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
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.
requiring either technical skill or admin access to circumvent.
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.
And the "we should not make it available for the public at large because it will lead to abuse" is also theoretical.
Anyway, I'm already on record saying that I don't like the voting system and that we should get rid of it altogether. Voting on content used to be about collective curation, not a constant popularity contest.
I'm also on record saying that we need to stop relying on systems that only give us the illusion of privacy and depend on the software developers for culture shaping.
If making the vote public gets people to be exposed to these fundamental issues of the current design, and leads us to search for better solutions, then I'm all for it.
It's not quite that simple. As far as I'm aware, it's difficult to fetch from another instance "after the fact" what all the votes are for a particular user or comment; you have to be signed up to receive updates on it, and then after the fact you can go hunting around in your own instance's DB and see what all the votes were (or your UI can do it, if it's supported).
But, yes, there are instance softwares that will do it, and no one's defederating from every one of those instances (nor I think should they). Someone posted a link to an mbin instance breaking down the votes for this post. Votes are not private.
I ran curl "https://mbin.grits.dev/u/mozz/outbox?page=1" -H 'accept: application/activity+json' and I could see your outbox. Apparently mbin does not put Like/Dislike activities in there, only your comments/posts/notes.
In a world where ActivityPub is only used in server-to-server, this would be fine. If we ever get to a (IMNSHO, better) scenario where we have more clients talking AP directly, then this will not work, and mbin will have to add those as well.
All of this to say:
the debate about "what Lemmy devs are doing" vs "what mbin is doing" vs "what PieFed is doing" should be seen as tremendous conflict with the idea that "The good thing about the Fediverse is that we can all talk with each other, regardless of where we are".
There is no sane way to square this peg into a round hole. Privacy and "Social Media" are inherently incompatible. The advice about not putting anything online that you are not willing to ever be made public is evergreen, and anyone that does not follow it will eventually have to learn it the hard way.
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?
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?
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.
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.
Just because people can go out of their way to find this information, doesn't mean we should remove all restrictions. That's a real twisted way of thinking.
What we have in place is already egregious imo, and a major flaw with the system in place.
That isn't really going out of your way, it is the base mode of how the fediverse works. Looking at something on a different instance.
Plenty of people just use mbin and see this, without any action at all.
The point is that as it stands right now, there are already basically no restrictions. The only thing perhaps missing is the knowledge that you can simply copy paste a link into fedia or another mbin instance to view upvotes.
You can open an issue on mbin about it, to restore a semblance of restriction. But currently as it stands, all restrictions are about as fallen as they could be.
You can ofc argue that we shouldn't open another equivalent hole in lemmys webui and api, so that you can in the future remove the ability from mbin.
I would in turn argue that this system has always been egregious, and that in the same sense as banning encryption you never hit those you want to hit using incomplete restrictions. Regular users are led to believe their votes are private, while the worst dataminers or trolls will always have their instances to query all of that info.
And how could you inform people that their votes are public without at the same time telling them how to get access to that info?
If mbin removes the info, you will get another fediverse software showing it. You will get fediverse activity pub log info pages, specific vote info pages, it will never end.
Has reddit ever managed to kill the 200ᵗʰ removeddit clone?
Please instead put your effort into changing the way lemmy federates, the only way to fix this is to make vote details private, between only a select few instances. An mbin dev in the other thread mentioned PeerTube as an example implementation where you could remove vote details like that.
You're proposing removing the bar entirely because it is not high enough.
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.
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?
I liked it being relatively obfuscated. Even though I rarely downvote. But the ones I do are the ones I'd like to avoid. Tbh I'm more ambivalent compared to my thoughts on karma.
People who downvote more than upvote tend to be the ones who get in fights a lot and say snarky, inflammatory and negative things.
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
That was my take on it too. The vague sense that you’re just going to end up with nothing but circle-jerks if you implement all these suggestions. I could also just be whooshing an attempt a levity, something obvious to a seasoned community moderator.
Hopefully my shitty attempts at socratic method rate a bit better then trolling, but I often doubt it :-)
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.
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.
I'm down to work on an analyzer tool that would make it easier for everyone to see the votes
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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
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.
You just consistently post the worst possible political pisstakes repeatedly
Strange that you would say that. I haven't posted any political articles to this community. This is the fediverse community.
nobody likes them when they run across it every time.
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. :)
environment more hostile to discussion and honest exchange.
