Why can people see who upvotes and who downvoted post on Lemmy?
I woke up today, to a public comment in a Lemmy community asking a series of tagged accounts why they had downvoted certain posts
I thought that reactions to posts and comments are anonymous and now I don't really know what to feel about Lemmy any more.
In this case I had downvoted a poster because of its design, but was confronted publicly for being racist because the person assumed that I downvoted the message on the poster
EDIT: changed the title from "How" to "Why" because it broke rule nr 5 about it being a support question
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The Fediverse is open, everything you do on here is fully public.
It's why I prefer it over reddit, where who knows what really happens with all the vote manipulation and brigading.
To answer your question, it is all listed alongside upvotes on the posts if using mbin.
Depends on the instance, mine is an mbin instance but the upvotes and downvotes are hidden.
I remember coming across a site where you could put in a Fediverse URL and it would tell you who had upvoted and downvoted it, presumably it had an instance in the background that was tracking all that.
Edit: lemvotes.org, linked below by another comment.
Yes, the information is sent to your instance, and then is being censored by your instance. It's personal choice for the instance and it's support. But your instance must either be commonly supporting you not seeing it, or dictating you aren't seeing it.
Kind of like the championship football game played in the U.S. today before the Superbowl, where Fox edited out access to seeing people paying tribute to the man murdered by ice.
Sometimes it's good to have information, sometimes people think it is not
Wait what
I would like to see the ratio of up/down, because that's IMO much more informative, if you allow votes at all. Personally I think votes just triggers some dopamine crap and is totally useless most of the times (exceptions are serious places where responsible people downvote wrong information for example)
That's typically enabled/disabled in the settings of the client.
Fiddled around a bit and found a setting for that, or so it seems, gotta go collect some downvotes to try it out 😁
Thanks!
Aw, shoot. It doesn't seem to work for PieFed. For example, here's a link straight to the original instance and thread: https://piefed.social/c/historyart/p/1701717/
Changing that "p" to "post" didn't seem to work, either.
Isn't PieFed explicitly written to make votes anonymous again? Or am I thinking of something else?
Another commenter stated (its a little ways down the thread) they abandoned that plan due to complexity. (and other instance admins getting mad they couldnt see votes)
They ended up moving to a system where you now decide if you want your votes to federate outside the instance or not.
Thanks!
I'm also on fedia and I can see who upvoted and boosted a comment / thread / post.
Can't see who downvoted, though. I've actually considered switching instances over this since that's the most important thing to "be serious" with, it'd be nice if people were more judicious with their downvotes and having them be an obvious public thing might make people think twice about that. But the whole upvote/downvote thing in general just seems like a broken concept to me a this point and I don't care all that much about it.
I think downvotes are hidden for every Mbin instance. I don't know how it is with other software.
I am on an instance without downvotes and I really don't miss it. I think it took me about a week for the muscle memory of downloading stupid comments to fade.
If something is truly outrageous, I take it as a sign to just block the author. And if something is against the rules, I'll report it.
Fedia.io is also an mbin instance, you are speaking about the same thing.
Exactly. I enabled displaying the domains of every user, so I noticed that FaceDeer is on the same instance as I am and so wanted to point out this odd difference.
Even DMs?
Yes.
I don't know of any clients that publicly show it, but the information is sent out as a json that can be read by anyone setup to receive them.
Thanks for the clarification but is it for non-local DMs only or even local DMs and if so why?
Hmm I'm not sure if it affects local.
Because they're basically the same as a post or comment, it's how the fediverse works. They get sent out to anyone listening, and whoever is listening directs it where to go i.e. a community or users inbox. So all instances can update with a new post to their users who are subbed. In theory the DM would get ignored by everyone else who isn't the target, but one could easily set it up to not do so.
ActivityPub is public by design and admins can easily read DMs. Not sure about it Joe public can read any dm.
Admins of most services where data aren't encrypted can read data that is not public so I'd assume that by default.
Now my question specifically is about "Joe public".
I just block anyone who confronts me about why I voted a certain way. "Because I felt like it, fuck off cunt" is my go-to justification.
I like your style
The glasses never stop
If your votes don't federate then they have no effect other than you seeing the arrow light up.
