Submitted 2 months ago by rimu@piefed.social to fediverse@lemmy.world
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/4967
Probably better to post in the github issue rather than replying here.
No, votes should not be displayed public.
Blocking those who downvote creates further polarisation, echo chambers and an environment more hostile to discussion and honest exchange.
Following those who upvote creates personality cults and nepotism and devalues the content.
environment more hostile to discussion and honest exchange.
“Voting” and “discussion” are separate things. The old forums did not have voting but still had polarization, personal attacks, hellthreads, etc.
The problem is that Reddit/Facebook turned “voting” from a tool meant to measure “quality” (e.g, this post is relevant to the community, this comment does not add to the discussion) into a tool to measure “popularity” (I agree with this, so I vote up. I don’t like this, so I downvote).
Either get rid of voting altogether, or let’s bring back a culture where “votes” are meant to signal quality.
Reeditors did that, rather than reddit I’d argue. Still the same result of becoming a far less useful heuristic though.
Not really sure how to “fix” a system like that, which depends on the masses to do something correctly. They… don’t.
Maybe the upvotes should only be available to the person who owns the comment or post. Maybe to the mods and admins, too?
Same idiots playing games with each others in the open is better than bots and manipulation going on behind the scenes.
Do not make votes public. It will lead to personal attacks.
They’re already public if you look via kbin or run your own instance.
The experience of kbin and mbin users say otherwise, however.
I guess all 6 of them can be trusted. Lol
Because the fediverse isn’t as big as you think it is and so the number of crazies aren’t a problem yet.
It leads to an even bigger echo chamber, people with unpopular opinions will get ostracized not just for their comments, but even for their voting. There’s a reason why any real democracy has secret votes.
Enabling retaliation disincentivizes personal attacks
Vote in good faith and if someone attacks you they will be on the wrong side
I think people misunderstand. I too would prefer privacy, but theres a big BUT.
Due to how the federation works, anyone who is tech savvy enough can already see votes. One way is to run an instance.
This change doesn’t lower privacy, it aligns expectations with reality. A false sense of privacy, which people obviously show here in the comments, is way more dangerous.
I read about that. In my opinion is that what should change, if possible. There are good reasons why votes a secret in democracies.
That would be great. I’m not sure how to solve the problems that arises though. If i can send an anonymous vote to an instance, what stops me from sending 100?
Maybe there’s some smart cryptographical solution here that alludes me, but it seems hard, if possible.
There are good reasons why votes a secret in democracies.
Because voters only receive a voting ballot after they identify themselves as a real citizen with a real passport?
Then again, private votes would be private for mods and admins too. So no more moderating vote brigading or downvote abuse or anything like that.
Even on github they are public. Lol
I accept if a dozen people can see my votes.
That’s not what you’re saying.
Ultimately I’m not invested in this decision. If the instance wants to watch people vote then people stop voting truly or at all.
Except, if you’re using anything other than Lemmy at this point that information is already about. The Likes/Dislikes are considered public information by the protocol. Lemmy devs probably just didn’t get around to building out the UI for that before the Reddit APIcolypse.
If this is a hard requirement for federation, then I guess federated services are not for me, as I value my privacy more than I care to use them.
I think it’s a bad idea. It’s just going to start harassment and witch hunts when someone gets a downvote they don’t like. Stalking is going to be a thing, people are going to aggregate all the votes you’ve done to make assumptions about you to then bully you. Once public, sources outside Lemmy will start gathering and cross referencing data about you.
In the US, when you vote, the vote is private to protect the person. Making votes public will only empower those that would abuse it. It very well could end Lemmy due to massive bulling, harassment, and the decline of activity.
i already have had multiple weirdos harass me on lemmy for not being leftist enough.
way too many people take the internet comments/points WAY too seriously…
I agree. I already tend to get tossed into a category because I don’t agree with a majority of the user base. If people can get categorized more by how they vote, and lemmy users are already pretty savvy, I can see a scenario where people get tagged.
Exactly. We need counter views. One of the problems with any type of social media has been echo chambers and the lack of healthy debate/conversation. People have forgotten how to have a civil debate/conversation with someone else. And people tend to act like, if you don’t 100% agree with me, than not only can we not be friends, but you’re actively an enemy. That shouldn’t be the case. We do not need everyone to agree on everything, it should be acceptable to have a different opinion.
With everything public, we’re going to have no healthy conversation since people will use previous votes (up or down) against someone. One of the issues is, an up/down vote by itself doesn’t give much insight into anything. It’s not like the vote itself is quantified. We already see people try this with digging into post history to make assumptions of someone and bring it up as “evidence”.
The problem is its already pretty public, just for mods and admins, and non-lemmy instances.
While I agree its not ideal to have everything be public, given it functionally already is, this just makes it easier for users to see. Right now its a minor hurdle, but still a hurdle - but your votes are not really private/anonymous to start with.
I personally think it should be locked down and votes should be kept under a very tight lock and key.
