than deal with karma.
that's kind of the point, other instances are already aggregating and rating your votes given and received, why shouldn't lemmy show this to you?
Summed up my whole sense of humor in half a throwaway sentence ;-)
Seriously though, interesting read, thank you kux… you can really feel the author’s frustration and yet I can’t help but feel that they are interested in a certain kind of idealistic online community. Reddit but with a really restrictive HOA where everyone has the exact same color mailbox.
the author almost certainly has more experience in managing online communities than me (i have none) but it seems counterintuitive to see a dumb take, downvote *and* bother to leave an argumentative reply rather than just downvote and scroll past. downvotes in this case would defuse potential arguments rather than start them, but i'll defer to the author and assume that's not what happens
Admin access means nothing if you can set up your own instance in an afternoon, federate with everything, then get all the votes copied to your database. I have done this just to prove it could be done, btw.
I'm down to work on an analyzer tool that would make it easier for everyone to see the votes
Technical people can struggle when a choice isn't a zero or a one.
(b) will just lead to fewer up and down votes, i.e. less engagement. That in turn could lead to slowly bleeding out.
I would like a (c) where my instances collects all the votes on the post, and then transmits an anonymized aggregate.
That would require a major change to the ActivityPub standard, which is not easy or trivial. This is at worst infeasible to impossible, at best something that is 5+ years away.
This is not true, the piefed admin implemented pseudonymous voting agents in around 48 hours
Piefed's experimental mechanism isn't *truly* anonymous. For instance I'm pretty sure you're the downvote from PieFed on my comment.
You can still figure out who is behind votes by examining the proxy voting actors and their voting patterns. But it's probably close enough.
If you wanted to share only an aggregate with other instances, that would require activitypub changes.
My votes on piefed are not public. This dev took the obvious idea of a dedicated voting agent and implemented it in about 48 hours.
Mod-admins are already doing this, even if you vote and don't comment on something.
Yep. Same for me.
Isn't the obvious thing to just have it be an option that admins can enable or disable? Maybe have a third option for only showing upvotes? Then it's up to each instance to decide, and users can decide to go to instances with the option their prefer.
If they're a serial downvoter, then it's easier for you to track them and block them as well. Double edged sword i think
I thought blocks were one way - you can't see anything from the person you blocked, but they can still see your stuff?
Hmm, i haven't have experience with that, but even then you achieve your peace of mind and whatever they do means nothing.
I downvoted SO much more on Reddit than I do here. The comment quality here is leagues better.
That's why I'd like it.
So to catch a single "serial downvoter" you'd open up all your voting to vote stalkers? If it's a single person, honestly why does it matter?
Actually what's the case with vote stalker? I haven't seen them anywhere and i don't know what's so bad till have to hold off a feature just because of them.
Would be the people that would go through your vote history and then grief you based on it. Kinda like people that sift through people's comment history to grief them, just now it wouldn't allow any "anonymous" interaction with posts.
It doesn't REALLY matter. More of a thing where it would be fun to catch him since he's really obsessed with me. But meh, in the end, doesn't matter. And I blocked him, so...
It's already public, it's just lemmy users who don't see them.
What might be interesting would be to have it displayed, but grouped by instance. That way we could see some data and potentially uncover troll instances or attempts to brigade the conversation without opening ourselves up to personal attacks.
They can read your comment history why would you care about them being able to see what you upvoted?
How does that disincentive it? It actually makes it better
I specifically don't comment on people that give off the vibe they might be one of those kind of nutjobs, precisely because it gives them a notification with my username attached if I do. I'm on this site to kill some time with low effort, I want to minimise the risk of attracting the attention of some weirdo.
I downvote in those scenarios and then report if appropriate. If enough other users feel the same way the comment goes down to the bottom of the thread and fewer users see it. Especially if it's something that a mod eventually removes, as it reduces the reach until a mod can get to it.
If I risk retaliation for doing that, I (and others) will just stop, meaning those comments stay up front & centre and we lose that soft moderation plus that engagement in general. Going into the comments will just end up being a worse experience
I get your point but if you want to just lurk and read don't vote either
I'm dealing with one right now! lol It's crazy.
You don't even have serial downvoters. You have a few comments without many downvotes. You just consistently post the worst possible political pisstakes repeatedly and constantly and nobody likes them when they run across it every time.
Strange that you would say that. I haven't posted any political articles to this community. This is the fediverse community.
Really? So an article about a ninety year old woman, who finally graduates college, posted to my own sub, with 3 subscribers, and got 9 votes within a minute of posting is political? That doesn't seem like a political "pisstake."
Or 13 downvotes in my own educational sub about a college that gives out 3-year degrees. It has 2 subscribers in that sub. That doesn't seem like a political "pisstake."
Or 14 downvotes about a program serving underprivileged children and helping them go to college. and the downvotes were within 2 minutes of posting. To a sub that has 2 subscribers. That doesn't seem like a political "pisstake."
And since all my postings to a political sub are about third parties, from legit news orgs, seems kind of a stretch to call them "political pisstakes."
But wait, I haven't posted any of those articles to this community. So strange how you would know so much about what I post.
Of course, posting history is public. But I haven't checked your post history, because I don't care. Strange that you would check mine. And then not mention all of the non-political posts.
You know, what's really weird too? I posted some articles to the c/science committee. And even some posters there commented on how strange it was that my posts were being downvoted so much and so fast, when the articles weren't political at all.
Luckily the science people are cool, and the upvotes quickly outnumbered the downvotes.
But yeah, they were definitely curious about why so many downvotes so quickly on neutral science reporting.
But meh, probably just a coincidence.
I think maybe you are right. Because for sure there wouldn't be an incel loser, who is so butthurt about my not voting for his candidate, that he'd follow me around. And downvote articles and take screenshots of how much I post, or set up alternate accounts just to engage with me after I blocked him.
That's way too strange. There is no way a loser would be so pathetic to do that. All because he doesn't like the Green Party.
So now that I've thought about it, I agree with you.
It would be just too crazy that an incel loser like that would follow me around. I mean, sure he can't get a girlfriend, but hey, I'm sure he's not THAT mad at the world. :)
Touch sum fucken grass dude
Or how about I use a forum that doesn't have incels that get off on downvoting people. There is that.
That's a lot of words man
Well it does take about 20 seconds to read, I so can understand your frustration.
I don't see the benefits but I see drama this would cause.
So the annoying neckbeard i downvoted for being an annoying neckbeard is gonna DM me?
Yes
No joke, if I start getting harassed over votes on this site ill probably just leave. Its already pretty toxic.
You should be reporting and then blocking a user that harasses you in that manner. Those tools are available to you for a reason.
It hasn't even started yet and somebody is pulling the 'why aren't you just blocking them' shit.
Okay, well, what are your expectations for an (edit: public) online space? What makes blocking unreasonable people an unreasonable option for you?
To be clear, I'm not trying to lay the responsibility exclusively on users here. Trolls and agitators have been around as long as the Internet has. But moderators are volunteers and don't have the bandwidth to diligently police their spaces 100% of the time.
Reputation, whether informed by a voting system or not, has always been an important component of excluding bad behavior in pseudonymous communities. I don't think it is a reasonable expectation that you can participate in a space without spending any effort in keeping it clean for yourself and others (not that I think your position is necessarily that severe.) Reporting bad behavior should be the minimum expectation, and I see the block list as a fallback for when moderation efforts are insufficient or don't align well with the user's expectations.
Aren't they already practically public, given the federation?
Yup. Host your own instance and you could even write a browser plugin to make them visible to every user.
I rather not. If it does happen, I’ll just rss Lemmy and stop using my account. I like Lemmy the way it is because there’s not much focus on votes and more on actual discussion.
Every single one of your upvotes on lemmy is already public due to how the protocol works, it's just currently obscured by a bit of work to get them (have to run your own instance, assuming there already isn't some online tool to easily look them up)
Making them publicly and easily visible would only remove the *illusion* of privacy we currently have, not actually make your upvote logs less secured in any way
For me, personally, it’s more about the focus of votes vs actual discussion. I’m worried it would turn the tides and make people much more focused on the votes than actual discussion. It might make it echo chamber-ish.
I recently disabled showing votes on my side (through Voyager app). Even if I get downvoted a hundred times over, if I just get a respectful discussion with links to (trustable) sources. I’m all alright with that.
I would hate to have to deal with "why did you downvote me?" comments, but I'm also not sure I would have the self control to abstain from leaving such a comment myself.
I think that making vote identities easily accesible to every user runs the risk of increasing harassment and decreasing discussion quality.
*downvotes your comment* *leaves*
I disagree with the decrease in discussion quality. Votes inherently create echo chambers. We have low effort conversations where we all downvote someone whose opinion is different and it makes them feel whatever kind of way, and they act accordingly. Whether it be leave, lash out, or discuss. If it wasn't built in and someone wouldn't already know I would say it is a bad idea, but since it will exist, making it so people learn to be civil is probably best.
I think people misunderstand. I too would prefer privacy, but theres a big BUT.
Due to how the federation works, anyone who is tech savvy enough can already see votes. One way is to run an instance.
This change doesn't lower privacy, it aligns expectations with reality. A false sense of privacy, which people obviously show here in the comments, is way more dangerous.
I accept if a dozen people can see my votes.
That's not what you're saying.
Ultimately I'm not invested in this decision. If the instance wants to watch people vote then people stop voting truly or at all.
Except, if you're using *anything* other than Lemmy at this point that information is already about. The Likes/Dislikes are considered public information by the protocol. Lemmy devs probably just didn't get around to building out the UI for that before the Reddit APIcolypse.
If anything, Lemmy devs should work on methods to obscure user identities, not expose them.
One of the biggest issues with the fediverse is very specifically how much user information can be exposed outside your home instance. As has been pointed out in this thread, it is very easy for rogue instance admins to set up quiet data mining instances.
It seems like it should be relatively straightforward for certain activities, like votes and telemetry, to be anonymized/tokenized for the purposes of federation, since that information all propagates outward from the home instance anyway.
Lemmy actually marks votes as private for federation, but it seems that kbin/mbin ignore that.
Ahh, didn't even know there was a flag for that. I don't suppose you could link to the relevant w3c or FEP for it?
https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/#public-addressing
Next time try reading the spec before asking.
I read about that. In my opinion is that what should change, if possible. There are good reasons why votes a secret in democracies.
Then again, private votes would be private for mods and admins too. So no more moderating vote brigading or downvote abuse or anything like that.
Good point. Would it be useful to somewhat anonymize them by giving every user a unique code? So admins would see these codes but not easily know what users they represent.
I'm afraid this may enable a malicious instance to use this mechanism to manipulate votes while making it much harder to detect. I think transparent voting is much preferable.
If we look at any of the big social media platforms with public votes, that has not prevented voting abuse through bots and the like. Rather it has served to fuel online harrassment campaigns and value of influential individuals votes (ooh Bill Gates liked X, Kamala Harris disliked Y etc.)
Aggregating votes rather than having individually visible votes serves the purpose of shifting focus to how the community values of the content. It's the same reason that we follow communities rather than people.
That would be great. I'm not sure how to solve the problems that arises though. If i can send an anonymous vote to an instance, what stops me from sending 100?
Maybe there's some smart cryptographical solution here that alludes me, but it seems hard, if possible.
You could just hash your username+instance combo, right?
hmm, how would the receiving instance verify? what happens if I send 100 random hashes?
This is literally already a problem. I can easily set up an instance and write a simple bot which just spams votes with randomized user strings. There are generally a bunch of these functional vulnerabilities in the AP trust model which are only mitigated by the current lack of scale. Work needs to be put into reworking the trust model, not exposing user telemetry to even more people.
Each instance could store a static private key used to encrypt all usernames in that instance maybe?
Even on github they are public. Lol
Because voters only receive a voting ballot after they identify themselves as a real citizen with a real passport?
Passport required? Shit, most of our country would be ineligible to vote as they can't afford to travel out of the country for vacations enough to keep up to date passports. Valid up to date passports are around 40% of the population in the U.S. I believe it is trending up though. Pre 9-11 they were way lower. (Because you didn't really need a passport to go on short trips, just an ID)
If this is a hard requirement for federation, then I guess federated services are not for me, as I value my privacy more than I care to use them.
This would probably escalate a lot of arguments that break out in comment sections.
I fear this, too, but I'm not sure what that'd look like. Would people tag someone who downvoted them and act like they're entitled to an explanation? That would probably(?) earn a block from me.
Edit: never mind, that's exactly the kind of thing that happens, it seems.
I'd go for the block and move on approach as well. Nobody is entitled to an explanation.
It helps people and discourse, so it's appreciated. Stalking and tagging downvoters is probably going too far, though.
Happened to me just now in this very comment section! lmao
Grow a spine
You should too. And try not to be mad just because someone posts something you don't like. Can't wait till downvoter names are public. That should be fun!
I’ve already seen admins go through the federated votes on their instance to call out anyone who disagrees with them.
I don’t have a strong opinion either way but I don’t think it will be healthy for discourse to unlock that power for everyone
That is excellent behavioral information to have when deciding whether one's instance should stay federated with those admins, for what it's worth.
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Kbin/Mbin show votes too.
Edit: But I think downvotes are hidden by default now.
No need for a Lemmy server, kbin/mbin put it in their interface
https://kbin.earth/m/fediverse@lemmy.world/t/267356/Lemmy-devs-are-considering-making-all-votes-public-have-your/favourites
Saying the fediverse is good for privacy is just plain false, that's the kind of information anyone can acquire, even an ad company. All they have to do is federate a silent instance and see all you do.
That's way too much work. I just logged into my original account on kbin.social and tapped on the activity button to see votes before that instance went down. If I want to see votes again I can set up an account on any kbin or mbin instance in less than a minute and do the same thing.
This is not the case. What percentage of the population could set up a Lemmy server, do you think? 1%? 0.1%? Of those, what percentage have the time to set up a Lemmy server? 1%?
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Yes I know. Mbin and Kbin should be encouraged to change this. We're currently in a fairly benign environment so it doesn't really matter but if the threadiverse ever got big then this could become serious enough to be a cause for defederation.
Who are you to impose how others run their instance? Clearly this should be an option that each instance can set by itself. You are of course free to defederate, but that's kinda like an instance that has downvotes disabled defederating from instances that have downvotes enabled. You can do it but it's kind of arbitrary I would say.
I think it's a bad idea. It's just going to start harassment and witch hunts when someone gets a downvote they don't like. Stalking is going to be a thing, people are going to aggregate all the votes you've done to make assumptions about you to then bully you. Once public, sources outside Lemmy will start gathering and cross referencing data about you.
In the US, when you vote, the vote is private to protect the person. Making votes public will only empower those that would abuse it. It very well could end Lemmy due to massive bulling, harassment, and the decline of activity.
i already have had multiple weirdos harass me on lemmy for not being leftist enough. i've blocked dozens now, and really kills the experience to have some crazy people go around and brigading your comments because you disagree with their political viewpoint slightly.
way too many people take the internet comments/points WAY too seriously...
I agree. I already tend to get tossed into a category because I don't agree with a majority of the user base. If people can get categorized more by how they vote, and lemmy users are already pretty savvy, I can see a scenario where people get tagged.
Exactly. We need counter views. One of the problems with any type of social media has been echo chambers and the lack of healthy debate/conversation. People have forgotten how to have a civil debate/conversation with someone else. And people tend to act like, if you don't 100% agree with me, than not only can we not be friends, but you're actively an enemy. That shouldn't be the case. We do not need everyone to agree on everything, it should be acceptable to have a different opinion.
With everything public, we're going to have no healthy conversation since people will use previous votes (up or down) against someone. One of the issues is, an up/down vote by itself doesn't give much insight into anything. It's not like the vote itself is quantified. We already see people try this with digging into post history to make assumptions of someone and bring it up as "evidence".
Man it doesn't even need to devolve into a debate. You get berated just for having an opinion on something more and more. That's the problem with the voting system anyways. People that don't share an opinion with you shouldn't even have an option to down vote. Just don't vote at all. Up votes are for shared opinions. But even then the biggest gripe I had with reddit was the system has the up voted "popular" comments as the most viewed as well, leaving the opinions of people unseen without looking for them.
People are impressionable. If they see everyone agreeing with a comment they feel they need to skew their opinion towards the common dissent or risk being alienated. We're communal creatures. And social media screwed with our heads with the need to fit in.
I thought the whole argument was the internet was an echo chamber *because* of it being anonymous. Look at right-wing groups that employ masks where they can hide their true intentions behind "just being normal citizens". It's the groups like "Moms for Liberty" that are outed for their corruption because they have to use a public face during council meetings and such where you can't be anonymous.
I'm having trouble seeing how downvotes being public would lead to more harassment. You would have to make sure you're comfortable with putting your opinion forward just like with commenting. If there's someone going around downvoting someone relentlessly it will be brought to light for all to see, not hidden like it is now. That would encourage more people to speak up because their detractors would have to do so publicly and without explanation they seem like they're not bringing anything to the table in the discussion (returning downvotes to their true intention in the process).
edit' format, grammar
It's not just downvotes. Upvotes could be used as well.