That just means you're not voting ...
Does that happen?
I crashed out once and DMd someone who had downvoted a couple of my comments because I overreacted and thought I was being targeted. I'm not a particularly stable individual.
Felt terrible, they were a good sport about it though.
Happened to a few times to me. Usually tankies criticizing why I downvoted Russian propaganda in unrelated topics.
Downvote, block and move on
Lemvotes.org
Thanks! That's is very helpful and also concerning
Not sure how I feel about this
Why is that concerning? The whole system was meant to be transparent
Not the OP, but i find it concerning because this enables creating a very detailed profile of a users interests, political alignment, medical issues, sexual orientation etc. Even if they never post anything! We should all know by now that there are bad actors actively using this kind of data in the worst ways imaginable. In the US this can already have life threatening consequences (ICE raids etc...)
This is not a good privacy oriented design and it exposes users in a dangerous way.
EDIT: About lemvotes.org. I like this site because it makes it obvious how dangerous this really is. For example I accidentally upvoted a really disgusting NSFW post misclicking on my phone. This will forever be visible to the world. I'm a documented pervert now. Good job.
So don't interact. What you read isn't stored, but if you interact, it should be public.
I agree that it's dumb you don't have a "my votes" page where you can remove that. But you can go to said post and just remove your vote.
So in a niche community we are now promoting that people don't interact with said community if they care about their privacy at all?
Not at all. I'm saying you should interact and stand behind your interactions.
For example, you downvoted my post, which is fine. You also replied, which is also fine. Why is it bad that one isn't on your profile (but it is public) and the other is openly visible in a list on your profile?
Interactions are by default public, otherwise there's no point to interacting. I'd go one further and say that having the voting information public but not visible by default is by far the worst option.
What if people are okay with it being public but not okay with it being recorded forever in internet history?
I constantly misvote by doing a gesture not exactly right on my phone. I wouldn't judge anyone by their votes.
Which is why you shouldn't put all your interests in one account.
Have one account for memes and shitposts, then another for bringing down the patriarchy and kinky stuff. OK, so maybe 3 accounts
Is this an alt to your handsolo kink account
No, this is the alt for my "Princess Lay-uh" kink account.
C3POrno knows every position and toy in the galaxy.
This is just ridiculous.
It's only ridiculous because you're used to pouring your entire life into Facebook or Google's servers.
If you're disturbed by it being public, I think you should be just as disturbed by it being in the hands of data farmers and merchants.
The fact of the matter is, nothing you do online is private—and on the spectrum of "how private is it," social media platforms are traditionally designed to put you at the near zero end of it. So separate your concerns if you want any illusion of separation from your actual life.
You made assumptions about my social media use that are wrong. I don't interract with them because I don't like the way they are run and the data they gather will for sure be used against me. I interact with the fediverse because it doesn't start from a point of abuse, but it can very clearly be abused and I would honestly prefer that this particular information would not be available in any way since it is the most frictionless but also the most potentially exposing way you interact with this platform.
At least when pouring my shit into Big Tech I can be reasonably sure that it disappears into the ocean of other data they have, and it's exceptionally unlikely that someone with the access to do so would actually look into me specifically.
That any unhinged individual on the internet can pull out more information than strictly necessary about my online history is a completely different threat model. I understand that the federated model requires some level of data sharing to keep track of posts but I would kind of have expected that the instance that "owns" the post would be the only instance that needs this info.
On the other hand, I'm sure that absolute privacy like completely hidden post history to some extent will help bad faith actors with troll farms and bots so I don't fucking know.
Someone can spin up an instance and have votes federated to them anyway, so regardless of whether lemvotes exists or not, people can harvest your information.
just upvote and downvote a bunch of random things then your profile has been salted.
Piefed alleviates some of these issues.
Can you elaborate on this?
To be fair OP isn't the only one that finds it concerning. Kbin/Mbin had tons of complaints about its public voting until the Mbin devs decided to cave and hide downvotes. Piefed also tried to implement private voting before, but gave up because of their halfhearted approach not working out.