I posted this already as a response, so I’ll sort of post it here. If we start mapping users to their IRL selves, and agencies can start capturing what someone votes on, you have a few problems. 1) Marketing agencies selling your data again. 2) Governments can start using someones posts against them. You’re might not, but there are several that will. And Lemmy is a global platform.
Data is not suddenly public just because some people have access to it. Data is public when it’s available for anyone to look at. Privacy is almost always going to be a trust issue on some level, and very few things are possible to do truly anonymously. Some data will always be available to someone in a position where it’s possible to abuse. Instance admins can see your IP address. Should that be available for everyone to see?
I think it’s a bad idea. It’s just going to start harassment and witch hunts
LLMs are smarter than the average foe already and governments spend millions on online propaganda. We NEED a witch hunt and lots of fire
I am fan of Swiss Appenzeln Innerrhoden voting system. In public and with hands up. It’s supporting the civic courage values. It’s easy to ostracize people for no reason when you’re anonymous
No need for a Lemmy server, kbin/mbin put it in their interface
kbin.earth/m/fediverse@lemmy.world/…/favourites
Saying the fediverse is good for privacy is just plain false, that’s the kind of information anyone can acquire, even an ad company. All they have to do is federate a silent instance and see all you do.
anyone can set up a Lemmy server
This is not the case. What percentage of the population could set up a Lemmy server, do you think? 1%? 0.1%? Of those, what percentage have the time to set up a Lemmy server? 1%?
Kbin/Mbin show votes too.
That’s way too much work. I just logged into my original account on kbin.social and tapped on the activity button to see votes before that instance went down. If I want to see votes again I can set up an account on any kbin or mbin instance in less than a minute and do the same thing.
Boy oh boy, it sure is a mystery why democracies have people vote privately
The only thing worse than public voting is public voting that’s falsely advertised as private.
You only get to vote privately because the system can still verify that each person only gets to vote once.
There is no such mechanism on the internet. Anyone can make multiple accounts and vote multiple times.
Right. We are IDEALLY only identifiable by our content and where to reach us at for a given persona online.
A contrary ideal for where votes are supposed to represent an actual plurality of stake holders in the social contract.
The last thing I need is people knowing I upvoted a nsfw post.
I was really confused seeing this post, because I always assumed that Lemmy votes were public. Because how else are instances going to sync them? And indeed, the API exposes them completely, this change will just it easier.
Then I was really confused when I saw so many comments being against it. A lot of “I’ll leave if votes become public” in here. That’s a lot of people who somehow assumed Lemmy was private. Aren’t we all supposed to be Linux nerds in here?
Have you SEEN the drama that happens in this place? I feel like this is just asking for weird nobodies to harass anyone who quietly disagrees with them.
If this passes then I’m outta here.
I’m seeing lots of comments here saying that server admins can already see vote data, and therefore it is not private.
But from my point of view, having a handful of people able to extract voting data using their position of trust on the lemmy network is very different from broadcasting voting data to everyone on lemmy. And although you can argue that it is possible to create a new server and federate and blah-blah-blah to create votes; that argument sounds to me like “don’t bother locking your front door, because that type of lock can be defeated by a lock-picking tools.”
And even aside from all that discussion about who can access what; there is another key point that I think is overlooked: Making voter information public makes it ‘normal’ thing to monitor and discuss. Currently there is an expectation that people won’t look at or discuss that information (even if they hypothetically could get access). But by making it public, the expectation then is that everyone will look at that information. That would create a change in tone and meaning of votes and discussion around votes.
I rather not. If it does happen, I’ll just rss Lemmy and stop using my account. I like Lemmy the way it is because there’s not much focus on votes and more on actual discussion.
Not everyone has a github account and can comment or vote there.
But, agree. Don’t think any good will come from making votes public. Any pro/con should be measured against who it benefits. If it’s mods or devs, there are always alternatives
If it’s end-users, consider the edge-cases and the repercussions of malicious actors having access to those individual preferences.
What a horrible fucking idea. You are want this place to be an even bigger echo chamber than it already is? Yes, let’s allow the majority of one opinion brigade people’s histories to further ostracized them!
Admins, for smart people, can be fucking idiots.
No thank you. I’ve already had one person go off on me because of some perceived offense: lemm.ee/comment/13768482
I don’t want votes to be public, but they already are, so.
This would probably escalate a lot of arguments that break out in comment sections.
I would hate to have to deal with “why did you downvote me?” comments, but I’m also not sure I would have the self control to abstain from leaving such a comment myself.
I think that making vote identities easily accesible to every user runs the risk of increasing harassment and decreasing discussion quality.
Please No
I’ve already seen admins go through the federated votes on their instance to call out anyone who disagrees with them.
I don’t have a strong opinion either way but I don’t think it will be healthy for discourse to unlock that power for everyone
Lemmy is already a privacy nightmare, in some way. There was a comment showing the screengrab of those peiple who upvoted and downvoted a post. Basically, if you self-host an instance, you’ll have access to these. This can easily be weaponized by certain organizations that want to create profiling of lemmy users, e.g NSA and Intelligence agencies.
