Comment on Upvotes and downvotes are public information on Lemmy
anamethatisnt@sopuli.xyz 1 week agoEven if sites like lemmyvotes disappear and software like kbin/mbin starts hiding the votes all you need to do is to spin up your own lemmy server. Piefeds dev is actively trying to find anway to obsvcure voting, but I think that ended with the choice of public (federated) vote or private (instance-only) voting.
I agree that the public nature of votes could be made more apparent, but the lemmy devs has decided against that
github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/4967
I don't understand why everyone is so dismissive of this being a problem. Especially considering it is easily mitigated using simple voting agents.
It's not just a privacy concern either, I promise you that trolls love being able to see which accounts are engaging with them in order to target certain demographics. Like we know this kind of shit has been used to manipulate elections already, and people here are just like "well I guess that's just the world now."
If you have an easy solution then I’m sure they would love your code over at github.com/w3c/activitypub
I don’t mind public votes, I do wish lemmy did a better job of showing that they are public though.
Piefed literally already implemented voting agents and it worked fine until forum politics killed it.
Ah, so what Rimu calls an alt/sockpuppet account that automatically votes on their behalf.
I haven’t seen the Matrix chat but having a dev look for feedback and then implement changes based on feedback received isn’t “forum politics” in my world.
Good luck with your fork!
piefed.social/post/956572
PhilipTheBucket@quokk.au 1 week ago
It's ridiculously stupid. In my opinion. Actually making the votes private would be fine. Making the votes public but making sure everyone knows that would be fine. Trying to pretend they're private, and hiding them in the UI but making it an open secret that they're not private and anyone who knows what they're doing can look at how other people are voting, is textbook harmful security-by-obscurity misleading your users.
It kind of goes with their authoritarian mindset I guess. "Don't question me, I don't have to be honest with you about what's going on, just shut up and go back to your UI which has only the features I allow you to have. Mine has a little dropdown that can look at the votes. Yours doesn't. Get back in your box. All the good users won't look outside what I tell them to."
clb92@feddit.dk 1 week ago
This is why I actually like that in kbin/mbin you can see up front who has voted what. It doesn’t pretend votes are secret when they aren’t.