I personally like public votes. It's great to see who upvoted me, especially if it's someone I recognize. While I miss being able to see downvotes, because sometimes I do feel like asking for feedback from downvoters on where I could do better.
That said, there's an issue of consent there imo. So I do understand the complaints. While a receiving instance is technically free to do with the federated vote what they want, the user never really consented to that. It's like if an instance made private messages public. Theoretically it's allowed to, but that doesn't mean people would be happy about it.
To be 1000% clear, the voting agents on piefed worked just fine. They scrapped it because of forum politics. A few terminally online admins got real mad they couldn't stalk user votes and threatened to defederate, even though they could easily just ban the voting agents if they wanted. They made up a completely absurd and roundabout premise that they needed to be able to preemptively ban people based on votes in case they might make a "harmful comment" in the future. The fact that this was the primary concern indicates that the functionality worked as intended.
Hopefully someone integrates the same functionality into an app. Honestly I'd take a swing at it if I had a bit more time.
This is the post I remembered.
This is what I meant with it failed because their halfhearted approach didn't work out:
They could have just used private voting with every instance, but they just had to segregate them by trust because the good (according to authoritative selection) instances should still be able to see what you voted for, and that was too much work to keep up, so they just scrapped the entire system instead of implementing blanket private voting...
Right, the reason they tried to do the trusted instance nonsense is because of the threat of defederation after some major Lemmy admins threw a tantrum about it. They were cagey about admitting this openly but will basically admit that is the case if pressed.
Back when they decided to scrap the idea (over back channel discussions with almost zero user input, I might add) I spent some time arguing about the decision, and Blaze basically came out and said that "You are welcome to fork the code and restore the functionality, but nobody would federate with you." I am paraphrasing, and don't care to go back and find the comment, but I'm sure someone else can if they are motivated.
I had expected reactions to be encrypted, as it's not a build in feature of Lemmy itself. If it was, I feel like it should have been visible, just like the modlog. There must have been a reason why the Lemmy devs don't show a list of who up votes or down votes
Assume that everything you say and do online is public, unless explicitly stated (and proven) otherwise. The advantage of Lemmy (and Reddit in principle) is that your account is anonymous, it is not linked to your person. So you have some freedom to be who you want to be without repurcussions in your daily life.
Yes but it is frighteningly easy to identify users from post history if someone really cares to do it. You either have to never comment about anything personal, including providing your expertise since that can be somewhat unique, or mix in enough bullshit in a way that's not trivial to separate from the real stuff.
If it would be encrypted, it would open up for vote manipulation. There are plans that mods will see who upvotes in their communities. Create multiple accounts on different instances if you need more privacy, separate personalities for different topics.
Isn't that manipulation too?
If someone has a problem with your alt they can ban it. If votes would be encrypted they would have to defederate the full instance where they come from.
Create separate accounts for privacy not for vote manipulation
Only if you are using it to vote multiple times, or vote on your own posts/comments.
I love it. It's awesome. Also the Lemmy modlog. I love how open everything is!
Please wholly ignore people butthurt about downvotes. We all do. Voting does not warrant any explanation.
I solve that issue by having down votes disabled, I don't have the capability to down vote or see negative scores. It honestly made my experience on the platform better as well, because it helps hide the hive mind mentality that the platform as a whole seems to have at times.
Feel this! ⬇️😆
I think you missed the point of this - I don't mind down votes.
I am just surprised that (some) users will actively use third party software to identify who made them, and then confront them publicly
I don't think it really matters, just don't dox yourself and you should be fine.
Also you can have multiple accounts on different instances and stuff if you want.
And I don't think you can tell that much by just upvotes and downvotes. I often times downvote stuff I've seen re-posted too much in different instances. I don't want to see the same thing dozens of times ofc, doesn't mean I necessarily have an issue with the content.
Lastly I bet most people don't use that website anyway. I don't. What good does it do me to see who downvotes me? If we disagree on something... that's allowed.
The protocol is ActivityPub not ActivityPriv
I'm pretty sure the Pub doesn't stand for Public, but rather Publish.
edit: not saying that it is private, just my opinion on whether the pub is an adjective or a verb
Still Publish, not Privish.