That works unless your opinion is the minority. What if there's someone's gay in say a location that might put them to death for being gay. And now they can't even upvote/downvote safely because any action they take could be used against them. Swap out gay for any really where people can be punished IRL for something online.
To what end? What benefit does that bring other then further harassment/bullying? If I actively know someone is downvoting me because I said Batman sucks and they decided to go through my entire post history to downvote everything, what, if anything should the response be? Do we form up a council to start handing out punishment and review cases?
There's a huge disconnect already from view count, posts/replies, and votes. If you're going to require that a vote must come with an explanation... you're going to see engagement drop to 0. This really sounds like the "if you have nothing to hide" that's thrown around on why governments/police feel the need to pry into everything. Which you might agree with, but I very much don't. And frankly, I don't think it's going to encourage more people to speak up, simply because people just don't have the time. It's easy for a person to just upvote/downvote something without saying something, especially if they have nothing to add.
Throwaways / burner accounts remain a thing that are available for both positive and negative use cases.
In case you're not aware, all your activity via the ActivityPub protocol is already public - it's just that the details are hidden by some front ends. It is already possible for anyone motivated to check your post from a federated instance that displays full vote details, or to host their own instance and receive the raw voting information from places they're federated with.
Yes, you can have communities with higher moderation standards, Beehaw is a great example -- but those are local moderation standards, it does not stop the general public from seeing what's going on as onlookers.
IMO it's no different than most message boards in the earlier days of the Internet. You are pseudonymous, not anonymous, and when you consistently participate on an account, that identity is going to develop a reputation based on how you participate. Upvotes and downvotes just cut down on the kind of low-effort "this", "love this post", "fukkk u omg" replies that would add noise to threads in those days.
Gah, way to take it to extreme. You are not private or anonymous on here, if your actions on this platform put you in danger than do not continue to interact thinking it's completely safe! These things can already be seen, this discussion is about making it show up in every UI by default instead.
If someone is going through your history and downvoting in a harassing way, just block them. They're not there for discussion and the problem is solved. Without seeing a repeat offender you'll never know and the harassment can continue. I see discussions being more open honestly, you actually have to take a second to think about your downvote instead of just gut reacting it.
The problem is its already pretty public, just for mods and admins, and non-lemmy instances.
While I agree its not ideal to have everything be public, given it functionally already is, this just makes it easier for users to see. Right now its a minor hurdle, but still a hurdle - but your votes are not really private/anonymous to start with.
I personally think it should be locked down and votes should be kept under a very tight lock and key.
I posted this already as a response, so I'll sort of post it here. If we start mapping users to their IRL selves, and agencies can start capturing what someone votes on, you have a few problems. 1) Marketing agencies selling your data again. 2) Governments can start using someones posts against them. You're might not, but there are several that will. And Lemmy is a global platform.
I absolutely agree that its a problem. The problem is there is nothing stopping companies/governments from doing that *now*, and I don't know if its feasible to make them actually private on Lemmy.
Right now, they aren't private, you just need a few extra steps to see it all.
Agreed. I've never liked that it's already as public as it is. I remember when Lemmy was taking off and there was a discussion and to me it seemed like people were in favor of Lemmy stepping up user security, but seems that never happened. If user security isn't critical, than the Fediverse is a complete failure and should NOT be used by anyone for any reason.
If you are particularly concerned that you're going to be identified IRL based on your participation online, you should be changing your identity frequently rather than using the same account for a year+.
Data is not suddenly public just because some people have access to it. Data is public when it's available for anyone to look at. Privacy is almost always going to be a trust issue on some level, and very few things are possible to do truly anonymously. Some data will always be available to someone in a position where it's possible to abuse. Instance admins can see your IP address. Should that be available for everyone to see?
Anyone can stand up an instance though. So its available for anyone to look at right now.
I don't think it should be made easier, but I don't think its fair to suggest its currently private in any way, shape, or form today.
Because it is decidedly not.
Y'know, that's fair. I think I misspoke, and meant to say that the admins of *your* instance can see your IP but not the admins of another (assuming you're not self hosting on your home PC without a VPN), but I'm not 100% sure that's true because I've never looked at the protocol.
*If* every interaction is already public on the backend/API level, then simply not showing the info to users is just a transparency issue.
The more I'm thinking about this, the more I believe it's a cultural/expectations thing. On websites like Tumblr, all of your reblogs and likes are public info, but it's very up front about that. Social media like Facebook, IG, and sites like Discord, it's the same; you can look through the list of everyone who reacted.
As far as I know right now, IP and such details are your instance only.
Votes, however, are visible across any instance. I agree its a transparency issue. Right now I think a of of folks believe their votes to be anonymous (or only visible to their instance admins at most), but that's not true at all.
I am fan of Swiss Appenzeln Innerrhoden voting system. In public and with hands up. It's supporting the civic courage values. It's easy to ostracize people for no reason when you're anonymous
LLMs are smarter than the average foe already and governments spend millions on online propaganda. We NEED a witch hunt and lots of fire
I understand that this information is already basically public but there is a thin barrier to the average nitwit user accessing such information and going in a rampage screwing with people who have downvoted them. I'll say this, if they make it more public I think I will just simply stop voting. I will continue to use Lemmy but only as a passive user.
I don't even run with votes enabled(I can vote but can't see scores) on my clients, but like yeah this will definitely make me second guess any type of interaction with voting for both directions because I don't want to become a target for harassment. It defeats the purpose in my opinion of having the system in the first place if someone can't truthfully vote the way they want.
I think in one sense it can be good. Sometimes it is counterproductive to downvote someone from 1 to 0. I think this would prevent that, as the first downvote is probably the most important one.
But I agree that making any data public will allow everyone to be categorized easily. "This person dislikes this content and likes other content."
Remember, you are giving this info to everyone. Mark Zuckerberg will be able to see what you like and dislike in all public votes.
ActivityPub is designed to be public though. Lemmy's current choice not to display the details of voting information does not prevent Zuckerberg or anyone else running a compatible instance from receiving all those details and looking at them.
As an aside, I currently prefer mbin's style of keeping the vote totals separate. I think it provides more useful context to be able to tell the difference between a post with 0 upvotes and 5 downvotes, and a post with 35 upvotes and 40 downvotes, rather than having them both display -5.
Also, not sure if this is different on Lemmy, but a fresh post is at 0/0, it does not start off with an upvote from the user who posted it. I kind of like that, but I'm not sure how much it matters
Should be a server setting, just like how some servers can choose to show combined votes or separate up/down votes.
Do not make votes public. It will lead to personal attacks.
They're already public if you look via kbin or run your own instance.
The experience of kbin and mbin users say otherwise, however.
I guess all 6 of them can be trusted. Lol
Well, there are other problems too of course, but you can check the rest of the thread for that or check my comment history.
Because the fediverse isn't as big as you think it is and so the number of crazies aren't a problem yet.
It leads to an even bigger echo chamber, people with unpopular opinions will get ostracized not just for their comments, but even for their voting. There's a reason why any real democracy has secret votes.
Comparing to democracy doesn't make sense, as democracy has mechanisms to ensure 1 person = 1 vote. The internet has no such mechanism. If we did, I'd be all for private voting.
Sounds like those people doing the ostracizing should get moderated if they can't handle being downvoted. Besides, if a dickhead wants to see the votes today, they can find them - votes are public, Lemmy just doesn't display them in the UI.
I know, it's an issue, but there are certainly ways to solve it, like having the vote identity split between multiple servers that can still confirm with each other that the vote is valid, but neither would reveal the actual identity to make it traceable back.
That's unfortunately not how it often works. Small, ostracized and vulnerable groups often get taken advantage of. As an example, imagine I want to make a good faight argument around, say, a political topic like Russia. Or a sensitive topic like paedophilia. Or about abortion or trans rights in a religious subreddit. Chances are I'd get downvoted to oblivion, even if the consensus (at least originally on Reddit) was that downvotes should not be used to simply disagree with someone. But at least I "opt into" that, by putting myself out there, knowing that the comment will be attached to my name.
But that's not really the standard with votes, and them being public has a chilling effect, makes it easy to harass people just for (dis)agreeing with something, etc. We should find a way to make votes more private, not less.
Yes, the votes are already kinda public, but there's still at least some barrier to it, and most people either don't know or care enough.
This doesn't solve it. I can still just make multiple accounts and vote multiple times.
The only way to solve it would be to actually verify that each account is associated with 1 real life person and then verify that each person only votes once on each post. But that requires essentially verifying a passport and documents for each user which is totally infeasible and has far worse privacy concerns than public votes do.
Vote in good faith and if someone attacks you they will be on the wrong side
Enabling retaliation disincentivizes personal attacks
No, votes should not be displayed public.
Blocking those who downvote creates further polarisation, echo chambers and an environment more hostile to discussion and honest exchange.
Following those who upvote creates personality cults and nepotism and devalues the content.
"Voting" and "discussion" are separate things. The old forums did not have voting but still had polarization, personal attacks, hellthreads, etc.
The problem is that Reddit/Facebook turned "voting" from a tool meant to measure "quality" (e.g, this post is relevant to the community, this comment does not add to the discussion) into a tool to measure "popularity" (I agree with this, so I vote up. I don't like this, so I downvote).
Either get rid of voting altogether, or let's bring back a culture where "votes" are meant to signal quality.
Redditors did that, rather than reddit I'd argue. Still the same result of becoming a far less useful heuristic though.
Not really sure how to "fix" a system like that, which depends on the masses to do something correctly. They... don't.
We can fix that by having moderators that can establish clear guidelines and show enough authority and can be trusted by the community. And yes, if the guidelines include something like:
Then the mods would be completely justified to call out users who are drive-by downvoting.
But... we had those on reddit. I didn't see many actual examples of the "moderator gone power crazy" stereotype that is so often echoed there (especially by people who fully deserved the moderator action they received).
The issue wasn't that the rules were clear. The issue was that people refused to read them in the first place, and became hyper-defensive and obstinate whenever they were called out on it, even by moderators.
No moderator went on to call out users who were down voting for disagreement, because this data is not public on Reddit.
Or some self entitled 3rd party admin would do that just because they'd feel like people owed them explanations.
Hey, do I owe you anything for all the space I'm taking in your head or am I still living rent-free?
If users are the problem and the platform encourages/enables them to behave like that, then the problem is the platform. Redditors act that way because the system incentivizes it.
What alternatives to votes would you propose to handle this better? Because I have no doubt the same thing will happen here too...
It's just how people work, especially when things get heated. That said, perhaps that's a poor example as a heated discussion isn't necessary a helpful/constructive one...
I already said: upvotes only, remove downvotes, votes are public. If we don’t have downvotes public voting is not as important. But if we insist on keeping them, then yes it should be public
We also need people to be more accepting of stricter/heavier-handed moderation, which is a hard sell.
(Score: 5, Insightful)
Meta-moderation and multi-dimensional voting. We were happier with slashdot and we took it for granted.
Same idiots playing games with each others in the open is better than bots and manipulation going on behind the scenes.
Maybe the upvotes should only be available to the person who owns the comment or post. Maybe to the mods and admins, too?
Hard no. I'll move on like I did a year ago from Reddit, and I was on that site for 14 years.
Just from a political/nation-state viewpoint, it would needlessly expose information to make it easier for countries and political parties to keep some kind of "social score" and decide when to do something to you. China already does this kind of stuff.
We need to make it easier for everyone/anyone to do this? Think about all of the super-divisive issues at hand. People can already get a sense of your views from your responses, and that should be it.
State/nation actors can *easily* track this information without an UI setting. Just set up any software that uses activitypub and subscribe to any AP group (i.e, Lemmy community) that you want to get up votes/downvotes (Like/Dislike activities).
Man I would have assumed that information would be cryptographically obfuscated while still being verifiable, like monero.
How would it work? The other instances still need to know what actor is behind the activity.
Also, why? This is social media, not official elections. "Votes" here are completely meaningless.
Like monero. However monero does it is the strategy I propose.
For the same reason it’s not readily available already.
Either you are conflating two different applications of cryptography or you know something that I don't. And as someone with a pretty good grasp of blockchain applications, I'd love to hear if you have something novel.
Perhaps you mean something like Zero-Knowledge Proofs to verify who voted in an AP object without having to reveal it? This would *probably* work, but then you have to have all those nasty blockchain-y things like validator nodes and expensive proof generators... If we go that route we might as well go all the way and just use a fully p2p system.
Votes are already public, lemmy just doesn't let you see them in the interface.
Just so you're aware
https://kbin.earth/m/fediverse@lemmy.world/t/267356/Lemmy-devs-are-considering-making-all-votes-public-have-your/favourites
I'm not sure what this is supposed to tell me, sorry man.
That yor votes are already public.
If you open via browser, it linked to this post but in Kbin, there you can find your comment and click "More" then "Activity", click the "Favorite" tab and you can see the people who voted your comment.
Edit: to clarify, kbin already have that ability to see upvote(favorite) and downvote(reduce). I think admin also have the ability to set the visibility of downvote because i used to use kbin to check for random downvoter before admin here get the update for the function.
I would say no. I don't want some dumbass to interogate me about why I downvotes thia and why I upvoted that.
Ignore them?
They already can with effort. No reason not to add it.
If it's effort, virtually nobody does it. Convenience is king since the beginning of the internet.
Yes there is. They might not bother most of the time because it's annoying. Having vote information accessible at a glance might create a situation where people have more sterile discussion and create more drama about votes because they see it. And that sounds annoying.
I hope I'm wrong.
Not everyone has a github account and can comment or vote there.
But, agree. Don't think any good will come from making votes public. Any pro/con should be measured against who it benefits. If it's mods or devs, there are always alternatives
If it's end-users, consider the edge-cases and the repercussions of malicious actors having access to those individual preferences.
tbf, github accounts are free
I am kind of afraid that if voting becomes more public than it already is, it will lead exactly to more of the kind of "zero-content downvote" accounts mentioned in the ticket. Because some people are just wildly irrational when it comes to touchy subjects, and aint nobody got time to spend an eternity with them dismantling their beliefs so they understand the nuance you see that they don't (If they even let you). So it kind of incentivizes people to create an account like that to ensure a crazy person doesn't latch on to the account you're trying to have normal discussions with.
But I understand that they can technically already do this if they wanted to. So perhaps it will be fine as long as we fight against vote viewing being weaponized as a community.
Yeah I didn't realize votes were essentially public already. This will 100% change my voting patterns. The problem is, I'm an idealist who still follows old school reddit voting guidelines of "this adds to the conversation" or not..so I upvote stuff I don't agree with as long as it is well thought out, well said, or at least civil and trying to have a good conversation. When I remember to, I also tend to downvote vitriolic nonsense or pithy nothing comments even if I *agree* with the values, because I don't think it helps anyone to have annoying angry echo chambers. That's like...the entire Internet right now, and Lemmy is already bad enough with that. It doesn't need to get worse by making sure everyone is voting in lockstep lest they get brigaded (which there are no inherent protections against).
That's basically how I'd do it. I think it's super creepy to have voting public and I'm wary of people who insist that transparency involves weirdo shit like this.
It should actually be made more private.
How? The ActivityPub protocol has no support for private votes. Also, private votes would be private for mods and admins as well, which would make downvote brigading and vote manipulation very hard to detect and moderate.
Hmmm ... is it not really possible at all? Just riffing here ... the identity of a voter isn't necessary, just a means to ensure the uniqueness of a voter so there's no duplication etc. So ... could a hash of the voter's ID be distributed with the vote to prevent duplication?
In ActivityPub, no, not at the moment.
How would you verify that such a hash is coming from a real user? What if an instance sends 1000 fake hashes as votes? Also you could still correlate hashes and figure out who is behind the hash by looking at voting patterns of that hash.
Yea ... that makes sense. Thanks!
Still ... intuitively it feels like if the "threadiverse" platforms weren't so concerned with interoperating with the likes on microblogging platforms, they could come up with a system that involved only sharing total vote numbers from their instance without any idenfifying metadata.
Only sharing aggregate votes could also lead to a lot of issues with vote manipulation, as it is very easy to manipulate such an aggregate.
I agree that ActivityPub is biased around microblogging though. For all its flexibility and universality, it is surprisingly catered to that use case.
What's the difference from users though?
You'd give each user an anonymous vote ID that only the instance can link back to their username.
Imagine you have 500 users that consisently upvote each other and 500 users that vote randomly on different posts. If you jumble up those 500+500 in 1000 random hashes, it becomes impossible to distinguish who is part of the voting ring and who isn't.
The last thing I need is people knowing I upvoted a nsfw post, so nope thanks.
Found the one guy who watches porn!
that sick bastard
That's disgusting! Tell me the nsfw instances that I should add to my banlist.
Most clients make having multiple accounts super easy.
Not that I'd know anything about that 🫣
mbin users can see that right now.
how?