I would say no. I don’t want some dumbass to interogate me about why I downvotes thia and why I upvoted that.
Absolutely not.
This will like lots of other people say start witch hunts and people will absolutely develop bots and websites which scrape all that information and classify all users based on that. Like those Reddit sites where you can search for a user and see where they are active and all that. But this will be worse.
I say no. Privacy.
Comments say they’re already basically public. I don’t know anything about that, but it’s probably better to merely have a camera in your toilet than have a camera in your toilet that livestreams 24/7.
But I don’t have an especially informed sense of how to run a platform so maybe there’s a bunch of crap I’m not thinking about.
No, as it would create a lot of excuses for targeted harrassment and just increase toxicity
Hard no. I’ll move on like I did a year ago from Reddit, and I was on that site for 14 years.
Just from a political/nation-state viewpoint, it would needlessly expose information to make it easier for countries and political parties to keep some kind of “social score” and decide when to do something to you. China already does this kind of stuff.
We need to make it easier for everyone/anyone to do this? Think about all of the super-divisive issues at hand. People can already get a sense of your views from your responses, and that should be it.
What will this accomplish other than facilitate brigading?
It is baffling to me how many people want to copy Reddit voting system, including hiding voting history, despite having left Reddit. The entire voting system over there is a huge part of the toxicity problem.
Downvoted be removed, all votes public. Accountability changes peoples’ behavior and I can tell you that before kbin.social went down you could definitely see the difference.
This is clearly an unpopular opinion and I will be downvoted like crazy for it, but it is so exhausting watching forum after forum make the exact same mistakes.
I don’t see the benefits but I see drama this would cause.
So the annoying neckbeard i downvoted for being an annoying neckbeard is gonna DM me?
9point6@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Hard no from me
I don’t want some nutjob with too much time stalking me because I upvoted something about climate change or downvoted some bigoted shit. We all know those fuckos are out there
Voting on Reddit-like platforms is soft moderation by a community, and if you disincentive that, the whole model kinda falls apart IMO
mozz@mbin.grits.dev 2 months ago
Your 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.
rimu@piefed.social 2 months 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.
zerofk@lemm.ee 2 months ago
(b) will just lead to free up and down votes, i.e. less engagement. That in turn could lead to slowly bleeding out.
it_depends_man@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I would like a © where my instances collects all the votes on the post, and then transmits an anonymized aggregate.
socsa@piefed.social 2 months 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.
Coelacanth@feddit.nu 2 months ago
I agree with you. I remember arguing about this a year ago when people first discovered votes were public on Kbin. I don’t want to obsess over who up- or downvoted me and I don’t want anyone else doing that either. Discussions are healthier when voting is anonymous (or at least obscured as is currently the case).
If bots become such an overwhelming problem that all regular users need access to voting records to better report all the bots I’ll maybe revisit my stance. But right now the gains seem dubious.
UniversalMonk@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I’m dealing with one right now! lol It’s crazy.
empireOfLove2@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 months ago
You don’t even have serial downvoters. You just consistently post the worst possible political pisstakes repeatedly and constantly and nobody likes them when they run across it every time.
Annoyed_Crabby@monyet.cc 2 months ago
If they’re a serial downvoter, then it’s easier for you to track them and block them as well. Double edged sword i think
AlligatorBlizzard@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
I thought blocks were one way - you can’t see anything from the person you blocked, but they can still see your stuff?
UniversalMonk@lemmy.world 2 months ago
That’s why I’d like it.
Rai@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 months ago
I downvoted SO much more on Reddit than I do here. The comment quality here is leagues better.
zecg@lemmy.world 2 months ago
It’s already public, it’s just lemmy users who don’t see them.
cyborganism@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
Yep. Same for me.
Xyre@lemmus.org 2 months ago
What might be interesting would be to have it displayed, but grouped by instance. That way we could see some data and potentially uncover troll instances or attempts to brigade the conversation without opening ourselves up to personal attacks.
GBU_28@lemm.ee 2 months ago
Mod-admins are already doing this, even if you vote and don’t comment on something.
SorteKanin@feddit.dk 2 months ago
Isn’t the obvious thing to just have it be an option that admins can enable or disable? Maybe have a third option for only showing upvotes? Then it’s up to each instance to decide, and users can decide to go to instances with the option their prefer.
index@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
They can read your comment history why would you care about them being able to see what you upvoted?
How does that disincentive it? It actually makes it better
9point6@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I specifically don’t comment on people that give off the vibe they might be one of those kind of nutjobs, precisely because it gives them a notification with my username attached if I do. I’m on this site to kill some time with low effort, I don’t want any risk of attracting the attention of some weirdo.
I downvote in those scenarios and then report if appropriate. If enough other users feel the same way the comment goes down to the bottom of the thread and fewer users see it. Especially if it’s something that a mod eventually removes, as it reduces the reach until a mod can get to it.
If I risk retaliation for doing that, I (and others) will just stop, meaning those comments stay up front and centre and we lose that soft moderation plus that engagement in general. Going into the comments will just end up being a worse experience