You are right but you can’t exactly publish something and expect it to be private
And what does publishing something do? Does it make it widely available to the public?
Indeed it does. However my intention was to say that Pub in ActivityPub is most likely not an adjective (public), but a verb (publish).
WHAT
And certainly not ActivityCafé
This one is gold :)
If someone is posting about you downvoting them, then they're a seriously flawed individual. Some people will take any reason they can to call other people racist. I think it's a fetish, honestly.
You're fine.
Much easier to determine vote manipulation when there is no central authority to handle it and the votes, as well as moderation actions, are publicly visible.
Isn't the Fediverse supposed to be open?
You can show your personal support for something by upvoting it or your opposition to something by downvoting it, but if you don't want to take a stance on something at all, you don't have to.
It's an entirely optional mechanic. You can fully utilize Lemmy to view, post, and comment without ever voting if you don't want to.
As far as I'm aware, the votes don't really matter, anyway. Lemmy doesn't seem to use karma the way that Reddit does. i.e. I've never seen a post removed because the user didn't have enough karma, etc.
I agree - I was just surprised to be confronted publicly by a user, for down voting a post. Not that I didn't want to be exposed, but that people actually could look it up
Oh, 100% agree that it's a bit unhinged to actively call out people because they down-dooted something you posted.
I don't make it a habit to check, but it has been fun to check and call out in precisely two scenarios.
One user and I deep into a sub thread on a multiple day old post arguing about ettiquette here. Was weird to get multiple downvotes on those sorts of comments. They were using their "abandoned" alts.
Another thread where I had repeatedly asked someone to share the source for their claim despite them insisting that I just wasn't googling right. I offered them to edit literally every comment (multiple thousand) on this account to sing their praises. Downvoted with no response.
Interesting! Not something I've encountered, but I suppose that's what makes the Fediverse special! We can all control how we want to interact with things.
The real question is why do we even need upvotes or down votes at all?
It's the main metric by which you determine what posts are popular.
And the first layer of moderation.
On other platforms, it's a mechanism to assign a sort of "social worth" to people and ideas, and to tailor an algorithm to drive engagement.
I think it exists on Lemmy purely to make it feel more like "Reddit but federated." Without the votes, this is just a normal message board. Lol
If you sort everything by Newest Comments, then the votes don't matter to anything and it is just a normal message board. 😌
Exactly.
But if Lemmy was just seen as a federated message board, it wouldn't have nearly the users that it does. It's popularity rocketed (compared to the rest of the Fediverse) specifically because it takes so much of it's style from Reddit.
So my instance doesn't have down votes, but it's still kind of like the inverted pyramid of a newspaper article. When I read the comments, I get all the most highly upvoted or new ones first, and by the time I get to the bottom of the comment thread with old comments with just one up-vote per post, I can feel the quality falling off, and I know it's time to go back to scrolling the feed.
Votes being public is kinda cool, same for mod actions and who made them. Cool way to counter the Resdit type shadow, secret decisions and botted and bought votes.
Reddit even allows you to hide all your action history (no comment history), which is done to make it easier for bots and bought accounts to operate.
As for someone calling you or anyone out for voting certain way, who cares, tell them to go pound sand
I was sceptic of the open concept at first. But now I find it appealing, because comment and post history are also public. If people wanted, they could probably extract my living place, job, sexual preferences and political opinions from my comment history of 1,000 comments. So why hide the up- and down votes?
This is the point though. If it's hidden by the platform, I feel like exposing it in public is against the sentiment
If voting was public through Lemmy and its clients, it would be more open and not only partly anonymous
I had assumed that if voting activity was meant to be public, there would have been a feed like the mod logs, for each users activity
That's true, but I think this is more of a development thing than an actual aim of Lemmy. Due to the nature of federation, everything must be open. As the Software is strongly inspired by Reddit, transparent votes is something that is technically exposed via the API but not yet implemented in the UI. But I think any app developer could integrate this into their app if they liked. It seems like Mbin chose a different path way.
In general, there is no congruent sentiment in Lemmy development, but I agree there should be one or it should be discussed with the community. Have you looked if there is an already ongoing discussion on git?
