Lemmy devs are considering making all votes public - have your say

submitted by Rimu edited

Probably better to post in the github issue rather than replying here.

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/4967

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Avatar SorteKanin

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.

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Avatar imaqtpie

You should check out the PieFed concept that I linked. That seems to provide a layer of privacy managed by the local instance admin. I'm curious if you can see any obvious way it might be bypassed or exploited, because I know you have a greater technical acumen than myself.

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Avatar SorteKanin

Hmm it's an interesting way to handle it but it should be easy to correlate users and the voting profile by just examining voting patterns. It doesn't really fix it entirely I would say.

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Avatar imaqtpie , edited

I was going to edit my previous comment but I'll just put it here.

I understand your point, but I'm saying that private/public is not a binary concept. It's a spectrum, and making votes visible on the Lemmy UI shifts the position much closer to the public side. It will have a noticeable effect on people's behavior.

But I agree that it's probably possible to correlate the voting profiles in theory. Could potentially be prevented by randomizing the profile for each vote maybe.

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