Comment on Lemmy devs are considering making all votes public - have your say

• rglullis@communick.news ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  requiring either technical skill or admin access to circumvent.

  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.

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  • rimu@piefed.social ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    They'd get defederated from.

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    • rglullis@communick.news ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      1. You don’t need to be federated to read people’s activities…
      2. Even if there was some type of “authorized fetch” involved, one could bypass it easily by writing a bot on LW to get the data. Then what?

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      • rimu@piefed.social ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        Ok, yeah, theoretically.

        But we're talking about putting voting info into the UI for anyone to see. Not highly motivated and skilled bad actors.

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      • mozz@mbin.grits.dev ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        It's not quite that simple. As far as I'm aware, it's difficult to fetch from another instance "after the fact" what all the votes are for a particular user or comment; you have to be signed up to receive updates on it, and then after the fact you can go hunting around in your own instance's DB and see what all the votes were (or your UI can do it, if it's supported).

        But, yes, there are instance softwares that will do it, and no one's defederating from every one of those instances (nor I think should they). Someone posted a link to an mbin instance breaking down the votes for this post. Votes are not private.

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    • 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?

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  • 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?

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    • rglullis@communick.news ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Every comment/post/vote made in a community is sent as an activity to the community’s subscribers.

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    • 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.

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  • systemglitch@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Your idea of a nice world and mine are very different.

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    • 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.

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    • 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?

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      • systemglitch@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        Just because people can go out of their way to find this information, doesn’t mean we Should remove all restrictions. That’s a real twisted way of thinking.

        What we have in place is already egregious imo

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  • SteveFromMySpace@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    They already can

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• mozz@mbin.grits.dev ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  You're proposing removing the bar entirely because it is not high enough.

  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.

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• adam@doomscroll.n8e.dev ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Image

  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)

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• Fillicia@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  People say this all the time, but it’s not really the case.

  Except that it is, people with the skills already bridged that gap for everyone.

  kbin.earth/m/fediverse@lemmy.world/…/favourites

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  • 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.

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    • 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.

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      • sukhmel@programming.dev ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        Ach, well, a known method to create a nice discussion

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• 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.

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• 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-…

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  • 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.

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    • 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?

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      • can@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        I liked it being relatively obfuscated. Even though I rarely downvote. But the ones I do are the ones I’d like to avoid. Tbh I’m more ambivalent compared to my thoughts on karma.

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  • sramder@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    People who downvote more than upvote tend to be the ones who get in fights a lot and say snarky, inflammatory and negative things.

    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.

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    • 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

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      • sramder@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        That was my take on it too. The vague sense that you’re just going to end up with nothing but circle-jerks if you implement all these suggestions. I could also just be whooshing an attempt a levity, something obvious to a seasoned community moderator.

        Hopefully my shitty attempts at socratic method rate a bit better then trolling, but I often doubt it :-)

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• 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.

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• index@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  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.

  I’m down to work on an analyzer tool that would make it easier for everyone to see the votes

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• silentknyght@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Technical people can struggle when a choice isn’t a zero or a one.

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