I care more about PieFed, but I don't know how they look on the topic though.
I just think it should be more obviously transparent, rather than the UI pretending it has no attribution.
I recall some proposal about adding the info to the UI and objections due to privacy concerns, which is just pretending something is private.
Who cares? Upvote what you like, downvote what you don't. Who cares if someone has a whinge.
Which community/instance did this? I'd like to block it.
https://quokk.au/comment/3048088
Wow, what a shitshow.
not surprising that it's Deceptichum
(trying something: https://lemmyverse.link/quokk.au/comment/3048088 )
edit: not convinced, I still don't know how to properly share a link of a post or comment in a way that all instances open it on their own
also:
hey @[email protected] I see you downvoted my comment, care to share your opinion??
fuck you!
forgot to switch accounts?
Humor is lost on you.
Ah, that's a common mistake, you have to file it under "humour" or it won't be properly processed.
Dean Browning moment
No, fuucckk yoouuuuu!!!
You can't, at least not yet. The only cross instance linkable is with communities. (i.e. ![email protected])
Seems to work fine in Voyager, opens in my home instance. But presumably that's a feature of Voyager.
I'm not at all surprised who the OP here was.
I mostly solve this by upvoting what I like and ignoring the downvote option, reserving it for advertisement bots and spam.
I think that having the voting record hidden in the client UI makes more harm than good to be honest and would've preferred if the devs changed their mind on tricking end users that voting is anonymous.
The federated design of fediverse means that upvotes and downvotes must sync between instances and as such they're not hidden or anonymous in any real sense. Anyone with a fediverse instance can see the votes.
lemvotes.org democratise this by allowing everyone, not just techies with their own instance, to see the votes.
One should know that lemvotes.org isn't a perfect source of truth though, when I lefthand scroll I sometimes fat finger a downvote that I remove again. The latest downvote in my record is one of those.
https://lemvotes.org/ state I downvoted a post:
https://feddit.uk/ sees 75 upvotes:
https://sopuli.xyz/ sees 75 upvotes and I clearly have not voted:
How dare you not upvote my post.
I blame it on rarely upvoting posts at all! Or maybe it was someone elses fault, must be someone else to blame. I think. Is it your fault? You made me not do it? You must've made me not do it. You're to blame. I'm certain.
This doesn't solve the privacy issue. It still enables bad actors to create a very detailed profile of who you are, just by looking at the content you upvoted. Your interests, political alignment, medical/mental health issues, sexual orientation... just to name a few.
If you don’t sign in or don’t interact, then you don’t have anything to worry about. Reddit doesn’t make votes public but it definitely is selling your voting data as well as IP and location data to third parties.
Lemmy just publishes the data it needs to make activity pub work. If you don’t do anything that generates an AP action then there is no data on you that somebody can compile. I agree that it probably isn’t a good idea to hide the fact that AP actions like upvotes or downvotes are public, but that’s how the protocol works
Yeah, if you wanna lurk and not comment because you want to stay private then I recommend not voting at all.
If a person is already engaging in communities with comments like you and I are right now then I think the added details from our upvotes only strengthen what they already know from our comments.
I think most of my upvotes are in comment chains like this, when I think that they add value and are on topic.
I had assumed that this was somehow encrypted. Especially as it is not a build in feature of Lemmy itself, to show who has reacted in certain ways
And that assumption is why I think the choice of the devs to hide it was wrong. They essentially tricked you.
Having votes transparent makes manipulation much harder and people much nicer.
It needs to be open for federation to work. It needs to share what votes are by whom from where. If instances don't have this information they can't really moderate. They can't block people or other instances.
Users typically don't have access to this information, but any admin does. Because of how federation works though, anyone can become an admin pretty easily. Also, you can go somewhere that publishes the data for you who's done that work already.
I don't see this as an issue personally. It's just something to be aware of. I wish it was told to new users so they aren't surprised, but now that you know you can be prepared. Always assume others can see your votes.
It's pretty helpful sometimes when you can see who is brigading and where the majority of downvotes come from. Allows communities to better police themselves.