"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.
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...
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:
Downvotes are not for disagreement. It's fine to downvote if the argument is false or deliberately misleading, but if someone is making a good faith argument that you disagree with, either make a constructive response or simply let it go
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.
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 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 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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?
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
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.
dont upvote laydyboys unless you want all to know you like them. Its a sign you shouldnt do it.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Any admin can already review voting activity, but some people don't realize that. This change would make it less surprising
it would make it easier for non-admin users to study voting activity and find abuse
it would make it consistent with other platforms that we federate with, which can already see votes
Potential downsides:
People will report voting activity that they don't like, even if it's not malicious.
Admins will need to set up rules on what activity they will act on (and also take action against people that spam bad reports).
It would also help to have automated tools to review voting activity since it's hard to do that manually.
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:
Mods and admins can ban people for upvoting content in communities they aren't in charge of. This might work on a small scale, but I'd caution against it because it often misses nuance:
it's very easy to accidentally vote on something while scrolling (unless there is a consistent pattern)
even if the community is seen as "bad", the post might be good (ex. it could be calling out the community)
Bad
it lowers the barrier for other types of abuse, such as tracking vote activity for advertising, approximating when a user is asleep, etc
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
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.
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.
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.
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”
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
For my community ( ![email protected] ) 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.
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?
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 .
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
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 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.
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?
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
I haven't accused you of anything. And what does the amount I post have anything to do with this thread?
Other than, well the people who follow me around, def have a lot of work cut out for them. I mean, fingers must get sore with that downvote button.
But hey man, showing up in a thread at the exact same time I am talking about someone stalking me, and then throwing up screen shots of the number of posts I make doesn't make you look guilty at all.
Nope. No way could we be talking about you, friend.
@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.
Hey, keeping posting screen shots of your interactions with me, when I haven't mentioned your name at all, sure doesn't make it look like you are stalking me. For sure it doesn't. Don't worry man, it's all good.
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:
Lemmy is a pretty small place.
They're a reasonably prolific commenter.
Every time they show up somewhere, it's a woe-is-me victim complex about how they're being downvoted (immediately drawing attention) or making the absolute shittest political takes imaginable, which again draws attention and downvotes. This could definitely be survivorship bias where I only notice their username on comments that are doing these two things and not on normal ones.
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.)
I personally do not give enough of a shit about this user to waste any precious time or effort stalking them across Lemmy.
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! :)
Moreover, they note that it's a small community with three subscribers, which could actually hold weight as evidence of brigading if we were on Reddit. But on Lemmy? Nah, you kind of just see everything.
If we're sorting by new on /r/all, I need to scroll back several pages on RiF to even see something that was posted 30 seconds ago; the chance that more than a few users will see the same feed there is tiny.
On Lemmy, by contrast, sorting 'All' by new gives me posts in the last 10-ish minutes on just the first page; things just move a ton more slowly. Consequently, there's a lot more outsiders who are liable to see and interact with your post in a small community.
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'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.
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.
Because muting doesn't stop the poison the spread, just my personal ability to not see it.
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 not sure which two trolls decided to downvote your comment saying "fair points," but here's an upvote for being a good sport about listening to me explain why your preferred implementation of blocking might not be more effective than what we have now.
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.
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!!
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
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.
They'd get defederated.
Ok, yeah, theoretically.
But we're talking about putting voting info into the UI for anyone to see. Not highly motivated and skilled bad actors.
And the "we should not make it available for the public at large because it will lead to abuse" is also theoretical.
Anyway, I'm already on record saying that I don't like the voting system and that we should get rid of it altogether. Voting on content used to be about collective curation, not a constant popularity contest.
I'm also on record saying that we need to stop relying on systems that only give us the illusion of privacy and depend on the software developers for culture shaping.
If making the vote public gets people to be exposed to these fundamental issues of the current design, and leads us to search for better solutions, then I'm all for it.
It's in the mbin ui already
It's not quite that simple. As far as I'm aware, it's difficult to fetch from another instance "after the fact" what all the votes are for a particular user or comment; you have to be signed up to receive updates on it, and then after the fact you can go hunting around in your own instance's DB and see what all the votes were (or your UI can do it, if it's supported).
But, yes, there are instance softwares that will do it, and no one's defederating from every one of those instances (nor I think should they). Someone posted a link to an mbin instance breaking down the votes for this post. Votes are not private.