Votes are public data, just not exposed by the lemmy UI
This makes things weird.
We know all your kinks now
By simply using the default mbin UI and clicking on two menu options for any particular post or comment.
But they know already, if they are on mbin or run their own instance.
Own your kinks. \ And in turn teach not to kink shame.
Be a voice of change for the kind in this hateful world.
it should be a setting per instance to hide/show all, some or none
Or even per community, or even per user, the latter in a similar fashion from how that video platform works, showing some of the people who liked your video, but hides these who set their likes to be hidden, bc you can set whether to publicize your "Liked videos" or not.
Make it optional and opt-in.
Probably for the best if downvotes remain less easy to access, at the very least. There's a myth that people who are suicidal will "find a way even if you take away some of the easier methods", which is explicitly false. If you take away the easy option, you are directly reducing the harm that easy option might have caused. https://gizmodo.com/why-have-people-stopped-committing-suicide-with-gas-5959303
If the admins take away the quick and easy option for seeing who downvoted your passionate comment, the mods are directly reducing the number of people who go on rants about downvotes and targeted vitriol.
It has nothing to do with privacy; this is a public forum that by it's very nature, *requires* that all activity be easily available to all the sites you federate with. There is not privacy in that.
This is about the type of community that forms around the software. Do we want to encourage, and make easily available, the list of people who disagree with you? Or do we want to to put minor barriers around that to help keep the number of people who do that low?
I'm not sure the comparison to suicide holds up. I could just as easily compare it with migration where it *is* absolutely true that people will find a way to migrate even if you take away the easier methods. It's simply completely different things.
Not sure what you mean about migration. People absolutely do move less when it is made harder to move. Mitigation isn't perfect, it never is, but for damn sure it helps.
Just because the wall is dumb as fuck doesn't mean it didn't stop at least a few people from crossing the border.
What will this accomplish other than facilitate brigading?
It is information provided to the instance runners, mods, and other fedeverse platforms such as mastodon. It inherently tracks such to know if a user has previously liked/up voted an entry.
So you may have a conversation on here, and some users will know who is downvoting, some will only know who's upcoming, and some will know none
I think part of the motive is to make brigading harder (show if users or bots are colluding to vote things up or down)
It will also strengthen the hive mind, exponentially.
No, as it would create a lot of excuses for targeted harrassment and just increase toxicity
Excuses are only that, especially if your instance has already implemented robust server rules against harassment.
I think the real sign of toxicity is weighting (perceived) anonymity over accountability for your actions on any platform. I'll vote for transparency any day.
Accountability, really? Okay, what's your full legal name and address? If you're totally fine with your idea of accountability, why not tell us all?
Nice cherrypicking. Don't get a bellyache from that fine harvest.
Edit for context: as I wrote elsewhere, "Anybody using the fediverse is ensured pseudonymity already, the privacy issue should be whether your account(s) can be linked to your real life identity against your will."
I'm perfectly happy with being accountable for what I say and do *within our pseudonymous community* here. Our bad faith friend above doesn't get to pull his infantile whataboutism, sorries.
Nice dodging. Here's hoping you get doxxed someday, I think that would be hilarious.
the vote history of your lemmy account is visible
vs
your real name and address are exposed
how the fuck are these things similar
Idk if I trust that some powermod won't send me to hell if I vote against something they strongly believe in, akwardtheturtle style
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Naw. Downvotes are invisible by default here on fedia, but we can see upvotes. Just gotta check the page for them.
I gotta say, I've known this for a while, and the lack of downvote transparency has always frustrated me in the moment, but looking back it's probably for the best. I would not have used it in a positive way.
Mods of communities can already see votes in communities they moderate. Admins of instances can already see votes on all content.
I moderate a few communities,
Edit: It would appear that I am a little behind the times...
I think that's because your instance hasn't updated to Lemmy versions that add this yet.
Ah thanks, that would make sense.
Now there's a name I haven't heard in a while....
Already happening
likes and votes should be anonymous and user names should only be displayed for comments.
Votes are public in the underlying protocol - mbin users and lemmy admins can see votes. They are not anonymous. This is only about whether votes should be displayed in Lemmy.
Yes I know, I said "should".
That would require a major change in the underlying protocol, and it could enable easy vote manipulation since there is no way for admins to watch out for malicious voting patterns.
they are already talking about major changes. welcome to the conversasion
This is not the conversation about the underlying protocol, which is ActivityPub. This discussion is merely within Lemmy. Lemmy does not have its own protocol, it uses the ActivityPub protocol. ActivityPub has no support currently for private votes. Lemmy's GitHub repository is not the place to suggest ActivityPub changes.
Please No
Every vote is recorded in activitypub and carries or else it wouldn't know you already voted. That information is public on other instances currently, so people you are responding to may have that information.
*Please Yes*
Let's create separate accounts for voting and for posting so to improve anonymity and freedom of expression.
I have been considering building it into PieFed, if votes became public. There would be a pool of 1000+ bot accounts which will vote on behalf of anyone who wants it. When a vote is cast one of the proxies would be randomly chosen to federate the vote instead.
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I don't know it's just a brain fart fantasy at the moment, haven't seriously looked into it. But afaik there is no voting ring detection in Lemmy.
It would still make it near impossible to audit voting behavior from any instance if such practices came into effect. A single instance using that mechanism in a malicious way could seriously manipulate votes and it would be very hard to tell it was happening.
User's votes anonymization through this system looks quite nice for me.
I have this brilliant original idea, scroll down, and here you & @A_A@lemmy.world are…
I was thinking an app like Voyager could help vote from a non-posting account. Maybe it’d need to route through a proxy to better obscure the connection between a posting and non-posting account. Seeing PieFed, suppose you could try that route instead but your idea might be more secure. Folks just have to trust you I suppose hehe. Maybe one could build greater trust with a Lemmy app (Voyager) than an instance (PieFed) if they proved the app kept stuff private locally, or am I wrong?
I like the idea - if the lemmy devs do implement public voting I'd definitely move over. Not only does it maintain the (current) state of voter visibility, but it also protects from the frequently cited admin and kbin/mbin exploits. Trusting one admin is far easier than trusting *every* admin.
I was actually having similar thoughts after reading the post (forking lemmy) but idk if I have the time to run an instance.
Please don't man, that makes matter even worst.
Literally what Ill do if this happens. One account that gets no notifications posts no content and votes, then another account where I comment.
Maybe make it possible for a server to only share aggregate votes on a given post?
Like a proxy vote, where only the server knows who it belonged too.
I actually like the idea of being able to see how many upvotes/downvotes came from specific instances much more than seeing the actual users. It would cover some of the positives mentioned in the github discussion:
-Could help fight bot and multiple-account voting (if we assume that people who make multiple accounts do it on the same instance)
-Could help identify voting-patterns from specific servers (obviously)
And then if something looks suspicious, the admins can already see who voted, so they could check out whether some user is abusing the mechanics.
I find that this approach might be worth talking about, but making user votes visible to all seems very unnecessary.
My understanding is that admins already have access to see who votes. This feature is to make then visible to everyone.
Sure, but then you're trusting the server not to just lie about the totals.
I mean, that's already true and why the federation model is used in the first place. If another instance can't be trusted, you can disconnect your own from it (extremely easy if you self-host, if you are a standard member of a larger instance it might require convincing)
Also true.
I could go either way, but I don't think "other platforms have public voting" doesn't seem all that convincing. Who cares? I don't care who voted on what, and I doubt most others do either.
While there are workarounds, leaving it as is at least weeds out the majority of trolls who aren't technically inclined enough to go pull up A to see how B voted on C.
Have you SEEN the drama that happens in this place? I feel like this is just asking for weird nobodies to harass anyone who quietly disagrees with them.
If this passes then I'm outta here.
Please be aware that votes are effectively already public, just not shown in the Lemmy UI.
I was unaware of that. I thought it was only accessible to instance admins, and I think that's how it should be.
In Lemmy, only admins and mods can see votes. But most other ActivityPub implementations show votes freely and there's nothing in the protocol that makes votes private. Votes are inherently public - they are only hidden behind a curtain that is very easy to get around in Lemmy.
I mean, this starts to get moot if no one is aware doesn't it. You might dismiss the design as merely artificial obscurity, but if no one is pulling up the data, then the obscurity is working. The "curtain" you cite isn't trivial for the vast majority of users, which is what this is all about. Starting an instance and extracting the desirable data is a pretty tall hurdle where just the effort alone is prohibitive and enough to give someone a chance to calm down.
You don't need to start a whole instance to find votes, you just need a user on any of the services that show votes publicly.
Also, if someone is getting angry about downvotes in a bad way, moderators should just step in. People should learn that votes is just part of the system and accept them.
I forgot other fediverse platforms interact with this place. So upvotes translate to likes on mastodon and other platforms? I still feel like this should be anonymized, but I also get how that could be exploited since likes aren't auditable in that case.
Yes, upvotes are in fact just a Like object in ActivityPub and downvotes is a Dislike object. This translates to various other concepts in other ActvityPub apps, depending on what they choose to call it or how they handle them.
There is no mechanism for doing this in ActivityPub at the moment. Also, you may not want that because it would then also be hidden from admins and mods, who would then be powerless to discover vote manipulation or downvote brigading and other nasty behavior. Having the votes be transparent is probably better as it allows people to discover this kind of behavior much more easily.
Why would this encourage harrassment? It would just expose harrassment.
There are bots that exist solely to downvote specific users and instances. If you and JacobRimJob downvote each other every time you see each other and eventually argue about it until it devolves into passionate lovemaking, tbats not what harrassment is.
It would also expose upvote bots promoting propoganda.
It would encourage harassment the same way comment history does: someone goes looking for it, sees it, and attacks the person over it.
If I say some shit you disagree with then feel free to engage with me. I'm literally here for discussions. What are you here for?
You should not be ashamed of your vote history.
I agree, people shouldn't be ashamed of their vote history unless they are trying to harass a person or community with a pattern of downvotes.
I still don't want to be harassed for my voting though, nor will I be pressured into defending my votes if a user brings it up.
I want to apologize for my needless aggression earlier. I spent the morning arguing with CCP propogandists and its got me seeing red. (see what I did there?)
They can come at me, I downvote every single hexbear post in the feed regardless of content.
Or just block them.
Yeah, blocked users cannot see or vote on your content.
Are you sure? I thought blocking a user just prevents you from seeing their responses.
You are correct. On some clients, it also blocks you from seeing threads or posts where that user participates, but I believe that is a defect.
I am not 100% but I am like 98.9%
What's the benefit?
Like, what's the actual user experience gain from seeing someone else's votes? Is it just so the average joe can profile users, like for identifying bots or whatever? That's not rhetorical, I'm genuinely curious, as I don't see what I'd gain from this as a Lemmy user.
Bit as I see it, I really have no desire to do this. Maybe if I was a a pseudo mod on a spammy community I guess? But comments are already a decent indicator.
Yeah, I'll be honest, never have I took a look at somebody's likes on Twitter or Mastodon.
Sir Elon Epstein Musk already removed the ability to see likes... I wonder what his motive was.... 🫤
My answer is yes to the original question. I speak with my votes, my comments, and my engagements. If I wanted to be separated in anyway from this I would just use an alt. Hell though, I even gave up on having a porn alt on twitter and I just own it if I like something. 🤷♂️
He removed the ability to see likes made by some profile on the profile page itself.
Gathered some thoughts here
Potential positives:
Potential downsides:
People will report voting activity that they don't like, even if it's not malicious.
It's another option for abuse, similar to bringing up past comment history
Both could be dealt with but it would make moderation somewhat harder
Likely bad:
Bad
Lemmy is already a privacy nightmare, in some way. There was a comment showing the screengrab of those peiple who upvoted and downvoted a post. Basically, if you self-host an instance, you'll have access to these. This can easily be weaponized by certain organizations that want to create profiling of lemmy users, e.g NSA and Intelligence agencies.
Lemmy was never designed to be private in that way, nor was ActivityPub. You should expect the things you post publicly on the Internet to be *public*.
I expect that for posts but not for votes. Inherently, we don't want our votes to be public - that kind of defeat the purpose.
I'd be curious to know where that expectation is coming from. On average I'd expect a majority of folks have that expectation carried over from Reddit. Another poster somewhere mentioned that there are several other social media platforms that don't have private voting, and I wonder if the expectations would be different from people who came from those.
Personally I think the transparency on votes here has been refreshing and am sad to see platforms pushing to make it private. But then, I grew up in a time before Facebook, when it was understood that you used a pseudonym, not your real identity, and needed to be careful about what you chose to share on the Internet. If you had concerns about being judged for a specific opinion or a hobby or whatever, you could just make a separate account for those topics. Kind of like how some folks only keep a Reddit account around these days for porn.
Public voting is much more of an political and self-conscious act. There is a reason voting in democracies is private.
And there is also a difference if I have to deploy special measures to see who votes how, or if it is made very easy to see and use. Ultimately there should be some kind of crypto algorithm that hides how a user voted from activitypub.
I have to disagree. It should not be a consequential or self-conscious act if you aren't using your real identity. (If you *are*, the expectation that you should be very careful with how you participate remains unchanged. This isn't LinkedIn and it shouldn't be trying to be.)
Commenters on the GitHub issue have put it better than I can:
Different tool, different purpose.
If you're afraid of triple letter agencies you probably shouldn't engage in social media at all.
The privacy concerns are about coercion from the user base. The bar to spin up a private instance to get to the voting data is far too high for 99% of the users.
I don't want votes to be public, but they already are, so.
Someone can easily host a website to leak this information and people should know, instead of believing they are private
Anyone with a kbin account see them by default, no need to create a special website for it
You don't even need an account to see upvotes. Just look it up on an mbin instance
Fedia displays details on up votes but not down. Which is slightly a shame because I'm mildly curious if the single down vote I get on ~70% of my comments is from like one guy I pissed off at some point. At the same time I don't care enough to work around the system, so maybe it works?
"easily" lol. It's orders of magnitude more difficult than just pressing a button on someone's account page. If people really want to jump through those hoops to see them then that's fine. If that becomes a common occurrence then we should look into making votes more private or more public (so at least those site owners couldn't lie about your votes). But now? I think it's fine.
Boosting a Lemmy post in Mastodon shows up as an upvote in Lemmy. So the two concepts seem to be coupled in the activitypub substructure. I don't see how upvotes would be secret then, as I don't think it's possible to boost something privately on Mastodon.
You are exactly right - the underlying protocol (ActivityPub) has no concept of private votes. Making them private would only hide them in Lemmy's UI, but still make them accessible to other users using other apps.
Looks like PieFed is experimenting with a potential workaround.
either way id still shit out my ass
There... There aren't a lot of things that would change that...
While I don't necessarily think that votes should be made public, it would be nice if you could see your own votes. There have been a few times I wanted to find a post that I had seen, but didn't save, and I couldn't find it.
If you are on Android, Voyager shows what posts you upvoted and downvoted in the profile page.
I agree, would be nice if this was standard in web version.
I was really confused seeing this post, because I always assumed that Lemmy votes were public. Because how else are instances going to sync them? And indeed, the API exposes them completely, this change will just make it easier.
Then I was really confused when I saw so many comments being against it. A lot of "I'll leave if votes become public" in here. That's a lot of people who somehow assumed Lemmy was private. Aren't we all supposed to be Linux nerds in here?
No! :) The most Linux I use is a Steam Deck.
I feel votes should be visible to admins but otherwise anonymized and private, or else I fear vote-harassment could become a forever-problem on Lemmy. As a woman who has been harassed on Twitter and Reddit in the past, I strongly urge the Lemmy community to embrace privacy on this issue. If there's any way to make votes more private between users, we should do it.
If we don't and users get harassed, they might leave. Lemmy needs more women. And you all are great but Lemmy also needs people who aren't Linux nerds! Lemmy needs diversity.
I very much agree with your diversity sentiment, but this part is just not possible right now. The underlying protocol (ActivityPub) just has no mechanism for private votes.
Yeah. I guess we shouldn't expect that to change any time soon?
If that's the case, maybe public votes is the best way to go.
As far as I know, there are no plans or proposals for private votes at the moment and most implementations don't seem to mind that votes are public. So no, I don't think ActivityPub will have any support for private votes in the foresseable future.
Kinda same. I also have an Ubuntu homelab server, but I feel like I use my Steam Deck more often than I spend an occasional 3-day all-nighter to get something working on the server over SSH.
But my joke premise was obviously flawed anyway. We are supposed to be, but we clearly aren't.
And to address your point regarding votes being viewable only by admins, it's sort of pointless cause anybody can become an admin, just make your own instance. This just makes your statement to be "let only the more technically advanced people see the votes", which just makes it unfair.
True, anybody can become an admin, but most people won't. I think that a slight barrier to viewing vote identities is a good thing, and reducing that barrier to zero would result in more harrasment and unproductive discussion.
I still think it's just unfair. You can lookup votes and harass people only IF you know enough about computers. Anybody persistent enough to harass other people will put a little bit of work into being able to look up votes.