It's to guard against bot accounts. I'd much rather have that instead of the clearly manipulated comment sections on Reddit. The pro-israel posting and down voting went away almost overnight when we got broader access and a few mods got called out about it. Go look at a comment section about it that hits all on Reddit, there's clearly artificial voting going on.
It's still not that hard to mess around but I'll take what I can get, and I guess it does keep the racists away, even if it's sometimes a false positive like in your case.
I agree that it is good with transparency, but then this should also be freely available on the Lemmy platform, and even the clients, in the same way as modlogs list what is going on.
I knew that admins could somehow go into the database and check who has done what, but I assumed that this was only the admin, and maybe even that the info was encrypted. It's alright with me that it's not, but then why not display it on each post and comment, with a list of interactions to it.
In this case, it's this post:
https://quokk.au/comment/3048088
Although, the comment where people were being called out, may have been removed (not sure if it's because I have blocked the user, or they have blocked me)
I fully agree it should be transparent instead of a kind of trick you learn eventually. Won't happen anytime soon though, the Lemmy devs are against the notion. They actually block lemvotes on their instance which is a bit ironic because they insta ban people for down voting a lot from what I understand.
Community moderators can also directly see who upvotes or downvotes posts and comments on their community.
It's not just through lemvotes.
How?
it comes up as an option when you click on the "..." of a post
To allow other instances to know about your vote, Lemmy federates it. This involves the post you downvoted and your account. Neither is really optional here, as the receiving instance needs your account to verify the vote.
When another instance receives your vote, it's up to them how they handle it. Mbin used to display both of them to users, but due to backlash from Lemmy users they made downvotes private eventually. Upvotes are still visible on Mbin though. Other fediverse platforms might also display your votes to users like Mbin and Lemvotes do. And of course anyone can make a minimal ActivityPub implementation and subscribe to a Lemmy community and get all the votes made within.
If you want to maintain some sort of privacy when voting on any platform in the Fediverse:
Create an alt account, do not make any posts/comments with it, only use it for voting.
Otherwise we would need an instance that generates a bunch of voting accounts. Then, when you vote on something, the instance randomly assigns that vote to one of their voting accounts and sends out that vote information to other instances. Then only the Admins of your home instance would be able to view your voting history.
also don't do this because fuck that
I've already run into a few people that have burners that upvote themselves and downvote any disagreements. Pretty cringe shit.
Lol, that is super lame.
As other comments have said its by design. But there is a quirk if they used lemvotes to determine who the down voters were: it doesn't seem to pick up downvotes by mbin users. For example, according to lemvotes I’ve never downvoted anything. This is demonstrably false :)
Mbin doesn't federate downvotes so lemvotes can't record them.
That's creepy! I down vote and am down voted constantly.
It's also petty... But knowing that this is so easy to identify people behind vote activity fundamentally changes how I feel about Lemmy
Maybe we should convey to new users more strongly that ActivityPub software "is like a large open place, where you can publish what you want (minus moderated content) and everyone has the ability to see everything you did".
The lesson here is that your assumption about how the system works is wrong.
That means can mean 1 important thing :
Consequently I suggest you recall when you started using Lemmy, how you heard about it, how you then understood how it work and thus potentially update the documentation (or whatever you relied on then) accordingly so that others don't make the same mistake.
AFAIK Lemvotes runs a private instance with a bot (???) as an admin which it uses to collect downvote information (as others have explained, the information is already there, it's just private on the client side on most Fediverse platforms).
I would like if vote counts weren't shown until after you voted, so it doesn't influence your opinion
You can vote and change your vote. It would be a useless feature.
People are less likely to change their vote afterwards than they are influenced before voting. It's not meaningless. An opinion would form without first.
The "Reddit" way is to allow votes to be hidden for some length of time (often a few hours, but I think up to 1 day).
Up voting for good discussion.
Somewhat off topic as the question was answered: Maybe an unpopular opinion, but I believe votes should be scrapped all together. Make it chronological per default with the option to sort by count of comments in the last 24h. I hate the beehive mind that gets promoted with votes.
I disagree. In theory, the crowd-sourced curation and moderation is a great concept. Comments still accomplish that to some degree, but I like the votes.