I ran
curl "https://mbin.grits.dev/u/mozz/outbox?page=1" -H 'accept: application/activity+json'and I could see your outbox. Apparently mbin does not put Like/Dislike activities in there, only your comments/posts/notes.In a world where ActivityPub is only used in server-to-server, this would be fine. If we ever get to a (IMNSHO, better) scenario where we have more clients talking AP directly, then this will not work, and mbin will have to add those as well.
All of this to say:
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?
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?
Just because people can go out of their way to find this information, doesn't mean we should remove all restrictions. That's a real twisted way of thinking.
What we have in place is already egregious imo, and a major flaw with the system in place.
That isn't really going out of your way, it is the base mode of how the fediverse works. Looking at something on a different instance.
Plenty of people just use mbin and see this, without any action at all.
The point is that as it stands right now, there are already basically no restrictions. The only thing perhaps missing is the knowledge that you can simply copy paste a link into fedia or another mbin instance to view upvotes.
You can open an issue on mbin about it, to restore a semblance of restriction. But currently as it stands, all restrictions are about as fallen as they could be.
You can ofc argue that we shouldn't open another equivalent hole in lemmys webui and api, so that you can in the future remove the ability from mbin.
I would in turn argue that this system has always been egregious, and that in the same sense as banning encryption you never hit those you want to hit using incomplete restrictions. Regular users are led to believe their votes are private, while the worst dataminers or trolls will always have their instances to query all of that info.
And how could you inform people that their votes are public without at the same time telling them how to get access to that info?
If mbin removes the info, you will get another fediverse software showing it. You will get fediverse activity pub log info pages, specific vote info pages, it will never end.
Has reddit ever managed to kill the 200ᵗʰ removeddit clone?
Please instead put your effort into changing the way lemmy federates, the only way to fix this is to make vote details private, between only a select few instances. An mbin dev in the other thread mentioned PeerTube as an example implementation where you could remove vote details like that.
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.
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)
Except that it is, people with the skills already bridged that gap for everyone.
https://kbin.earth/m/[email protected]/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.
Ach, well, a known method to create a nice discussion
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?
I liked it being relatively obfuscated. Even though I rarely downvote. But the ones I do are the ones I'd like to avoid. Tbh I'm more ambivalent compared to my thoughts on karma.
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
That was my take on it too. The vague sense that you’re just going to end up with nothing but circle-jerks if you implement all these suggestions. I could also just be whooshing an attempt a levity, something obvious to a seasoned community moderator.
Hopefully my shitty attempts at socratic method rate a bit better then trolling, but I often doubt it :-)
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.
Technical people can struggle when a choice isn't a zero or a one.
I'm down to work on an analyzer tool that would make it easier for everyone to see the votes
(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.
I didn't downvote you, but I also use the term pseudonymous for a reason
But if you use that term, don't say what I said isn't true.
Interesting that you said you didn't downvote me and then the downvote from PieFed I saw just before is gone hehe
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.
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.
Yep. Same for me.
Mod-admins are already doing this, even if you vote and don't comment on something.
It's already public, it's just lemmy users who don't see them.
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.
Ahh, i see.
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...
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.
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'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.
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.
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...
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.
Hey, do I owe you anything for all the space I'm taking in your head or am I still living rent-free?
You are the one pontificating in my comment, and I am the one going personal. Seems like your reasoning is as good as your reading comprehension.
But hey, thanks for stopping by!
(Score: 5, Insightful)
Meta-moderation and multi-dimensional voting. We were happier with slashdot and we took it for granted.
Maybe the upvotes should only be available to the person who owns the comment or post. Maybe to the mods and admins, too?
Same idiots playing games with each others in the open is better than bots and manipulation going on behind the scenes.
Do not make votes public. It will lead to personal attacks.
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 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.
Boy oh boy, it sure is a mystery why democracies have people vote privately
The last thing I need is people knowing I upvoted a nsfw post, so nope thanks.
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.
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.
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 thank you. I've already had one person go off on me because of some perceived offense: https://lemm.ee/comment/13768482
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.
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.
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.
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
This would probably escalate a lot of arguments that break out in comment sections.
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
I would say no. I don't want some dumbass to interogate me about why I downvotes thia and why I upvoted that.
Please No
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.
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.
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!!
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
What will this accomplish other than facilitate brigading?