In addition, as we can see, this "semi-privacy" confuses a lot of people. Better that all users KNOW that their votes are visible, instead of them thinking they are private.
After the meltdown that occurred when Reddit ultra monetize their API Lemmy acquired a lot more casual users. Especially when makers of Reddit apps switched over to making Lemmy apps instead.
I was one of those people. But statistically, even the people who migrated from Reddit to here are not "normies". My "normie" friends (which is all of them 🥲) just kept on using Reddit and didn't notice anything. They weren't even using 3rd party apps.
Blows my mind that people just deal with ads.
What truly blows my mind is the amount of requests the 1st party Reddit app sends home. Back when I was using Sync I still had the app installed, but then I set up AdguardHome and saw that my phone was spamming requests. Checked the logs and found out that the 1st party app, which I wasn't even using for months, was "phoning home" literally every 10 seconds! Besides privacy concerns, that can't be good for battery life. Nuked the app then and there. I'll take the nagging, thank you.
My point is just that Lemmy is no longer made up of just Linux nerds. Over the course of the last couple of years the user base has diversified quite a bit.
So the API does disclose who upvotes and downvotes, however since the major front ends themselves don't show to everyday users, it's walled off to finding a frontend that is able to view them and to mod/admins of the instance.
Currently it takes someone to be somewhat savvy to be able to do that, this proposal is making everything public period, which would remove that wall
Yes. And I think better make it obvious that votes aren't private, instead of people wrongly assuming that they are.
Considering making votes public, not considering making mod actions inform the user they occur.
I can see where their priorities are.
Making votes something mods can see is one thing but public is whole other can of worms.
Edit: Spleling
Asymmetrical visibly of votes is more problematic than letting everyone see them
This is an interesting conundrum.
On one hand it would help locate foreign agent bots/bad faith actors faster and recognize vote manipulation by bot farms.
On the other it will lead to even more account-stalking problems, user drama, and would further enable vote dogpiling if you see certain known users voted a certain way.
I'm inclined to say no. They are already "public" if one wants to put in the effort to admin a standalone instance or run alts on multiple services they can see if they care- I personally don't really care
The larger question is when will votes be private?
There are reasons democracies vote in a concealed ballot box
Enable admin access to which server it originated but more and you’re just hurting more than helping.
I saw some other's commenting about "private ballot boxes" but I think that's a false equivalency. You Vote in a democracy on policy and representation, not discourse. You're basically saying your upvote/downvote is being used to police conversation and who you think best represents you.
It has similarities though, as pointed out in orher comments. For one, a user might be more careful with downvotes if they are afraid of negative consequences e.g. harassment. With piblic votes, there would therefore be a bias towards upvotes and and people abstaining from downvotes, i.e. less interaction in total.
Downvotes serve a purpose today, letting us quickly scan which comments are controversial or even harmful to the conversation. I, for one, usually sort most threads by votes and then skip the comments with many downvotes but for controversial topics, I instead seek out the comments that have both many upvotes and downvotes.
These would be harder to find given the above bias.
I agree it would lead to less interaction, but the interaction lost would only be downvotes being used *as* a disagree button. No one is going to get harassed for downvoting a bot posting an ad or someone just completely off-topic, that which the downvote is suppose to be used for. In your scenario you point out that the comments you seek out have so many upvotes-downvotes because it's controversial, not that it doesn't add to the discussion.
I'm seeing lots of comments here saying that server admins can already see vote data, and therefore it is not private.
But from my point of view, having a handful of people able to extract voting data using their position of trust on the lemmy network is very different from broadcasting voting data to everyone on lemmy. And although you can argue that it is possible to create a new server and federate and blah-blah-blah to view votes; that argument sounds to me like "don't bother locking your front door, because that type of lock can be defeated by a lock-picking tools."
And even aside from all that discussion about who can access what; there is another key point that I think is overlooked: Making voter information public makes it 'normal' thing to monitor and discuss. Currently there is an expectation that people *won't* look at or discuss that information (even if they hypothetically could get access). But by making it public, the expectation then is that everyone *will* look at that information. That would create a change in tone and meaning of votes and discussion around votes.
Being a lemmy admin is not a "position of trust" - anyone can fire up a single-person instance for themselves and be a lemmy admin. You can also just view a post on mbin to see votes.
Not only admins can see the votes, but anyone on Fediverse (except regular Lemmy users) can see them.
Security through obscurity is prone to failure when it is used by itself. If people want their votes to actually be private then another method of securing their privacy should be created.
We aren't talking about security though. We're talking about what information should be presented on lemmy.
Let me put it this way: have you personally ever tried to see who upvoted or downvoted a particular lemmy post? And if you did, did you talk about what you saw?
My point is that currently basically no one sees the data. The expectation is that no one is looking. And it is not socially acceptable to discuss who is voting for what. But if the votes were changed to public then everyone would see it, the expectation would be that it is common knowledge, and so obviously it will be discussed. Is that what we want on lemmy?
I sure don't, let the mods see it for their communities but not for everyone
Your first comment expands on both privacy and security. There is no privacy without some type of security.
Now to answer your questions: Yes and yes. Users from c/all were downvoting posts from a small community I'm a part of because they don't agree with. I couldn't see the posts from small communities that are important to me because of that. Now we have the possibility to sort by "scaled", which fixes that. Sometimes there are discussions that are very relevant as to who is voting for what. But that discussion has nothing to do with privacy, which was your first point and went unacknowledged on your second comment.
But this isn't *security!* No one is claiming that not making vote history visible through the UI is a means to keep things *secure!*
One of the things I liked back in Kbin was being able to see who upvoted. Some people were lurkers who didn't comment, but it was still nice to always see them take an interest in the material. Felt more like they were a regular in the community.
VOTES ARE ALREADY PUBLIC.
If you are using Lemmy because you want privacy, you've already missed the boat, everything is wide assed open for datamining and advertising fingerprinting.
I'd hoped for an open system with open APIs and open implementations that allow everyone equal access to the system and bring equal accountability.
If people just want Reddit style fiefdoms with no real public accountability possible, then make a blackjack and hookers fork.
I'm really not interested in a system that bakes in more authoritarian secrecy and control, which could very well be an unexpected outcome of backlash to how this has been presented.
The source code for Lemmy is free for all to view and modify, there will be no authoritarianism... And if it were to happen all of Lemmy administrators would either refuse the upgrade and stay retrograde, or quickly fork. The devs don't really have total control of thousands of servers to have free reign to do stuff like reddit corp does.
I'm all for vote privacy in the UI. There are just too many downsides to public votes, and not as much weight to the positives in my opinion. People should not be afraid of backlash from down voting if a post does not contribute, it'll only create echo chambers/ unchallenged groupthink.
Absolutely not.
This will like lots of other people say start witch hunts and people will absolutely develop bots and websites which scrape all that information and classify all users based on that. Like those Reddit sites where you can search for a user and see where they are active and all that. But this will be worse.
This data is already public. You can just create a kbin account and see who's voting. Anyone wanting to scrape it already can, the only difference proposed is the Lemmy client showing it.
It should then be unpublicised.
This is not possible with how the underlying protocol (ActivityPub) works. It has no mechanism for private votes.
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You're misunderstanding what the developers are asking here.
Votes are public in the underlying protocol. There is nothing Lemmy can do against that. Lemmy currently doesn't show the votes, despite the fact that they are public. However, other ActivityPub implementations, for instance Mbin, do show the votes. So the votes are only slightly more complicated to get but not really private at all.
With that in mind, the devs are asking: Should the votes continue to only be shown to mods and admins or should everyone see them? Considering the fact that all users on other implementations see votes anyway. They are not asking your opinion because they want to implement changes to make votes more private than they are right now - that is not up to Lemmy to decide. That would require a change in ActivityPub, which would be a lot more complicated and it's not certain that it would ever happen.
I thought they were already???
Like how/why wouldn’t they be public? Even if the data isn’t readily accessible via a gui it’s gotta be somewhere so that federation works. Unless you’ve been thirsty in your main it shouldn’t be a problem?
Am I missing something?
You are not missing anything. They just aren't shown in the Lemmy UI
which aren't? btw, this post has 7, now 8.
Then I'm super for it. Might as well make what is available to a few try hards available to all easily.
Data collection agencies wholeheartedly agree with you
On multiple occasions a moderator has reached out to me and informed me an account existed purely to go through my comments and downvote me. I assume this is a common occurance and we could combat it better if we could see the votes.
I worry though that public votes will enable unstable people to stalk people. Vote the wrong way? Why, I'll just create some bot accounts to constantly downvote you, and I'll harass you with replies to every comment you make, reminding everyone that you vote against the grain and shouldn't be trusted!
I assure you that unstable people already stalk others and vote histories are already visible to those who try hard enough.
Yeah there is already too much of a hivemind already, we don't need to make votes public, it would only enshrine a permanent 100% groupthink. It is a very bad idea.
You could make the saame argument against commenting, say the wrong thing and you get harassed. But what do you do with someone harassing you? You block them. What do you do when someone is harassing you by downvoting you? You most likely suck it up because you don't know who is downvoting you.
I would argue it's more a tool against harassment than a tool for harassment, especially since anyone determined enough can already access that information.
That must have been an admin, mods can't see votes as far as I'm aware. Only domain administrators can see votes
Easier to just ignore downvotes the instance I'm on doesn't show them and it's great. If someone can't be bothered to explain how I'm wrong I don't care about their opinion anyway.
Nah. Votes are already visible to people using other applications than Lemmy, so let people use those if they want to see how people voted. It's fine as-is.
They are? Where? I mod a Community and I've never seen anything that isn't explicitly for Admins that can see them.
I'm not sure which ones, I only use Lemmy.
Already had one person today mention my down votes .
It didn't validate their argument at all and without context it can be interpreted in any fashion to make it seem malicious
So, federated network advantages here: you can always modify your instance's hosting code to patch this out, at least for the users on your instance.
What you cannot do is prevent other federated instances from publishing the votes submitted to content on their instance. But if you're accessing that content through your local instance, they can modify the upvote button to pop up a dialog saying something like: "The instance that hosts this content has elected to make usernames visible for upvote/downvote. Would you still like to vote?"
Personally: In many ways I don't mind. I'm on the internet with my real name. I don't mind being accountable for my behaviour online. I might be a little more cautious about upvoting something controversial or NSFW, but largely it wouldn't change my behaviour.
Boy oh boy, it sure is a mystery why democracies have people vote *privately*
The only thing worse than public voting is public voting that's falsely advertised as private.
Its already not private
You only get to vote privately because the system can still verify that each person only gets to vote once.
There is no such mechanism on the internet. Anyone can make multiple accounts and vote multiple times.
Right. We are IDEALLY only identifiable by our content and where to reach us at for a given persona online.
A contrary ideal for where votes are supposed to represent an actual plurality of stake holders in the social contract.
Yeah. For major things. For trivial stuff like choosing lunch place people usually do public voting.
Wrong comparison. in state votes it's done to prevent bribing here you can share your activity and create as many accounts as you want.
To allow easier falsifications.
No, that's entirely wrong.
My comment is a specific application, and your comment is "no u wrong".
No, it's to prevent people from buying/selling votes, amount other things.
What it definitely does is prevent you from verifying vote results and specific votes. While people selling votes will (in our day) just make a photo and send it to their buyer.
If by "other things" you mean violence against those voting "wrong" - yes, that's a problem. When you invent a way to have a verified anonymous vote, let me know.
Many people in this thread seem to not realize that votes are essentially public already - this is only about whether the Lemmy UI should make it a bit easier to see the votes. They can already be seen quite easily if you know how.
However, there is an easy solution to this problem. This is clearly a controversial decision, so don't make a choice for everyone. Make it an option. Any admin can decide for themselves whether their instance should allow users to see votes.
That also means that users can decide to go to instances where the votes are hidden or public.
This approach leaves the choice to the individual, rather than forcing the choice on everyone.
It's confusing enough understanding how federation works for the less technically inclined. I don't think we should also expect them to figure out which instance is privacy-conscious. Privacy of votes should be baked into Lemmy. Even kbin users shouldn't be able to see it.
If users want to advertise their approval/disapproval of posts they can use public comments in tandem with private votes.
This is impossible. The underlying protocol, ActivityPub does not have the concept of private votes. It is not up to Lemmy to decide. You'd need to revise the protocol for this and good luck with that.
ActivityPub can't evolve? Is there some insurmountable technical blocker?
I suspected this would be an issue and have avoided voting on controversial posts. But if everyone did as I do, there would be no open discussions about pressing topics.
Evolving ActivityPub is not easy, any additions to the protocol take a lot of time and discussions between the various implementers.
It is *possible* that ActivityPub could add this feature. But it's not certain you'd even want that. Private votes would mean private for admins and mods too, so no more analyzing votes to look for down vote bots or manipulation or down vote brigading and all that stuff. Votes could lose all meaning. Admins and mods are unlikely to say goodbye to those moderation tools.
Even if it could be added, it's probably years away.
Fair points. I'm warming up to the idea of making votes public so that people don't have a false sense of privacy. I wish votes were actually private, but maybe it's not a big deal if your account can't be easily traced back to you in real life.
Pseudonymous voting doesn't mean a unique ID for every vote. It just means the user string itself is tokenized. You can still ban participation for that token without revealing the actual user. Literally the only thing this stops is easily seeing users who use the same name across several instances.
You don't even need to upstream the protocol changes imo. An instance could decide to participate with tokenized user IDs. Other instances could decide to defederate because this is out of spec behavior, but as far as I am concerned it is perfectly aligned with the core spec. Nothing says user activity cannot be anonymized.
How would this work in practice? I upvote a post and it sends the upvote via a token user to another instance. Then I remove my upvote or downvote instead. My instance would then need to send an undo or dislike for the token user too. How would you ensure you have enough token users to fill up all the votes on a single post? You'd need thousands if not tens of thousands of these token users. How does it work when I ban one of these users? How do I prevent a user from participating if they use these token users?
Also, this could be used to make vote manipulation easier I bet.
The simplest form of this is literally just a token which replaces the universal identity. So you ban the token, you ban the user. This only applies for voting anyway, since commenting and posting follows the plaintext user agent.
A more robust trust model with rotating tokens would fully move ban enforcement to the home instance, which I actually believe is already the case in some situations. Eg, when I am banned from a specific community on another instance it seems as if my host instance knows not to even display a vote on the UI, which suggests that it has knowledge of my federated ban. With this trust model it would be possible to fully enforce cryptographically secure forward security as well.
I say no. Privacy.
Comments say they're already basically public. I don't know anything about that, but it's probably better to *merely* have a camera in your toilet than have a camera in your toilet that livestreams 24/7.
But I don't have an especially informed sense of how to run a platform so maybe there's a bunch of crap I'm not thinking about.
I say we put a camera directly on the asshole
This guy *scats*.
Agree. I may be misunderstanding something here, but to view votes one would have to spin up their own instance. This would prevent your average abusive moron from harassing users who down voted their post/comment.
All you need to do is look at the post from a federated instance running software that doesn't hide the information. Here is a link to your post from my instance, which shows upvote info: https://fedia.io/m/fediverse@lemmy.world/t/1097629/Lemmy-devs-are-considering-making-all-votes-public-have-your/comment/6869259/favourites
To view down votes, they *might* need to host their own instance? I don't know offhand of another software that shows downvote information, but even though Mbin does not show it, I think it should still be accessible if you're running the instance yourself and looking directly at the database.
Yes, I may be wrong, but spinning up your own instance would also let you see new votes *from now on*, not votes on old posts. Which makes it even harder for trolls and morons.
This would be a catastrophic mistake. Please don't.
Please be aware that votes are effectively public already, just not shown in the Lemmy UI.
I'm well aware that they can be viewed from other platforms and by admins. But I don't agree that this makes them effectively public.
By that logic, everything is effectively public. Why should I be reluctant to share my age, weight, income, DNA? All of that information can be publicly available for someone who takes the time to sample a piece of my hair, check my birth certificate, etc. It's not illegal or impossible for someone to obtain that information.
But there's a whole world of difference between something being theoretically accessible via workarounds, and being displayed prominently for all to see. As a result of human nature, I think that allowing people to easily check votes on any post would cause a great deal of conflict.
Also, there are currently plans underway to build more privacy into the fediverse.
It is not "theoretically accessible via workarounds", it is plain and simple there on other platforms and easy to access. See, here's the votes for your first comment, it even shows the downvotes. I just had to type in the URL for your comment in the search bar and click the "Activity" field in the menu.
As an aside, I do think it is actually illegal to get all that information you mention without your consent, so your premise kinda doesn't work. Also, none of that stuff is stored on Lemmy's database so of course that stuff is not public, how would Lemmy even share it?
Believe it or not, that barrier of entry is enough to dissuade 99% of people. People simply don't have the time or inclination to do this. But if you put a button right in the Lemmy UI, *people will check constantly*, and it will cause arguments and potentially defederations.