There are a lot of problems. Bandwagoning like you mentioned - people are more likely to up/downvote if they see it's already going one way. And the almost opposite problem, where low-effort votes only look at a headline or title without clicking through or actually reading the content.
But to me it's almost a moot point on Lemmy anyway. Sorting by Hot or Scaled surfaces new content heavily regardless. Even when it's spam and getting downvoted to oblivion, seems like the posts still show up on my feed just by virtue of being recent.
Yeah, i like the concept of crowd-sourced curation as well and it it’s a privilege to not be in much need of it right now. If the community grows too large and so the spam we are receiving a voting system might be the knight in shining armor.
I still would then hide the score though. So maybe don’t scrap the whole voting system but just hide the score behind some menus per default so the sorting algorithm can still be transparent.
Voting in itself isn't necessarily the issue. It's users being able to see those scores that feeds the echo chamber.
It affects posting and commenting habits because people quickly learn what's popular and what isn't. That leads to both self-censorship and just shouting out popular views for validation without putting much critical thought into it.
It also primes users to approach posts or comments with a strong bias - positive or negative - based on the up- or downvote count before they've even read a word.
You are right. Thankfully Mlem (Client) is fairly customizable so I can disable it client side.
To be clear, most users can't easily see votes. Only community moderators can quickly access vote data within communities they moderate - and instance admins can see all votes. Yes, people /can/ go to lemvotes, but it's often just not worth it.
I think it being transparent in this way is good for the fediverse.
I think in this case they just mean the total count and score, not who voted what. For that, I think most clients readily display it. I see it on both the desktop website and in Voyager.
It is unpopular, because there'd be no way for communities to distinguish quality vs. poor quality or trolling content.
Should be pretty simple to make a client display things like that without voting UI stuff
Yea, I use Mlem and have it disabled everywhere i’m able to. Do not see an option for that in Photon.
Because ignorance is strength
Locking for rule 5.
edit: Unlocked.
It’s a hard feeling to take but it’s a free place. I have no qualm with the comments however the topic you are posting on, is a devisive one and I agree with it’s not clear if it’s about the actual date or First Nations rights so there seems to be a few conversations going on at the same time. I am personally in the camp of always was always will be, but I think removing or changing the date will just cause more tension.
Dont let this sour lemmy for you. It’s just a day on the internet.
In this case, the post popped into my "all" feed. I have no idea about neither sides, but I down voted on the design of the poster, for not making this clear. I may be a design freak, to down vote on something like this, just based on that, but getting wrapped into a discussion about being racist just because of a down vote feels quite extreme
Yeh it’s a heated topic and the design of the poster is likely far from most people’s mind. I personally as with others try not to downvote…I just leave the odd sarcastic comment instead like a true elder of the internet.
There’s plenty of manga to downvote if you are feeling a bit trigger finger frustrated. 🤣
Your votes on reddit or facebook are profiled and sold to every data broker on the planet.
Making them public just removes the illusion that they are private in the first place
But they are not public. You need third party websites or special privileges to see them.
For true transparency there should be a list with voting interaction on each post and comment
On pyfed, I see your overall "attitude" by default. This is the percentage of positive to negative voting interactions you have had recently. You are presently at 68%, which is rather low.
The activitypub protocol is not at all private. Anyone with a server and admin account is able to see all of these details.
Anonymous negativity is actually rather mental and should not exist in any democratic or ethical sense. You have a right to all information, a right to error, a right to skepticism, and a right to protest in nonviolent forms aka the right to offend others. Anonymous negativity is a violation of freedom of information and anti-egalitarian. Everyone has a right to confront their accuser with transparency.
If you have something to say, you should have the decency of stating it. Downvoting is a mental disorder. It is like people that use four letter expletives to express themselves when they lack the intellectual depth to articulate their thoughts. It only really exists as a corrupt means of artificially influencing behaviors for commercial and political means.
Is it ethical or reasonable to walk up to a stranger and give them negative feedback. Let's say you see a man exit his car to walk into a store. Should you have a right to leave an anonymous message on his car about the style of his shirt? Doing such nonsense will get you labeled a halfwit or worse. Take any real life circumstances and transpose this behavior. It is completely unethical nonsense.