No, as it would create a lot of excuses for targeted harrassment and just increase toxicity
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 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?
Aren't they already practically public, given the federation?
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.
It should actually be made more private.
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.
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.
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
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.
Your arguing about the logistics of the changes, everyone else is here to discuss the change it self.
Votes are already public? If they weren't, federation of votes wouldn't be possible.
Idk if I trust that some powermod won't send me to hell if I vote against something they strongly believe in, akwardtheturtle style
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.
This would be a catastrophic mistake. Please don't.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Should be a server setting, just like how some servers can choose to show combined votes or separate up/down votes.
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
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
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.
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.
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. This isn't a change
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.
[Posted this comment on GitHub.]
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?
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.
No.
it should be a setting per instance to hide/show all, some or none
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
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.
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.
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.
Make it optional and opt-in.
Let's create separate accounts for voting and for posting so to improve anonymity and freedom of expression.
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.
Do not want.
I say make them public. It was like that on Kbin and it never brought trouble.
This kills the Lemmy.
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.
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.
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.
I dont see the issue letting people see them. They are already public making it more accessible just increases equallity.
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
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.
either way id still shit out my ass
Absolutely braindead consideration by the devs. I'll be quitting Lemmy if/when this is pushed through. Unbelievably stupid.
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?
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.
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
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.
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
I'm down for more transparency. Lets make them public!
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.
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.
I just hope my app hides them
That’s creepy
They simply want to police it better to suit their agenda
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.
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.
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
You could make a client or browser add-on or something that just uses a separate account for all your voting.
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.
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.
That'd be nice.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I can't read Chinese, so I'm not sure what good seeing their names would be. A downvote is a downvote.
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?
"That dude downvoted a cute cat pic, get 'im!"
They basically already are, if you run an instance. Might as well make it easier.
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.
They say twitter shows public voting but I thought Musk just anonymized likes on twitter because it was getting transphobes in trouble?
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?
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
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.
I think it should stay private
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.......
Go a step further,
Make it mandatory to comment if you vote.
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
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 think votes should be displayed publicly at the bottom of the comments section for each post. Make people stand by their convictions.
Why not try it, then remove the feature if it turns out toxic?
Hard yes from me, thank you.
ITT: Lots of people who have no idea how the tech works and couldn't be bothered reading the comments before posting
Would be cool
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.
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.
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.
Yes make it public.
No real reason not to.
For my community ( ![email protected] ) 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.
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?
Doo ettt
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 .
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
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.
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 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.
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.
I haven't accused you of anything. And what does the amount I post have anything to do with this thread?
Other than, well the people who follow me around, def have a lot of work cut out for them. I mean, fingers must get sore with that downvote button.
But hey man, showing up in a thread at the exact same time I am talking about someone stalking me, and then throwing up screen shots of the number of posts I make doesn't make you look guilty at all.
Nope. No way could we be talking about you, friend.
I sort by new.
It isn’t a conspiracy.
@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.
But it would make things more fun!
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?
Hey, keeping posting screen shots of your interactions with me, when I haven't mentioned your name at all, sure doesn't make it look like you are stalking me. For sure it doesn't. Don't worry man, it's all good.
You don't look guilty at all. Relax.
Then you have nothing to worry about.
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?
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.
Moreover, they note that it's a small community with three subscribers, which could actually hold weight as evidence of brigading if we were on Reddit. But on Lemmy? Nah, you kind of just see everything.
If we're sorting by new on /r/all, I need to scroll back several pages on RiF to even see something that was posted 30 seconds ago; the chance that more than a few users will see the same feed there is tiny.
On Lemmy, by contrast, sorting 'All' by new gives me posts in the last 10-ish minutes on just the first page; things just move a ton more slowly. Consequently, there's a lot more outsiders who are liable to see and interact with your post in a small community.
Yep!
Once you know the accounts doing it, you can block them so they can't interact with your posts anymore.
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.
Fair points!
I'm not sure which two trolls decided to downvote your comment saying "fair points," but here's an upvote for being a good sport about listening to me explain why your preferred implementation of blocking might not be more effective than what we have now.
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?
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.
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!!
Which politics comm
c/politics. Great mods. But the majority of users there really really hate the Green Party. lmao
What server though
Oh, Lemmy.world
https://lemmy.world/c/politics
Ah thanks had it blocked
You had some point, this looks like it will be absolutely deranged experience