In order to read gmails, you have to work at google.
In order to read the upvotes on this post, all you have to do is spin up your own lemmy instance. Anyone with technical knowledge can do it. The problem is a bit different. I could do it, if I was motivated.
If lemmy gets popular enough, there will be 3rd party sites with search bars and nice UIs and graphs to help you see how someone votes.
Not sure what the solution is. Maybe if we can’t make votes private, they should be fully public.
capital@lemmy.world 10 months ago
I don’t understand the concern though. I always assumed my votes, comments, or even PMs here were readable by at least the admins of the instance I’m a member of. The fact that votes and comments are public doesn’t seem to matter from a security or privacy standpoint.
urist@lemmy.blahaj.zone 10 months ago
There was an era of reddit where some nerds used addons to tag users for their own personal notes. Nothing wrong with making your own tags for people, imo.
But I do remember there were extensions for “mass tagging”. You could install browser extensions to label people based on their post history. Someone would run a script, aggregate data, put little tags on people based on how they post. Like, maybe you would install a tagger to label people who don’t agree with you politically, based on someone’s aggregated data.
I never personally liked the mass tagging stuff. It felt toxic to put people you don’t know in boxes. But, I never felt like it should be prevented. At the end of the day if you post something publicly, you shouldn’t be surprised when people respond to that.
But, some people here might not realize how public their vote history is. Not sure anyone wants weird graphs about how they vote. I upvote a lot of stuff, I’m sure a lot of people upvote stuff they don’t totally agree with. Maybe I’m imagining a problem where there isn’t one. I’ve just seen how weird people get when it’s easy to put people in boxes.
capital@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Oh yeah I used both of those.
Reddit is enhancement suite would do manual, single user tagging and the Masstagger browser add on would do… well, mass tagging.
I used it to show me when people I interacted with made more than 50 posts/comments in places like r/conservative or r/thedonald. It would also link you to the comments so you could see what they were saying there.
I found it helpful because there were times when I found people undermining concepts like cultural pluralism and participated in those subs. I knew where they were coming from and what they were trying to convince readers of (nothing good).
Several times it helped me effectively argue against white supremacists.
As long as comments are public, which I think is the point of sites like Reddit, lemmy, and kbin, those types of plugins and info will be available.