(b) will just lead to free up and down votes, i.e. less engagement. That in turn could lead to slowly bleeding out.
Comment on Lemmy devs are considering making all votes public - have your say
mozz@mbin.grits.dev 4 weeks agoYour 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.
zerofk@lemm.ee 4 weeks ago
it_depends_man@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
I would like a © where my instances collects all the votes on the post, and then transmits an anonymized aggregate.
SorteKanin@feddit.dk 4 weeks ago
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.
socsa@piefed.social 3 weeks ago
This is not true, the piefed admin implemented pseudonymous voting agents in around 48 hours
SorteKanin@feddit.dk 3 weeks ago
Piefed’s experimental mechanism isn’t truly anonymous. 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.
socsa@piefed.social 3 weeks ago
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.
rimu@piefed.social 4 weeks ago
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.
rglullis@communick.news 4 weeks ago
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.
rimu@piefed.social 4 weeks ago
They'd get defederated from.
rglullis@communick.news 4 weeks ago
dandroid@sh.itjust.works 4 weeks ago
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?
intensely_human@lemm.ee 4 weeks ago
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?
rglullis@communick.news 4 weeks ago
Every comment/post/vote made in a community is sent as an activity to the community’s subscribers.
adam@doomscroll.n8e.dev 4 weeks ago
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.
systemglitch@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Your idea of a nice world and mine are very different.
rglullis@communick.news 4 weeks ago
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.
Redjard@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 weeks ago
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?
SteveFromMySpace@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 weeks ago
They already can
mozz@mbin.grits.dev 4 weeks ago
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. 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.
adam@doomscroll.n8e.dev 4 weeks ago
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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)
Fillicia@sh.itjust.works 4 weeks ago
Except that it is, people with the skills already bridged that gap for everyone.
kbin.earth/m/fediverse@lemmy.world/…/favourites
rimu@piefed.social 4 weeks ago
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.
AchtungDrempels@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Yeah, just like rglullis actually dragged downvoters into the public on a few occasions, to pressure them to explain their downvotes.
mke@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
The bar is not nearly so high, it simply takes opening the post in the right kbin/mbin instance. That requires neither technical skill nor admin privileges.
kux@lemm.ee 4 weeks ago
piefed is already exremely reddity 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?
join.piefed.social/…/piefed-features-for-growing-…
can@sh.itjust.works 4 weeks ago
Oof, I’d rather just stick to Lemmy and let people see my votes rather than delà with karma.
kux@lemm.ee 4 weeks ago
that’s kind of the point, other instances are aggregating and rating your votes given and received, why shouldn’t lemmy show this to you?
sramder@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
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.
kux@lemm.ee 4 weeks ago
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
dandroid@sh.itjust.works 4 weeks ago
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.
index@sh.itjust.works 4 weeks ago
I’m down to work on an analyzer tool that would make it easier for everyone to see the votes
silentknyght@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Technical people can struggle when a choice isn’t a zero or a one.