"Trust" as a mechanism, is the primary tool of authoritarians and fascists. That is trash. Democracy and community are built with open transparency and accountability. One is a coward. The other will engage the dialectic and has nothing to hide. My "attitude" is 100% now. I rarely downvote because the behavior fails at fundamental game theory and the prisoner's dilemma. Negative feedback is incapable of creating positive outcomes. It always brings everyone down. So if you are going to be negative, at least do so constructively in a useful way by articulating your thoughts in text.
That's hilarious and simultaneously really sad
I feel like this is what upvotes and down votes are for though. Expressing that you agree, like, or don't like what someone is doing, or saying is not a mental disorder. I have been on the internet long enough, to know that starting a discussion about something, is almost never really worth it. I do feel that I should be able to join in on a general sentiment of approve or disapprove on a platform like this.
You compare online behavior with real life, and this is not relevant. But to put it into context, I see upvotes and down votes more like cheering or booing in a sports game. It's just an expression of what you feel for the content. A reaction. You wouldn't explain why you are booing at the opposing team when they score a goal
This is something where everyone has their own personal idea of what the votes are for. I was taught to think of the votes as relevant (on topic)/irrelevant (off topic) when I first encountered the system.
Weird sanism
Why are you using the term "mental illness" as an insult? 🧐
A disorder is a function that causes disruptive distress or deviation from nominal behavior.
In abstract, I have posited a claim, and then shown how that claim is backed by associative social norms. I am attacking the normalization of anonymous negative behavior at a foundational level. I'm attacking the ethics of the developers that created this system in the first place. I have exemplified how this same behavior is in opposition to human social norms. I have shown its weaknesses in terms of political impact. I have posited a deeply unethical use case of why such a system would be implemented in the first place despite the malevolence. Finally, I have shown how it is destructive and harmful to everyone through statistical analysis using game theory.
The abstraction is not targeted in any way at people with mental health disorders. I am showing how the feature itself is a disorder or catalyst for disorderly behaviors.
I have actually tried really hard to remove any forms of bias or personal attacks from my dialog over the last decade or so. Like in this case, I'm actually arguing for positive constructive interactions in a more socially aware architecture. I want to remove the nominalized negativity. It was a mistake to make a space where people are able to abuse others, to manipulate, and to cause harm without social consequences as a feedback mechanism. It is a particularly sharp prejudice to experience when one is in near total social isolation from stuff like physical disability. Allowing people with no independent ethics to treat a space like this as a sadistic release valve for turgid eristics is simply wrong.
What's my percentage? Public shame me!
4/999 negative votes (0.4%) or 99.6% positive
You're one happy dude!
https://lemvotes.org/user/[email protected]
Yeah I only downvote advertising and batshit crazy weirdos.
Edit: 2 of those I think we're accidental downvotes. Sometimes I'm too stoned for voyagers swipe feature.
Advertising yeh we should be given extra for downvoting that.
It's weird that it only take into account what your reactions are, and not the content that you share. If you down vote negativity, but share content that is upvoted, you still get a negative ratio
I’m only 96% I thought I was happier. I’ll have to work on this.
Transparency & freedom of information are good. Information that is naturally open should remain open.
I'm not sure anonymous negativity is anti-egalitarian: anyone has an equal opportunity to it. While
anonymous negativity isn't an accusation, it's disapproval. Plus, election ballots are typically secret in a democracy.
Moreover, everyone here is anonymous unless they associate their account with a real identity.
Your example had me confused.
In a free society, anyone has the liberty do this. They have the liberty to do "nonsense" & be "a halfwit or worse". None of it constitutes a harm conflicting with a right. The same liberty carries online.
While transparency is more conducive to healthy democratic deliberation, there is no duty against such a note. There is no duty to suppress information, either. There's just absence of duty altogether, ie, liberty.
Because the original reddit made a lot of stupid-ass design decisions. The great Lemmy devs were smart enough not to blindly copy them.
I feel like the devs should then have a visible overview of who has up- or down voted each post and comment then. Similiar to the mod log.
I feel like you should stay away from making design decisions in this regard.
You are welcome to feel any way you want about me 👍
I know.