It's not illegal to get your DNA, which is arguably the most egregious example I gave. They solve cold cases all the time nowadays by surreptitiously collecting DNA samples. You can see how heavy someone is just by looking at them. But that doesn't mean they want to tell you their actual weight. I'm not sure about income and age, and it would vary by jurisdiction anyhow.
I'm just trying to explain that healthy social interactions and environments are predicated on some degree of privacy, and abolishing that serves no one. If you remove the privacy of voting, you reduce the incentive for people to vote, or indeed to use this platform at all.
And I'm just trying to explain that there is no privacy to remove cause there was never any privacy to begin with. Hiding votes in the Lemmy UI is bad because it makes users think that the votes are private, when in fact they are public.
If there was a way to make them private, I would say we should go for that solution. But there currently is not any way for them to be private and I say we should not pretend that they are private when they are in fact not.
I don't actually think that would ruin the platform as much as you say - nearly all other ActivityPub platforms have public votes and they still exist so I'm not sure the argument really holds.
This is one of the downfalls of a distributed system. You basically need public votes. Without it, instances lack critical information about the validity of votes. You don’t have a centralized system with back door access to monitor and maintain things.
You can anonymise those votes with a hash if your data is structured to need a username for a key value. Use the username as a salt if you must. However the Lemmy API has plenty of metadata to prove a human account that is not a username. Creation date, how many previous comments, if they're banned from another connected instanxe. This isn't about mod tooling or APIs this is about anonymity and privacy.
There's no need for a fediverse wide running tally of upcotes for a comment on Lemmy
I vote for no upvote or downvotes, why build a token for a false economy like the upvote at Reddit or the note at Tumblr or the like on Facebook.
Endorphin buttons are not good for anyone.
You don't want "chug bleach to cure coronavirus" content being on the same level as actual intelligent discourse
Don't tell me what I want
Apparently I have to because clearly you've been getting into the cleaning supplies
Ah. Smug and disingenuous. Nice to know you didn't read my comment and posted your opinion anyways.
I think it's possible to have both in a federated system. Let the instance the user is on keep the tally of who upvoted what, and let the instance the post is on to know only the tally from other instances. Should be up to instances whether to show this data to users or not. This way it'd be easy to find and defederate single user instances manipulating votes.
But, on the other hand, I don't see a reason to care about privacy of votes if you can't even delete a post or comment. Fediverse is, by design, not very private, why bother with just this one aspect of it then.
Based on the comment, it seems there's more opposition toward visible downvote than upvote, so maybe dev should just make upvote visible and not downvote?
There's more talk about how bad visible downvote is and no one seems to talk about the upvote lol.
This is how it is in mbin. Well, over at the instance I'm using at least.
I find it amusing sometimes, because I can see whether posts have been liked from Mastodon or other services. Gives some insight into how interconnected we really are.
I guess over at Lemmy you can't currently tell if your post is boosted by a Mastodon user. Sometimes they are, and in theory they can kind of live a life of their own from there on. It's fun to be able to see when it happens.
My posts and comments are already exposed, so it seems like it would make sense to make votes public as well. I think it contributes to the general spirit of the platform.
You could make a client or browser add-on or something that just uses a separate account for all your voting.
You know what this feature is really useful for? Seeing who upvotes spammers to preemptively block them. Admittedly, I haven't had much of a use for that aspect since kbin.social died, but it was neat while it lasted.
Sorry, what's an upvote spammer and why are they undesirable?
Op is talking about accounts that upvote spam content. For the most part those accounts will be the spammer's alts that will be posting spam when the current account gets banned. Blocking them while they are still being used for vote manipulation means you wouldn't have to see their spam in the future.
Wow, did I misread that badly. Thank you for explaining.
Someone mentioned something similar in the GitHub thread, suggesting that this should only be available to mods or admins. I thought it was reasonable.
To spam on here I suppose it’d be good to try to start a popular community on your own instance and then see who usually reports and downvotes spam, then block them from accounts you plan to use to astroturf or otherwise send spam.
Sigh
absolutely a horrible idea. please for the love of god don't do this, it will only lead to people getting dunked on for how they upvote/downvote.
I think they should focus more on getting rid of bots, and get a little less ban happy on the people that are calling out bots or bullshit.
I'd love to see what mod removed content or banned someone.
Moderation logs are already public.
Standard disclaimer that you're gonna find objectionable content in there, browse at your own peril.
On your instance it can be found here: https://lemmy.today/modlog
It doesn't show which mod though, just that a mod did something. Unless I'm missing something.
It does look like your instance's mod log anonymizes all actions, at least the first couple pages I skimmed seemed to be that way.
I'm not sure if that's a Lemmy thing in general or if it's something lemmy.today has configured. On my instance, which runs Mbin, the moderation log looks like it has the *option* to anonymize the mod name (which I think is new since last I checked), but that isn't being used universally.
It's unfortunate because it really has the feel that there is a mod that has no business being a mod and has been going on a power trip. I have no way of figuring out who.
Votes are already public? If they weren't, federation of votes wouldn't be possible.
I think the change would make it accessible to non-admin users
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That's bad and Mbin should change it.
Maybe. There are likely both *bin users who agree and disagree. Even if they all agreed and removed it, though, there isn't much stopping others from running older versions, patching it back in, or even starting entirely new software that does the same. The fundamental issue, the false privacy of the voting system, remains.
Which is a good point, I included it in my longer comment here
https://lemmy.ca/comment/11097046
hypothetically, I suppose it could alternately be done by instances just federating the number of votes from their instance and only storing who voted what internally. Though then you might get issues with very easy vote manipulation if a server just says a lot of people voted a certain way without needing to make accounts to "justify" the fake votes.
If a website could be sure none of their users are malicious/bots and all of the users are perfectly rational and virtuous then public or private voting wouldn't matter either way. That being nearly impossible, why not a reputation based system like Stack Exchange? Only when an account meets certain requirements they can vote.
To boot, on the website tweakers.net one can actually vote -1, …, +3. - +3: “Spotlight comments are of such high quality and substantive value that they clearly stand out above the rest” - +2: “Informative and interesting comments that are a useful addition to the discussion in an on-topic thread or the information in the article” - +1: “Nice on-topic responses with knowledge that is common knowledge” - +0: “Comments that do not contain a relevant contribution, but are posted with good intentions” - -1: “Flamebaits, trolls, misplaced jokes, unnecessarily hurtful comments and other comments that violate our terms and conditions or house rules”
[Posted this comment on GitHub.]
Any implementation is of course free to use a reputation system, but it seems hard to implement. You don't necessarily know all the votes a remote user has received. Say you get a vote to a post from a user who you've never heard about before. But actually this user is a well-respected member of their own instance and has been on that instance for years. Meanwhile, your instance believes this is an inactive spammer or new account or something.
Couldn't you have the main instance take care of it? I don't exactly know how activitypub handles votes but if they're reported back to the users home instance it could be calculated there.
For example if I had a reputation of 12 and I posted on a different instance and got enough votes to get 1 extra reputation those votes would be reported back to my instance which would update my rep accordingly.
But how would I, an external instance, know your true reputation? Would I need to ask your home instance and just trust that? So when I ask "what level of trust should I put in this user", a malicious instance could just say "a million reputation points" and I just need to trust that? I don't see how this is going to work.
Yeah that's fair, but without some form of centralization I don't see how you establish trust. Unless you have every instance scan every users history but that would be pretty inefficient
Who determines the quality of one's posts though?
The users? Users are reactionary and often vote based on how a post influenced their feelings. It probably works on Stack Exchange because the scope of the forum is solving technical problems.
This is actually something I have not thought of, the only issue is that people are going to use it as a I like this instead of this is high quality, which I think is the biggest hindrance of that. This is also going to be nearly impossible to moderate on a federation level because an instance could be spun up that would lie about the reputation of an account and everyone would just go to that instance due to the fact that it doesn't have that restriction
-1 for rep/karma system. Most people agree that it's good we don't have karma here.
If they are shown to mods and admins then all the positives from the list are already included no?
What do users have to do with detecting „patterns” and bad accounts?
Witch hunting mostly. Big 'we caught the Boston Bomber reddit' moment.
Guarentee you will start witch hunts by making the votes more accessible. But if you want every user to be able to do that then go ahead. My ability to keep myself occupied here is already not that large, maybe some witch hunts are what we need to drive engagement up /s
It won't. You can block him it you don't to answer his questions. Anonymity creates treacherous and malicious people who know that they don't need to justify their actions. Before you start saying about stalking and doxxing know that I'm for using pseudonyms.
Nah I’ll fuck off.
arent they already though?
It's instance specific, but you can see it all if you try hard enough.
On a backend yes. But it's not as easy to get to as just opening your profile and forming opinion on you by looking at your voting history.
looking forward to chuds judging me for my voting history
That'd be nice.
I'm split, but I lean slightly towards no. On one hand, it could be good for discoverability, and it would help my efforts to make a client-side algorithm
On the other hand, it will make one of Lemmy's problems worse - engagement. Some people will vote less, and it's already feeling a little quieter around here as the numbers settled after the Reddit Exodus. I doubt it'll be a massive change, but a .5% decrease in voting, permanently, could make a difference
Ultimately, you can see it on federated platforms, so *shrug*
Idk why anyone would think it's a good idea.
I would like the option to make it public on my community. I have asked people not to downvote amateur bakers for just trying to improve their skills but some assholes don't listen.
A community specific downvote disabling would be pretty nice for this occasion.
True. Disabling downvotes would make a whole lot more sense than making them public and shame people who use them.
This I miss from the public downvotes in kbin.social. It was a great way to weed out people i don't need as part of my internet experience.
I don't see how that's much different from making a comment, it's not election, how is voting on a comment/post different from voicing your opnion with a comment?
Do I prefer the completely private option? Yes, but if the alternative is that some people can see and others can't, I prefer that everyone can see it.
Do not want.
What a horrible fucking idea. You are want this place to be an even bigger echo chamber than it already is? Yes, let's allow the majority of one opinion brigade people's histories to further ostracized them!
Admins, for smart people, can be fucking idiots.
The protocol fundamentally exposes them. Absent protocol changes, if someone hasn't already, sooner or later they'll just make a website to look them up.
There are many things that don't happen because nobody does them. Or should we start walking around in a bullet proof vest in case we're shot?
We're asking for votes to be private. I think your example is ridiculous.
Votes already are public to all server admins (I can see exactly what you voted for in communities my instance knows about).
This is why they need to make this change, right now theres a false sense of privacy. If I really wanted to see your votes right now, all I need to do is to set up my own instance.
That's not necessarily a false sense of privacy if it works. There's an inconvenient barrier to searching vote history and if you do it in the current system you'd be recognized as petty at least. Easing access is not going to make Lemmy better.
I've learned today kbin and mbin exposes it to users too
"All you'd need to do is set up an instance" is waaaayyyyyy more work than "all you need to do is click their profile"
You don't need a whole instance, you just need a user on another service that have votes public, like Mbin.
I checked and didn't see them there, but maybe I was looking in the wrong place. Not saying they don't exist there. Fwiw, I wouldn't be replying with what I did if people had said something like that instead. I just find it laughable that people suggest setting up a whole instance as if that's a simple thing. Checking from an mbin instance is a much better argument.
I think you may need to be logged in or something, not sure.
Is this meant to be reassuring? Because it really isn't at all, and it just seems like you're being dismissive to downplay the issue.
No, I just don't see how setting up an entire instance being a good argument. As others have suggested you can check it from mbin right now. I couldn't find it though. If that's the case then my opinion changes.
So because it's hard for you to access but easier for others, it's not a problem? One user could just publicize the info on a more accessible website.
Do you have a better idea to make it easier to flag bots and government propaganda?
It's pretty simple for me. Privacy is a good thing, lack of privacy is a bad thing. Think of the children arguments, which your line of thinking is akin to, is not justification to remove anonymous interactions.
?
No.
Baked in visibility of votes and blocking that only works one way makes Lemmy (and anything based on ActivityPub) less functional from an end user standpoint. Wish I knew a decent, somewhat popular alternative that implemented these features
Yea these things are unfortunately hard dealbreakers for some people. Hopefully the situation can improve in the future.
There are merits for it and against it. My biggest concerns would be privacy regarding data scrapers .
Regarding poor behavior, I really think that ultimately comes down to moderation on the platform. I've only had a few poor experiences but I am also someone who sometimes sees certain threads as dumpster fires and refrains from joining in or refrains from responding when I feel there isn't any form of discussion or chatter to be had. I can understand that it likely happens more often than not but I also believe that moderation is the only reasonable way of curbing it. Moderation teams have to make it clear that the behavior is not welcome and that it will be dealt with.
The protocol already exposes votes, so they already have that. It's just not currently visible in the Lemmy web UI. You can, as other people on here have pointed out, already go to any kbin/mbin instance federated with a lemmy instance and view upvotes on a post or comment on that lemmy instance. Not downvotes, but kbin/mbin don't propagate downvotes.
seems trivial to check for a login/subscribed etc. then increment up//down votes. why link each vote to an account in public? maybe for mods an account(s) to be banned for botting votes?
Because then people can vote an unlimited number of times.
There needs to be some sort of identifier
array votes[post_id, vote]; // for storing in user profile not public but can be hashed if you don't trust your dba
Enumerating every user to get the vote count on every single post/comment seems too computationally expensive.
post has it's own count, this was about a user's vote history in their profile
Ah okay
Yes. The act of voting a comment up or down shouldn't be much different to hitting reply to that comment.
Upvote/downvote systems do exist to overcome those "+1" "-1" posts on old forums. You are not voting for the legislative elections. You are just interacting with another person comment/post in a way that does not require writing. If post comments, are not anonymous, upvotes/downvotes shouldn't be anonymous as well.
What happens when foreign actors intent on influencing public policy decide to harass everyone critical of their issue? People will just stop being critical of the foreign narrative to stop the harassment, and you'll wind up with posts that are completely against the public interest and for the foreign narrative.
You can already see this effect to some degree in comments, it'll only get worse if everything is made public in the UI.
As counterintuitive as it is, regulated secrecy is necessary in all democratic processes, and I would argue that includes online forum debates.
It would actually be nice if community mods had the capability to turn the community to anonymous for comments and posts as well. Is knowing who posts the information more important than the information itself? If it's worthwhile to share from one person, it's worthwhile to share from everyone else so identity isn't all that important.
I think they should be public. They’re already accessible for mbin posts and anyone administrating a lemmy instance. It should be clear to all users that their votes are already not private.
Someone could make a lemmy instance just to get voting behavior and make a website with cool graphs and stuff today and the only thing that could stop them is defederation. If Lemmy gets popular, this is just an inevitability.
Imagine if a large instance decided to do that today. Imagine if lemmy.world released lemmy.world/votes. Would people defederate just for that? Remember: Mbin already displays scores and I don’t think anyone has defederated over it.
Might as well put it on the interface so everyone understands it isn’t private. Rip off the bandaid.
Exactly. If private votes were intended, Lemmy servers would have had voting privacy setting where the vote is federated as
@privacy-vote-{sha256sum userid & postid}@instance.fooinstead of the actual voter's username.Not privacy-protecting. You can easily deduct the voter by enumeration.
A privately-stored salt would fix that :)
Then what is the point of hashing the data? Just use an UUID.
Anyway, this is all pointless bike shedding because the activity needs to be associated with the actor, as it can only be accepted if the signature can be verified.
I agree that it's bad that there's a false impression of privacy, but I think it would be better to allow this as an extension or something and not include it as a feature in the UI, or at least not on by default. That way people who otherwise wouldn't bother won't be tempted to drive themselves crazy looking for imaginary enemies.
If I can't vote privately then I don't vote.
They should put the rest of the nails in this coffin. Go full clique.
Then you should not vote on the fediverse at all, since votes have been public since the beginning. The Lemmy UI just doesn't let you see the votes.
Your votes already aren't private, they're simply not easily accessible (by the average user). I won't get into the technical details but the short version is that every instance owner who is federated with your instance already knows how you've voted. Someone could make a website right now that collects votes and shows how someone has voted or who upvoted/downvoted a post or comment. It's already public information.
It would be very cool to have something like this from a data analytics perspective. Similar tools have existed for other platforms before.
You don't. You never have. Voting already is not private
That just makes me feel like never up/downvoting anything on Lemmy. I think it's super creepy that the devs and seemingly most people on Lemmy are A-OK with this.
I don't mind because I don't care who knows what posts and comments I vote for. I'm more than happy to stand up for what I think and why I think so.
Worst case. I get banned from .ml communities for seeing through the blatant ccp propaganda. No loss there.
Just curious, are you a man? Specifically, are you a white man? Because pretty much every POC and woman I know is far more privacy/safety conscious than damn near every white guy I've met who just lives his life with a ho-hum attitude about privacy/security.
If someone never comments in their regional instance but merely upvotes a post or comment, it's ridiculous that this info should be made public because it can easily lead to someone getting doxxed. It's so noble of you that you're more than happy to stand up for what you think, but I really wonder how folks like you would feel if that involved your home address being targeted.
