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Comment on Upvotes and downvotes are public information on Lemmy

sad_detective_man@leminal.space ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

if someone is harassing or mistreating you on the basis of your voting, then you can take it up with an amin.

this is a highly demanding solution for a misbehavior that takes very little energy to engage in. at least in my experience with admins, even when you have an effective one that doesn’t mean they will be effective in the coming months or years. ultimately a lot of people will end up having to explain somebody else’s bad behavior to another who just might not care.

but never mind that. what I’ve actually got to wonder is what does having votes public even accomplish positively? is the goal to help users understand each other based on actions we made that up to this point we thought were anonymous?

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gedaliyah@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
There have been a lot of discussions about whether voting on Lemmy should be public. Some threadiverse platforms actually take the step of displaying votes and reactions publicly for that very reason.

I won’t attempt to recap those discussions here, but you may be able to search for them.

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WellThisIsNew@fjdk.uk ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Votes are public more of a side effect of the fact that Lemmy is federated, rather than intentionally as something to be publicly visible, I don’t believe you can go find someone’s vote history just from the normal Lemmy ui, but someone could create their own Lemmy/mastodon/kbin version (or just some custom scraper that speaks activity pub and pretends to be one of these) to start collecting vote counts.

Votes being tied to accounts makes it slightly harder to do vote manipulation, but only slightly. It would be as simple as having my server tell the server of the original post that 5000 users that totally exist voted on this post. Of course you could do the same by actually creating 5000 fake accounts on your server, but that’s marginally more work, and also slightly more detectable. There’s a lot of trust in the activity pub protocol.

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- sad_detective_man@leminal.space ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  got it. thank you for the in-depth explanation
  
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- dan@upvote.au ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  
  I don’t believe you can go find someone’s vote history just from the normal Lemmy ui
  
  If you run your own Lemmy server, you can probably just query your own database. Lemmy admins can see upvoters and downvoters for all comments, not just comments on servers they’re an admin on, so that data must be in the database.
  
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