How very American of you. Me disclosing my ethnicity to you would do a lot more on the way of doxxing than any voting pattern ever could. Don't you think?
How exactly do you imagine "never commenting, but showing votes" might dox someone?
My home adress is not on display here. Imagine if pigs had wings. Imagine living on Mars upside down. And how long is a rope?
You need to explain why because either they're misunderstanding something or the two of you are using different definitions of private. In both scenarios asserting that something isn't private won't do any good.
As you wish, and probably a good idea;
Voting on lemmy is not private because anyone who wants to find out. Can. Be it moderators, adminis, or users on federated sites that simply show it for everyone.
Maybe a model where upvotes and downvotes can per instance be federated either publicly or aggregated? So an instance admin could choose to bundle together the vote totals and push them to other instances and it would just show the total number of votes on comments and posts by people on their server rather than the individuals. And if a federated server acts up and sends bad vote totals, the instance could be blocked for it as a trade off.
The underlying protocol, ActivityPub has no support for aggregated votes.
How would you detect this? It seems very hard.
Vibes, generally. If you see a server regularly having lots of downvotes or upvotes on things that otherwise would go the other way, it's probably a bad sign and asking the other instance admin what's going on should be a way to start figuring out how to handle it. As for activitypub, there isn't a generic server to server message that could contain a VoteTotals field while updates to the standard are proposed for addition?
I don't think vibes is good enough. There's not enough certainty there. You could ask the other instance admin, but who's to say that admin is cooperative? They could be actively malicious and hiding behind this mechanism. You would ask them what's going on and they'd just say "nothing bad to see here" and you would have no way to disprove that.
There is no such thing at the moment, though Lemmy could in theory implement it among its own instances, though even that would be hard. But it would be very non-standard and wouldn't work with other ActivityPub implementations.
Ah okay, my bad. Sorry about this.
That's okay, these are very technical things. No need to be sorry :)
I just hope my app hides them
That’s creepy
I was of the assumption they were private. Please make them private then because I want no one looking at my votes
They can't be completely private because instances have to share how many upvotes each post has. That's a limitation of the fediverse, since everything is spread across many independent systems, data has to be exchanged across them.
As of now, they're *semi-private* because end users can't easily see who voted on a post/comment unless they manage an instance themselves.
I know the amount of votes has to be shared, but I don't see why other moderators (hell, even mods of the main instance) need to be able to see who voted on what
If they did that, anyone could spin up an instance and start just fabricating votes and there'd be no way to know
So votes are not easily manipulated?
This would require a major change in the underlying ActivityPub protocol. This isn't going to happen for years, if ever.
Yes, and there's no genuine argument otherwise.
If you want Lemmy to grow and not be completely overrun with bots posting propaganda and signal boosting extremism, showing votes is the only way forward. It's the only mechanism by which independent parties can discover and expose things like "every post and comment by this account is upvoted by these 20 other accounts that have never posted and whose names follow the same formula".
The privacy you're mourning never existed in the first place and it *can't* exist on any platform. For Lemmy, it's required for federation. On sites like Reddit, you have privacy from other users, but not from the company or anyone they sell that data to.
Since true privacy isn't an option, it would be *far* better to be open about that lack of privacy. This thread is already riddled with people who thought their votes were private, rather than just inconvient to look up. That's *far* more dangerous and deceptive.
This needs to happen, regardless of the ill-informed tantrums it may cause. If you want to upvote pornography without it being used against you, create accounts that are strictly for pornography and properly compartmentalize your accounts.
Problem is, it actually encourages a hive mind. I've already had 2 people try to bully me.
I'd go one step further. Upvotes down votes and totals should be hidden entirely. This would encourage people to post based on their own without external influence It reduces the incentive to use bots
Then tell those people to get fucked.
Unless you have an actual implementation of how that would work, telling us "what you'd do" is just a fantasy. You can't "hide" things from federation -- they're either included, removed or made inconvenient to access.
Does "posting without external influence" even have any value besides sounding cool? The entire concept of Lemmy and Reddit is that external influence floats and sinks content. If you want unranked, anonymous content, you want 4chan (which is of course riddled with extremists and good content is almost entirely drowned out with worthless shitposts).
Personally, I'd rather that "external influence" was as fair and open and accountable as possible, rather than "I wonder if 500 of those votes are just Russian bots".
My implementation would be hide it from the UI by default for instances
Also, never said unranked.. I meant simply hide the rankings. Part of the disadvantage of showing the totals on the UI means that high upvotes make it seem like it was highly popular. It also means that people don't mindlessly upvote posts simply because there were a lot of upvotes. By hiding them, you know its popular, but no how popular. It changes the way people interact so it's more normal.
Showing Upvotes/downvotes doesn't show whether they are bots are not. It just means they'll upvote/downvote more random shit and mess around wit the rest of the posts, so more crap rises to the top because they're interfering with the rankings.
There are easier ways to identify bots.. And, it just aids abusive people. I don't think it will assist with bots at all.. Sorry.
Sounds trash to me. Fortunately it would be trivial for me to add them back in because again, all you're doing is making the information inconvenient.
Is that how your mind works? I've never once done this and I'm extremely skeptical that anyone does. Sounds to me like *you* don't like the content and have decided that nobody really does, they're just upvoting it because it was upvoted.
A log of votes is the data you need to discover bots. It doesn't magically reveal them, nor did I claim it would.
Voting on random shit might make a slightly more plausible voting log for a bot but that's going to be far more obvious than you think, won't actually interfere with the rankings if it's truly random and once again, *not* having rankings shown doesn't address this problem either.
Votes and rankings are always knowable, even if you hide them from the UI. If there is a pressure to make bots plausible through random voting, that pressure exists regardless of it being shown on the default UI. All you're doing is misleading users about what information they're exposing.
Describe them.
You've already claimed to be a victim of them and your solution does nothing to address it. You're just adding another value to the list of poorly obscured information, because it's what you personally want.
Yes, bias is a thing. Ever hear of the placebo effect? It gives people a bias before clicking the link.
In fact, showing rankings actually makes it easier for bots because of that bias, they just randomly click stuff to appear neutral, and upvote their target posts, which when they say +1.4k, you'll be biased into thinking it's a popular opinion. Hence why hiding them by default actually maybe has benefits. There are no advantages to seeing the votes other than abuse. Name some.
As you said, they're already accessible, so there is no point of bloating the code. Let's not make them even more so and encourage abuse.
What problem is being solved here by doing this?
Hear hear!
Well said and argued.
+1
Thanks.
Seems fine? Voting was, at best, only slightly anonymous anyway because other platforms that get the AP action will happily tell you exactly who did what when even if the Lemmy UI doesn't.
And, honestly, if you don't want your fake and nearly anonymous internet name associated with doing something, eh, maybe that's a sign you shouldn't do it?
Yeah - dont upvote laydyboys unless you want all to know you like them. Its a sign you shouldnt do it.
Also all books you lend from the library should be public knowledge. No hiding!!
I mean, nice strawman but what was more happening was you were telling your friend you liked ladyboys, and then your friend ran outside and told anyone and everyone who would listen that you liked ladyboys.
The only real change here is the Lemmy UI would stop lying to you about votes being private, because they never were.
On the contrary, I like gentlemangirls.
Terrible analogy. You can consume the post without anyone knowing. Voting is more akin to signing the guestbook.
Meh, that's rather just "I was here" or "I read this". Voting is more like "I liked/disliked this book".
You can also keep that opinion to yourself when reading a book from a library. Voting in this case is like signing that you like/dislike it in the back cover
It wasn’t an analogy- just an equally great idea.
So you would say they're comparable then? Maybe even analogous?
This. Unironically.
There is no such thing as privacy in the public internet. There never was. I take it as a given that if some loser decides to look me up they will dig even my IRC chat logs from some server I used to connect almost 30 years ago.
Anything you do in the *public* internet, you need to ready to own it publicly. If you want/need *real* privacy, this is the wrong place to be.
I think the best way to think about this is in terms of "affordances" of the platform and the balance of their merits. "Affordances" just mean the actions and behaviours enabled by the platform's features (a jargon-y but useful word I've seen others use in these discussions).
Broader principles like privacy are important too, but I think can easily lead to less productive and relevant discussions, in part because many of the counters or complications will come down to the actual affordances.
The biggest affordance is obvious: more polarisation & abusive/antagonistic behaviour
From what I've read so far, I think everyone shares a pretty clear understanding of what public votes will lead to ... a more heated and polarising dynamic, with potential abuse vectors opening up, and less honesty and openness in voting. And I think most share a distaste for that scenario. Either way, I do, and I'd encourage others to think about how it's likely result of public votes and with the internet being the internet, is unlikely to be pleasant or fruitful.
Specific people having access doesn't decide the matter
While others have access to vote data, namely admins of instances, mods (*for their communities*) and members of platforms that make votes public like k/mbin, I don't think this is decisive.
It's about the behaviours that are being enabled and the balance of behaviours and how they interact to form community dynamics, with the fediverse itself being an important factor. An admin or mod having access to votes is part of making their job easier, which is a good thing. It's power and responsibility. And the moment they violate the bounds of their role by "doxing" someone's voting data, that'd obviously be a bad thing, but with countermeasures we can take. We can leave their instance or community and our instance can defederate from them ... their account can be blocked and possibly banned by admins. On balance, this seems stable and fair enough to me.
In the case of other platforms, like k/mbin, that's definitely more tricky. But again, defederation is always a possibility here if it becomes problematic enough (however dramatic that could end up). This is just the nature of the fediverse, that platforms will differ on things like this. Again, if people start abusing that information from other platforms and instances, blocking, banning are options, as is the nuclear option of defederation with any such instances (which is a core balancing feature of the fediverse).
As it presently stands, k/mbin are a minority of users on the threadiverse and so whatever their platform choices are don't really affect the rest of the threadiverse.
In the end, you can only make the best platform that you can. That k/mbin do something we don't want to do isn't a good reason for following suite. If anything, it's a good reason to stick with what we prefer and continue to make the argument with them on their choices.
Privacy and transparency are relevant but not decisive
I agree it's an issue that it seems votes are private when they aren't. Again, I come back to the balance of affordances, and I think they're better as they are than with public votes. However misleading the privacy situation is, it can be handled by being more transparent with users by providing warnings etc.
Ultimately, the privacy problem on the fediverse is not going away any time soon ... it's the nature of decentralisation, and this should maybe be made more clear to more people! But making a better platform is a real problem in front of us right now and I think it's better to focus on that than how the general issue of privacy or consistency with privacy is best served.
Other platforms aren't that relevant
I think I saw someone mentioning in the GitHub dicussion that other platforms expose vote data. While true, many of those would be microblogging platforms (mastodon, twitter, bluesky etc), where, again, the balance of affordances becomes relevant. A "vote" there, normally called a "like" is a personal action between user accounts that are likely to follow each other with such being the core mechanic of the platform. On aggregators like lemmy/reddit, the core mechanic is making popular posts so that your content gets to the top of the feed (roughly anyway). While there's a lot of overlap, there's more angst here around what gets voted on and what doesn't and less inter-personal accountability and bonding. Posts and discussions are more public affairs and less conversations between people.
Technical can of worms
I wonder if making votes public would create the need or desire for enabling more post-specific options for users, such as making a post that can't be voted on or that doesn't provide public voting data?
What about the children!!
In the end, my bet would be that at the scale that lemmy is at, it won't make too much of a difference if votes were made public. I think some would definitely encounter more unpleasantness and some would definitely find voting a more stressful affair, but we're cosy enough that we'll cope. Going forward though, public voting for an aggregator feels dangerous and hard to undo. Yes, it could be technically removed, but if a culture is established that is accustomed to it and become desensitised to the negatives, they'll probably want to hold on to it.
I agree with just about everything you said, except that it won't be a technical can of worms to implement the change according to the devs.
Oh, I was more talking about the technicalities of doing anything that might become desirable once votes are public, such as opting-in to having your votes hidden or having a particular post’s votes hidden or whatever else may come out in response.
I can't read Chinese, so I'm not sure what good seeing their names would be. A downvote is a downvote.
They say twitter shows public voting but I thought Musk just anonymized likes on twitter because it was getting transphobes in trouble?
There's an easy solution. Dump and create new accounts every week or month or whatever fits your needs. Backup and move your data if you want (lemmy's data import doesn't work well with big data though).
Just like changing your password routinely increases your security, new online identity gives you privacy.
This is a lot of work for something that shouldn't be problem with a voting system in the first place, like there is no point in voting if it's not anonymous. I can see the reason that mods and admins should have to have it but it defeats the purpose of voting in the first place if it's not anonymous, personally speaking if one should be fully open, up votes should be not Anonymous but down votes which are going to be the target of harassment should be anonymized
How are harassing comments you could receive about your voting choices much different than harassing comments you could receive about the comments you make? Serious question. My instance only shows details on upvotes and not downvotes, but because the information is already public due to the ActivityPub protocol, it's already possible (albeit taking some effort) for anyone motivated to look at those details.
In both cases, it could reach the level of moderation actions against the offending user, but if vote details are hidden then you also lose the ability as a user to notice when (for example) people or bots are following you around and downvoting all your comments indiscriminately. While moderators and admins can still look into those things currently, I feel like moderation bandwidth is already slightly strained in the Fediverse, and relying on moderator efforts to catch that kind of behavior is going to be less reliable than noticing and flagging it yourself.
It's different because there might be some people who you always end up downvoting their comments and you don't even realize it's the same person because you don't look at user names and there aren't really that many prolific commenters here so they will see that you're always downvoting them and assume malice in a way that they wouldn't otherwise because they're not going through your comments, they're only looking at theirs.
For example, this comment just a few down:
They immediately assume that if one person is downvoting them it is malice instead of maybe that one person just disagrees with their comments for other reasons and isn't even looking at user names.
Edit: I just noticed you did the same thing in your comment too. There are not that many users here, just because someone is consistently downvoting your comments doesn't mean they are following you around, there isn't a lot of content and people who spend time here see a lot of it. Maybe they just disagree with every comment you make that they happen to see and have no idea or care who you are.
I think that comment you quoted is actually mine, haha.
Yeah it's a mild curiosity for me. It's fairly rare that my posts get more than one downvote, but it is very common for my posts to get exactly one. I'm sure it is just my brain doing its thing and constantly looking for patterns that has me wondering if it's largely the same person in the first place. You're probably right that it is not coordinated or malicious, and I don't really suspect that it is.
I would definitely not be messaging anybody to ask why I'm being downvoted; personally it doesn't bother me because of course not everyone is going to agree with what I have to say. But I do acknowledge that there is greater potential for that to happen at scale if votes are totally public for everyone.
Edit: And I am not claiming to be perfect myself either. There were certainly a couple users who I have consistently downvoted for what I have seen as bad faith participation. One of those users has mellowed out a lot over time and only rarely gets a downvote from me these days; the other slowly ramped it up until I decided they were worth blocking. I try not to reflexively downvote comments I simply disagree with, but I'm definitely guilty of leaving a downvote in lieu of having the energy to respond with push back to something disingenuous.
They aren't, however that doesn't mean that because one exists the other should do the same.
My instance while it has the ability to see scores I keep them turned off, I find the score system as a whole to be counterproductive to a healthy environment as it encourages an echo chamber effect. an effect that by making every vote public to the standard person will just become worse as now the people who were voicing their opinion via the downvote/upvote system, will think twice about voicing in the first place. It also removes the people who are non-combative/confrontational from giving an opinion as it links a name to the score. There's tons of people that would like to give their opinion about things, but don't want it to be able to be looked up easily, and don't want to be confronted about that opinion.
If conversations were healthy and always on topic I would fully agree with a public info voting system, but, there is no system in place to prevent someone from getting super pissed off that you downvoted their comment that's about how they love the color red when the conversation at hand is to do with the financial stability of McDonald's so they decide to just Branch out and nuclear downvote every other comment you have, or decide to try to harass you in your other comments. Yes you can block them and you can get the instance team involved but that can only go so far especially if the problamic user is part of a different instance, and like you said moderation is already strained so there's no point in giving even more work to them
The better solution in my opinion, is just keep the barrier in place, and honestly if it had the ability to I would say restrict down what the API provides regarding scores even further, but I'm fairly certain that the way it is due to the need of being able to Federate.
The fact that the devs even considered this is a bad sign, IMO. How out of touch does one have to be to think this is a good thing in any capacity?
Disagree. They showed their arguments, and those seem pretty valid to me, even though I disagree. IMO being open, transparent and promoting community discussion is a good sign.
How so? Most social media shows who liked stuff, it does make sense to consider it for lemmy.
Most social media is garbage for reasons including that.
a lot of software dev people are incredibly naive when it comes to how human beings interact and behave.
their biggest mistake is often they assume other people are chill nerds like they are...
Please realize that votes are effectively public already, just not shown in the Lemmy UI.
I support opening up vote logs to moderators in their own communities. Voting records add useful context to the nature of the exchanges happening, eg. if two people are having a back and forth, but neither is downvoting the other, it contextualizes the disagreement as less hostile.
I don't think it's a good idea to give every new user the burden of using that information responsibly. A minority would use it to retaliate, stalk, and harass, and there would be too many of them to reasonably hold them accountable.
Absolutely braindead consideration by the devs. I'll be quitting Lemmy if/when this is pushed through. Unbelievably stupid.
Please be aware that votes are already public, they just aren't shown in the UI. Other apps than Lemmy show the votes.
I know. But don't you have to be an instance admin to see them? Or can anyone do it? I feel like most people have no idea how to do it? Seems like a change if everyone can easily do it.
Your votes are already public and have been since you joined. There is just a slight barrier to entry to viewing the details that aren't shown on frontends.
I dont see the issue letting people see them. They are already public making it more accessible just increases equallity.
Votes are already public. This isn't a change
Yeah. Just look from a kbin instance, or if you host your own instance, there's a dropdown in the web interface to see who voted on a post/comment.
How are votes public? Someone’s been carpet-bombing my comments lately. I’d love to know who it is.
Servers can see who voted on what, even if the vote is on another server.
So if you view the vote from a server that makes the views public (like a kbin server) or you run your own Lemmy server, then you can see it.
TheLowestStone at lemmy dot world DarkDecay at lemmy dot world
Chaotic good admins are my favorite kind of admins. 👍
The easiest way to to take a look through a kbin/mbin instance, which exposes the vote information through the interface for everyone. The harder but equally valid way is to run your own Lemmy instance. Other instances will tell yours exactly who voted for what, and as an admin, you even get an option on Lemmy's web interface to see it.
Allow it to be configurable by server or community. Some communities may benefit from allowing the public or mods to see votes, while others would be hurt by it.
mods already see votes
And that should probably be configurable
To truly make that change, they would have to change how the federation works. Right now its visible to anyone who runs a server your server federates with.
I hear Mbin users can already see it.
Yeah, and I think that's the argument about making it public.
But access rights to stuff seems like the kind of thing that should be configurable, even if it requires a change and isn't backwards compatible
There I agree with you.
Making it public right now is useful to remove a dangerous false sense of privacy. But in the bigger picture I agree with you.
I wonder how one would solve that though. If you send a "vote" request without any user data, what stops you from sending 100?
I say make them public. It was like that on Kbin and it never brought trouble.
Anecdotes are cool.
Way cooler than astroturfing.
I value my privacy more than my exposure to astroturfing. Giving up privacy in exchange for more less astroturfing isn't a sacrifice I'm willing to make but if you are, go for it I guess.
If your privacy is at risk in a place like Lemmy, you might be giving up too much private information IMHO.
Sure sounds like a lot of victim blaming to me. If someone upvoted a post in their city's regional instance but never commented, it's insane to me that a) that vote should be publicly viewable and b) people would blame the user.
It is baffling to me how many people want to copy Reddit voting system, including hiding voting history, despite having left Reddit. The entire voting system over there is a huge part of the toxicity problem.
Downvotes should be removed, all votes public. Accountability changes peoples’ behavior and I can tell you that before kbin.social went down you could definitely see the difference.
This is clearly an unpopular opinion and I will be downvoted like crazy for it, but it is so exhausting watching forum after forum make the exact same mistakes.
Without downvotes, you get Twitter where even obvious rage bait drowns out everything. Downvotes aren’t perfect, but they’re much better than not having them.
Microblogs and threaded forums are completely different platforms with completely different issues
Additionally, there is no underlying algorithm deciding content on your behalf here like there is on Twitter. And we all know those algorithms favor rage bait. Not having down votes doesn’t change that in the slightest. If anything informs the algorithm more. They don’t care about what you like or dislike, they just want engagement at all costs.
Downvotes can be useful in certain contexts, like when you visit a thread and are looking for factual information, such as the answer to a tech question. I don't want to accidentally follow someone's bad advice because the bad advice didn't have any downvotes nor any responses as to why it was wrong.
It's not perfect, but voting is a quick, often effective method of fact checking.
It’s more of a vibe check than a fact check. But I think it’s definitely useful for the network to self moderate since mods are pretty much entirely voluntary on Lemmy.
Just to give a concrete example, there are a couple blatantly political posts on !fediverse. Do they belong there? Absolutely not. But by the time I saw them days later, the damage was done and they were already taken care of by downvotes. Should I really mod remove a week old post with 50 downvotes? The discussion there about why it didn't belong was fine, and didn't need to be hidden further.
The problem with seeing people's votes is you don't have context for why they voted that way. Did they upvote because they agreed, or because they thought it was an engaging counterpoint in an interesting discussion? Maybe they just thought it was funny or wanted the thread it was part of to be more visible. Someone looking at your votes could choose whatever perception they want if they decide to go after you for it.
How is that any different than what we see currently? We have no clue why people vote on our posts and comments one way or another
It is different in that the barrier to a user looking at your votes and choosing whatever perception they want is currently much higher.
What barrier? There is no barrier. You see the number and you make a snap judgment. If someone wants to obsessively check my vote count they’re free to waste their time. If they stalk me I block them. I don’t see what this is solving .
This is about seeing what posts you voted on. Like if you upvote a post that someone disagrees with for whatever reason or you downvote someone's post they could see that and go after you for it. Regardless of why you did it.
True, really wish that could just be a them problem though.
I'm against making votes visible. I don't want to make myself a target because I don't vote with the hivemenind.
Automatically removing downvoted posts is a bad idea, because you basically can censor any post when you have a couple of people.
I didn't switch from reddit because of the voting system, I switched because my app stopped functioning.
We don't have to be contrarian.
You can't have accountability and anonymity. There are people that post, not just upvote, garbage all day long. There's also plenty of occasions where people have been shamed for past posts in completely unrelated threads. I don't disagree with *those* things being public, otherwise we might as well use Pastebin, but we don't need one more way to judge people. It's also the simplest of acts. I've upvoted right-wing posts before but not because I agree but because they were making valid points and not resorting to personal attacks or demagoguery.
I’m of the opinion that downvotes are useful for self moderation of troll/off-topic comments or posts.
People also use it as a disagree button. That use doesn’t bother me personally but I see a lot of users get upset about having a negative score on a comment.
I think the best method is to keep the votes and either hide the score total or to not visibly show any score that’s less than 1
Let me ask you this: do you think even a slight majority of people use upvotes and downvotes to delineate between high quality/poor comments and posts? Because I think we all know that the majority of people just use them as agree/disagree buttons to try to build momentum during arguments.
That is (often) the noble intention by those who programmed into forums, but we all know that is not how it shakes out. Removing downvotes still allows us to push the best to the top considerably more easily than allowing up upvotes and downvotes does.
Self-moderation doesn’t work at scale unless you have a team of mods at the top aggressively policing the content, which I am actually in favor of but people also get mad about that and call it “power tripping.“
From what I can see, people will downvote shitposts even if they agree with it. But the downvote is used as the disagree button the majority of the time.
I will upvote any comment that seems to be made in good faith but I don’t have any illusions of that being how the majority of the network uses their votes. I think a higher percentage of people use their vote that way compared to Reddit but not much to make a difference.
That’s why I suggested hiding votes entirely. I think that would be unpopular because people like the dopamine hit of seeing your comment score go up, and so my compromise was to only hide 0 or negative scores.
Removing down votes is a terrible idea. Look what that did to YouTube
What did it do to YouTube? I remember there being a huge uproar over it...but I don't use it much but totally forgot that this even happened as it has made no difference for my light use.
I've been looking for someone to touch on this. I didn't like youtube getting rid of the downvotes but....what did it change? The only incidents I can think of is when there's vote bombing on a really bad video. Lemmynsfw got rid of downvotes and they're better for it. The only exception I can think of is a technical video that is just factually wrong but then there's always a comment highlighting that with upvotes. Seems like the only thing we lost was sensational downvoting and the thrill of jumping on a like-minded group dislike.
I partially agree with you, the voting system as a whole should be removed in my opinion or upvotes publicized but down vote should not. It's far too easy for down vote which is used commonly as in off topic or disagree to be taken the wrong way and cause targeted harassment. Making the whole thing public as a whole is just going to make dissants refuse to give their opinion strengthening echo chamber issues
I agree, there doesn't seem to be a good way to make voting not at the very least semi-public anyway so just stop a) pretending the information is protected and b) remove the not-a-disagree-button-but-totally-a-disagree-button. There is a report link for rules violations, maybe a separate one for spam would be good as well, otherwise, I don't know, just allow people to add an actual poll to comments if they want to?
Exactly, if you see troll, just block him and declare "damnatio memoriae". It works exactly like this in fms usenet like forum for old freenet / hyphanet. You can even subscribe block / allow lists ( -100 to 100 weight lists ). In my opinion, it's very good mechanism. One of the best I ever saw
This kills the Lemmy.
How come?
Because it is giving in to the already problematic functionality of AP, which is the fact that way too much user telemetry is exposed to way too may people as it stands. Work should focus on making AP more private, not less.
There is nothing in the AP spec which states that user strings need to be plaintext. Lemmy should be building out tools which allow AP participants to optionally participate via tokenized user strings.
That's a fair opinion, but this is clearly not the place for that discussion, neither is the Lemmy GitHub repository. ActivityPub has channels for that itself.
Meanwhile, while ActivityPub still has this state of making votes effectively public, we should decide how Lemmy should handle that. We can always change that if ActivityPub changes later, but that is probably years away, if not forever away.
Best option for privacy is not to vote
As mentioned previously "this kills the Lemmy". Threaded discussion platforms rely on voting to sort posts and comments.
I can't imagine as big of a chunk are so worried about their privacy that they'd affect Lemmy overall. It's just votes, who cares
Didn't kbin have a separate mechanism for supporting a post in a more public way? I can't remember how that worked now, but it was in addition to the regular voting I think?
Kbin has upvote, downvote, and boost. Boost comes from the microblogging side, kbin does both content aggregation like Lemmy and microblogging like Mastodon. On the content aggregation side boost counts as 2 upvotes and it functions as normal for the microblogging side. Kbin.social is the only Kbin instance I used, I expect that it works the same on other Kbin instances and on Mbin but I don't know for sure.
I use MBin and it works pretty much as you described, it has upvote (similar to Mastodon like) and boost (similar to Mastodon repost)
Both upvotes and boosts are public on Mbin, but downvotes aren't (to prevent harassment)
It's called 'boosting' and I believe mbin kept it as well.
Yeah. It's the repost functionality common on Mastodon.
Back on Kbin.social I would have some followers from Mastodon, and when I saw a neat comment I would sometimes boost it and thereby push it straight to their feeds.
Same thing would work on Mbin, except that i don't have followers. Oh well, I still boost posts I find neat.
Sure, but I think we can go further.
Filter the votes I see based on which users or instances I've blocked. I've blocked them for a reason.
This would require aggregating vote counts for every single user separately. I think that is simply computationally infeasible.
You could do something like send a list of user IDs who voted, and have the client do the filtering locally with its blocklist. It would consume more bandwidth instead of computational power but probably wouldn't scale very well
Well you could do something like that but it wouldn't affect sorting of the posts then. If you have blocked an instance and that instance has upvoted a post to 1000 votes so that it appears on the top of the All-feed, you'd see it at the top with 0 votes (or only the votes from the instances you haven't blocked), which would be very strange.
Would the client not be able to sort the received posts after filtering? Granted things could be fairly inconsistent from one page to the next. Or maybe something like "Score: 0 (blocked: 1k)" to indicate the proportion of activity being taken out of consideration?
Definitely not confident that this is a *good* idea or anything btw, just spitballing
Your client only gets a page of the sorting at a time. You would only be able to sort that single page, but to do an actual sorting, you'll need more posts than just what appears on the front page.
I'm not sure it would. If my instance knows who up and downvoted a post, then they can work it out on the fly per post without even needing to tell me who did what.
Personally I'm not even in favour of the simple up/downvote system. Everyone uses it differently. "I disagree with you but thanks for being civil" can be up or down depending on who you are.
The problem is the sorting of the posts, i.e. what sits at the top of your feed. That can definitely not be calculated on the fly for every single user.
I'm down for more transparency. Lets make them public!
"That dude downvoted a cute cat pic, get 'im!"
"That dude commented saying he doesn't like cats. Get him!"
See how stupid that sounds?
EDIT: I downvoted the above post... 😬
Yes this should have been done already. Reddit it's structured the way it is to better serve the manipulative intentions of the company behind it. Another useful thing would be to have votes on each user profile to flag bots easily. Bots are a threat to this platform, extreme transparency is one way to counter them the other is to add restrictions.
I support this.
Do you think it's a reaction to Twitter (X) making likes private?
I wonder if they're aware, actually. From the linked issue:
What voting system on Twitter is he talking about?
Me too.
They simply want to police it better to suit their agenda
admins and owners of any federated instance can already see votes.
Having seen the complete absence of mayhem on kbin caused by vote visibility, the absolute and utter nothing that will come of this decision leads me to say yeah, sure. That said, I’d prefer improved mod tools over this, but option c isn’t listed.
In my opinion this setting should be set by the use. Whether they want their votes to be shown to public. If they deny Lemmy would just show "upvoted by anon" or something.
That is not possible. The underlying protocol, ActivityPub does not have a concept of private votes. This is not up to Lemmy to decide.
Yeah, I think the ActivityPub standard doesn't have a concept of votes at all. They're not defined in the first place.
No it definitely does, it has Likes and Dislikes. Lemmy uses those for votes.
Well, there definitely aren't any dislikes. But you're right with the "Like Activity". I missed that, but it's in the standard. It doesn't really define what to do with it, though. The standard has a "likes" and a "shares" collection. It stops there. The rest of our voting system isn't part of the ActivityPub standard. (And that's also why i missed the likes, because I searched for the word "vote".)
No, as I said, there are Likes and Dislikes. You can see the Dislike object in the standard here. ActivityPub is composed of various different standards that all come together to form a federation system.
Likes are defined as being added to the Liked collection, which is essentially votes. It's all just what you call a vote or a like, it's just semantics. It is definitely part of the standard.
I have continuous doubts if a grandiose tankie with nick after Jean-Jacques Dessalines can exhibit any grown up behaviour. It’s like 15 year old pretending for a while to be all democratic and responsible but who knows what’s in that narc edgy head.
Still, undoubtedly it will be a fun ride whatever happens
Generally speaking, you shouldn't do anything on the internet that you absolutely don't want to become public. If you don't want people to know your votes, don't vote.
Porn... I don't think most people want the porn they interact with at all connected
Alt account is for porn.
And tbh if someone sees me liking a boob pic that happens to pop on my main's feed, I don't really care
I really don't care about what any of you think, so go for it. Perhaps better discussion will come from it. And I'd like to block users with consistent negative behaviours.
The problem is if YOU choose to vote something, and a powermod admin dislikes your choice, they can, and do, ban people from many communities on that alone.
Admin can already see your vote.
Totally. And I find their chasing of voters distasteful. A user has the right to use the tools afforded them. There are no rules about voting, if they expect a certain behavior, they should remove downvotes entirely.
This is where I'm at it with it. Votes are already public to those who *really* want to see them and that cat's not going back in the bag. Anyone that goes out of their way to inject it into the conversation is showing their ass and adding a (likely extra) level of toxicity that blocking would fix.
They can already do that and you have the modlog to prove your innocence.
They basically already are, if you run an instance. Might as well make it easier.
Fuck yea lets go, then the petty people involved in discussions can see I'm not even bothering to down vote their idiocy.
I vote for public votes. Your comments, history and activity is already public, what can you gain from "hidden" votes as much as privacy?
This is a copy and past from my reply another community, sorry if you are reading it again:
I’m at the completely opposite end of the spectrum of most people, they should be public to all. It makes it clear whether the guy downvoting you is doing so maliciously or as a non-participant. Same for upvotes. Otherwise, just get rid of it and find some better mechanism. The people saying “NO!” or that they should be anonymous don’t really have a reason, your comment history is already giving you away and no one has a problem with that.
The worst thing public upvotes/downvotes might lead to are the same things your comments are already profiled for by the same people that would and perhaps a random getting mad at your downvote or upvote and voting back, which doesn’t matter that much with the current karma system. The benefits, however, are a clear vision of where those upvotes and downvotes are coming from, without it you are a blind person in a social networks but with it you can tell who is interacting with you and you can investigate why and even make judgement calls because you can see whether they interact like a jerk.
No drama witch hunts, accountability for the way you are interacting online, the the benefits outweighs the drawbacks, but people don’t want it because they feel insecure about it. I specially favor it because it could be a first step for a form of crowdsourced moderation (speculated on it here), where you can choose the people you think are voting comments to your taste to eventually have a select group large enough to determine which should show up first and which shouldn’t show at all, and it could be completely complementary to existing systems. Don’t want to see “yes, I agree” comments sorting as the most relevant? You might choose people who do not upvote but have engaged with the rest of the thread for comments you consider more informative.
No one from kbin/mbin instances can check out the downvotes you make, since this attitude has been so widespread many don’t report it to those instances. They can see people who upvote, and the sky hasn’t fallen because of it. Anonymity largely only helps the minority making the drama remain hidden.
What porn have you up voted? Hmm let's find out.
That would be an argument to support alts natively in regards to the sub and instances you are participating in, and isn't that compromising as it can already be checked.
I don't even think generally anyone even tries to reveal any personally identifiable details to social network account on reddit let alone lemmy. Maybe influencers and people seeking recognition, but they are going to be using alts anyway.
Forget downvotes, if you are anyone of note and people know your username, they are going to spend hours searching through your comment history, and that's going to be far more incriminating than an upvote or a downvote.
Nice, weird Al
word it better dude. i can't comprehend what you just said.
Sorry dude, maybe you can read other better worded comments in this thread that share the same sentiment.
If this mean we'd be able to see who has up- / downvoted a comment on our own and possibly on other people's posts then I'm all for it. This would be highly useful at filtering out the people here I want nothing to do with.
It also opens the door to more users obsessing/being confrontational with anyone who downvoted their comment(s). May send users off to downvote users comments for lurkers who rarely comment, which could shrink the population/activity over time.
Not sure where I stand on it, I guess if the info is there and will be used by others, it's good to be aware
Unavoidably so but then again, going sideways because of a downvote is just more data on who you might want to block.
Agreed, the more I've thought about it I keep coming back to it being safer with all users knowing the data is easily accessible by everyone else. That will prevent users from situations as well where maybe they upvote something NSFW/controversial thinking what does it matter if they didn't comment so no one would know it was them. Some time in the future someone may start aggregating the data to use to kink shame / call out people or such.
"Help me build my echo chamber."
Echo chamber within echo chamber I guess.
It's not the people whose opinions I disagree with who I usually block. It's people making snide comments like this while fishing for upvotes. I'll reserve my attention to the ones who have something to say rather than ones just wanting to make noise.
I mean this is a benefit, I'm just worried that this is going to create a echo chamber, Facebook has the same issue where people just hide post that they don't agree with which basically makes it so the only content they see is content they agree with and it's never positive to have only one side of an argument. That's a big reason of why the US politics system is failing(sorry it's just the biggest example I can think of) it's too segregated between the two major parties so nothing can ever get done
I fully agree with this in the terms of removing stuff that doesn't have to do with the conversation or topic, but I don't agree on filtering People based off opinion, which is what I'm worried this would cause
By using Lemmy we're already filtering out certain people and opinions. I personally think that the more control we have over what we see, the better. I don't think it's opposing views people want to filter out. It's the ones having those views and being dicks about it.
I can agree with that, I myself am guilty of blocking people who are hostile with their ideologies, I do believe that would be handy. But I know there is definitely people who are just going to block every person that has to do with their ideology, and giving them the ability to see the downvotes see who disagrees with their ideology I don't think it is healthy/should be promoted
I think it should stay private
Yes make votes public
ITT: Lots of people who have no idea how the tech works and couldn't be bothered reading the comments before posting
Go a step further,
Make it mandatory to comment if you vote.
Why not try it, then remove the feature if it turns out toxic?
I'm genuinely thrilled by how many here are wetting themselves at the thought of others knowing what or who they downvoted. That is really the extent of "privacy" awareness in most of this thread, wanting to get away with being dicks.
Downvotes are meant to balance out "likes", and minimise people gaming the score system — but let's be honest here, just as often they're a "disagree" button. And sometimes they're just bullying tools — an endless supply of "Kick me!" post-its to be distributed generously wherever.
Hot fix: end downvotes. Just yank them out of the system. Actually my preferred solution.
More realistic fix: make votes transparent, encourage accountability.
This is already possible - just go to an instance that has downvotes disabled, there are plenty of them.
God no. Websites with just upvotes have some of the worst threads because a small pocket of stubborn idiots keep upvoting each other.
Downvotes are one of the most important indicator if a post is trolling or nonsense. If it only shows the total, you lose all sense of perspective. A post could have 2 upvotes and 1 downvote or 10000 upvotes and 9999 downvoted, this massively changes the context of a post. Also why should I not use a vote to say I disagreed with something? I don't always want to write a detailed explanation, especially not when people reply with "did an AI write this?" or simply ignore what I said. Most cases are not like your comment where there's a valid reason to explain something.
No, much better that they have to wonder in private "did a not just downvote me?" 🙂 But I do appreciate you replying, much more than I would a vote in either direction.
Hard yes from me, thank you.
It matters very little to me if votes are made public. It's not even a top 20 reason I'm a Lemmy user.
Edited for clarity. I should have tea before I post.......
Yes make it public.
No real reason not to.
I think votes should be displayed publicly at the bottom of the comments section for each post. Make people stand by their convictions.
I say yes!!
I have a particular set of people that actually follow me from community to community, just to downvote what I say and the articles I post. All because I posted a neutral article about the Green Party to the c/politics sub. That made them mad enough to be obsessed about me. lol
So if you are determined enough to do that, then ya shouldn't be upset that people can see what you're doing.
Wow I want my obsessed about me haters too. Where are you people
Go post an article about the Green Party into the c/politics sub. Not only will you get plenty of people following you to downvote, but you'll get called a "russian troll farm employee" every single day. So double win!!
Deleted by author
c/politics. Great mods. But the majority of users there really really hate the Green Party. lmao
Deleted by author
You don’t, you just pretend that you do.
Hey, wow! What a coincidence. Funny that YOU of all people, would show up at the EXACT time I am talking about people following me. Crazy coincidence, don't ya think?
It'd be super fun to see who it is following me and downvoting me, right? I mean, not that YOU'D ever do that, right? All because I posted a Green Party article to a politics sub. You suuuurrreee wouldn't be the type of person to do that, I bet! Right?
SatansMaggotyCumFart is one username I immediately identify because I see their comments so often. Are you sure?
Well in this thread, just now, he just posted yet another screenshot of how many posts I make. Which he has already done about me earlier today in unrelated communities, so...
He REALLY likes to keep track of how may posts I make and then takes screenshots of it. lmao
Here you are throwing baseless accusations my way again.
You have proof about those, right?
I didn't say you did it. In fact, I said you never would do that.
I mean, you wouldn't be the kind of person to do that, right? Not you. Surely YOU wouldn't do that.
Right?
You’ve posted a comment or post roughly every thirteen minutes for the last ten days.
You also accuse me of crazy things then hide behind ‘I actually didn’t say it about you’ because you have no proof.
@UniversalMonk @SatansMaggotyCumFart I don’t know you, I’ve never seen you before, and I’ll likely never see you again, so feel free to skip reading this, but I’m absolutely not surprised that your posts get downvotes if this is indicative of your average comment. Accusatory, sarcastic, and grating are not the adjectives that I associate with positive energy. I don’t think public voting is going to solve the issue you described.
I may have proof soon. But you have nothing to worry about, right?
Why are you throwing these insane accusations around if you have no proof?
Yeah, but then what?
So you have confirmed that you have a fan club that likes to downvote you. What would you even do with this info?
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However, this particular user has deluded themself into believing this grandiose nonsense that they have a club of users who stalk them to downvote their stuff, when in reality we all come across them naturally because:
I personally do not give enough of a shit about this user to waste any precious time or effort stalking them across Lemmy. (Source: I came across this post organically and would almost assuredly be one of the users Monk is talking about.)
And I wish more people felt that way!
Got up to 49 downvotes for an article talking about a 90 year-old woman graduating college, brah. In a sub about college, with just 3 subscribers. So I deleted, and posted again. And 10 reports about it being an advertisement (which it wasn't so it didn't get removed). lmao
But yeah, I'm just being grandiose.
And one day after I got called a Russian Troll Farm employee after posting an article about the Green Party in the c/politics sub. With 20 DM's telling me to go back to Russia. Yeah, I'm just being grandiose. Probably all just a coincidence!
And by the way, me talking about doesn't mean I am crying and thinking I'm a victim.
I give zero real world fucks about my downvotes. I'll discuss it. It'd be cool to prove it with a public downvoting system.
But I don't really care if it happens or not.
And fuck all of you, I'm still gonna post any interesting article about third parties I see. :)
But hey, public voting names would def prove me wrong or right. So bring it on! :)
The specific college was Brigham Young University, a well-known conservative Mormon college that mandates religious education.
The persecution complex with a total lack of self reflection is truly epic.
Yep!
Once you know the accounts doing it, you can block them so they can't interact with your posts anymore.
I'm pretty sure that's not how it works on Lemmy. For some reason "block" here is really what "mute" is everywhere else on fedi.
I've seen a few "*There's no record of this comment*" and when I open up the thread in a private tab, it's someone I've bumped heads with but don't remember/care if I blocked them or they blocked me. I always wondered if it goes both ways, which it should, imo.
Yeah, that was what I thought to. It's just mute. Which is nice for the quiet, but I'd be great if the block would make them unable to downvote you and your posts as well. And it'd be nice if it wouldn't even let them reply to your posts. Because muting doesn't stop the poison the spread, just my personal ability to not see it.
I'm not entirely sure that's going to work out the way people think it will.
Suppose I'm some jackass that gets off on harassing you: if blocks prevented me from interacting with your content, and you blocked me, I would have confirmation that I've successfully gotten under your skin. I can then just make another account and continue what I'm doing.
If blocks don't notify or provide indication to the blocked party, they would either escalate their behavior (while you are blissfully unaware) and get banned by a moderator, or give up and move on to someone else.
There's also considering how that's going to work with moderators and admins: do they get to bypass the block and continue to comment and interact with you against your wishes? Does it hide your posts from them if they're blocked? It's a lot harder to design this type of blocking on a community-centric platform than it is to do for a microblogging platform like Twitter or Tumblr.
That's what mods and admins are supposed to do. It's not the users' responsibility to moderate the behavior of others, and it's a lot less stressful than trying to stop toxicity when you only have words in your moderator toolbox.
I'm under the impression that they can still downvote but you won't be able to see it.
Yeah, that's the impression I'm under. But if I'm wrong, then that would be awesome!
I wish.
Wait, does that mean that they can't downvote the articles I post, or just that I personally wouldn't see them?
Like is that possible now when we block someone, or can the blocked person still downvote our stuff right now?
The user above is wrong. Blocking is only one-directional and you won't see comments and posts from them any longer, but they still see the things you posts.
Ahhh, ok. That's what I thought, but I was kinda hoping for a different answer. Thank you!
Well I'd call them out on it and ask why they feel the need to do that.
Maybe, just maybe, if they know people could see how obsessive they are, it would take the fun out of the stalking.
I mean, at the end of the day, I don't care THAT much one way or the other. I just think it would be funny to give them a shoutout and welcome them to another round of downvoting.
I posted an article about a ninety-year-old woman being the oldest person to graduate from Illinois University. 9 downvotes within one minute of posting it. lmao
Right now they are laughing and rubbing their hands together when I post something, just so they can downvote it. Which is funny and sad. Like am I really that important?! lol
So public or not public, I don't care, but we can vote for, I'd say yes.
But I won't cry if Lemmy doesn't make the votes public. And I doubt there will be many Lemmy users that want their votes public, so I don't think it's gonna happen.
There are a lot of arguments about social pressuring users into voting a certain way. But not having votes public also leads to a lot of vote manipulation. Especially from the Hasbro's.
Lemmy is a lot like the early days of the internet right now. Very easy to abuse and mostly running on users not doing so. Bot accounts will start being a bigger and bigger issue with the growth and Lemmy so there needs to be a way to combat this.
Votes are also already not private as many users said. Just by running an instance one can see all the votes.
Would be cool
For my community ( !actual_discussion@lemmy.ca ) I would adore this *as long as it's available to Mods of the community the downvotes are in and Admins of that instance only*. It should absolutely not be visible for normal users.
We are hit with downvotes nearly every time we post a new thread on anything even remotely controversial so it would really help us filter out people who simply downvote to bury the thread and contribute nothing whatsoever to the discussion.
If you disagree, we want to know *why* and discuss that with you. It's the entire point of our Community.
Heck, we actively made it a rule to not downvote unless the user is not adding to the discussion, and that it should not be used as a disagree button. People generally ignore this, however.
That or just add the moderator option to disable downvotes for Communities. It would be an incredibly handy toggle.
EDIT: For an example as to why it should be implemented, see this post you're currently viewing where I give reasons, how it's been impacting us, some alternatives, and people hit the "fuck you" button with zero discussion and that's all. This is the problem.
I support this. I want to know who keeps downvoting my posts. They just need to allow a way to ban them from the community without needing to comment first.
This kind of sentiment is *exactly* why votes need to not be visible. As soon as the general expectation is that votes are public information free to be used and abused, it will be used and abused.
It exposes the troll and bot accounts that just downvote while having zero posts.
Admins and moderators can already take care of these sorts of problems.
Can moderators see vote identities? I moderate a few communities and have no idea where this feature is, if it exists.
I never said blocking people is an unreasonable option. That's something you just made up so that you could give your little speech.
I'm pointing out that it's very strange that when I bring up away this is going to obviously be abused pure knee-jerk reaction is to say ' why didn't you just block them' as if it's already happened.
Now to the matter at hand... What is the point of this? Why do users need this information? Every argument for it on the GitHub seems to only apply to things moderators need to know
Looks like you hit the wrong reply button and your post got disconnected from the thread.
That's a gross assumption of bad faith on your part. I pointed out that you would still have the same tools that you already have available for any types of harassment that may already occur.
I said that because, as you might have already learned from elsewhere in this thread, voting information is already public and any "annoying neckbeard" that was too-interested in you can just view your post from any other instance running software that displays those details. It *can* already happen, but I'm glad that it sounds like it hasn't happened to you.
I explained why I think it could be beneficial in another comment in the original conversation. Another user pointed out that I was overlooking your concerns that there would be an increase in harassment due to the increased ease of access to the information. That's a fair point which I had not fully taken into account, because as I said above, the potential for a bad actor to access that information is already there because of how ActivityPub works.
Since my original replies I have since found a post about PieFed adding experimental private voting to their ActivityPub implementation. You might be interested in reading more or trying that instance out for a while because of your concerns around public votes.
The people complaining about privacy have it fucked up imho.
Lemmy wasn't built for privacy. It was built to combat censorship and they are not synonymous. Again, imo hiding any sort of public engagement or impressions is just more censorship.
To simplify my point, were all here to engage with one another, so unless your being an asshole or aren't living up to your own values whatcha gotta hide?
Also, mass bot'ing of votes can critically stifle online discussion. Without visibility what course of action can one take to defend themselves aside from making unverified claims of manipulation.
Lmao, the dev instance is literally one of the most censored places on the internet.
Get rid of votes.
They only rank replies and posts as content, which is only useful for advertising or providing a platform without ads that hooks into the same antisocial behaviors that an ad revenue driven one would.
They also discourage replies, promote groupthink and provide a vector for abuse.
Get rid of votes. You’re not on reddit anymore, you don’t have to be a redditor .
Showing upvoters and removing downvotes completely!!
People downvote totally harmless posts and comments, just because they have a different opinion.
This useless and contraproductive negativity is the reason why YouTube removed downvotes and many other platforms never offered such a feature.
This is already possible, just join an instance that has downvotes disabled. This has been an option for years. If you don't want downvotes, just move to such an instance, there are plenty of them.
Thanks, did not know about this.
So, from a technical view....
There is a person who is mad about the fact that a different opinion might exist... That person clicks downvote in their app and it does not have any effect??
Or are the downvotes still broascasted to all instances, but "my new" instance just ignores them? Just curious, how dislikes enabled and disabled both work in a decentralized system....
They are good questions. The downvotes for an instance with downvotes disabled are simply ignored so they don't appear in the interface and they do not affect sorting.
For this user base it is the right answer. So many petty downvoters. On my site I'm considering a rule that would make it so you can't be the vote that casts a comment into the negative without giving a reason, and then that reason would be turned into a comment. If something is worth downvoting then it is worth explaining why someone is wrong. If you can't do that maybe you shouldn't downvote. I don't think you should have to do that every time. But if a comment is going to go negative someone should step up to the plate and bother to articulate. That way a comment can't get hidden away from the public just because a petty mob that can't even present an argument sees it as convenient if certain information disappears.
So in that case the downvoter who crossed it into the negative would not be anonymous.
i think that will end up pushing discourse on your site towards negativity
I believe there is precedent for that. I've seen people from HexBear say that because their instance doesn't have down votes they leave comments to criticize people. I get the appeal of wanting people to justify downvotes but this is a casual internet forum. Nobody is going to do that every single time. I'm more concerned it will lead to more simple negative comments like "this is stupid".
Doo ettt
Yes, absolutely. I am for pseudonyms but transparency. I would be very keen on having colors of the usernames to signify how old the username is. Also having a possibility to load block lists from files ( like github ) to allow sharing the block lists of the trolls
I am downvoting you
Ok