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.
I don’t see how that’s much different from making a comment, it’s not election, how is voting on a comment/post different from voicing your opnion with a comment?
Do I prefer the completely private option? Yes, but if the alternative is that some people can see and others can’t, I prefer that everyone can see it.
This is one of the downfalls of a distributed system. You basically need public votes. Without it, instances lack critical information about the validity of votes. You don’t have a centralized system with back door access to monitor and maintain things.
You can anonymise those votes with a hash if your data is structured to need a username for a key value. Use the username as a salt if you must. However the Lemmy API has plenty of metadata to prove a human account that is not a username. Creation date, how many previous comments, if they’re banned from abother connected instanxe. This isn’t about mod tooling or APIs this is about anonymity and privacy.
I vote for no upvote or downvotes, why build a token for a false economy like the upvote at Reddit or the note at Tumblr or the like on Facebook.
Endorphin buttons are not good for anyone.
You don’t want “chug bleach to cure coronavirus” content being on the same level as actual intelligent discourse
I think it’s possible to have both in a federated system. Let the instance the user is on keep the tally of who upvoted what, and let the instance the post is on to know only the tally from other instances. Should be up to instances whether to show this data to users or not. This way it’d be easy to find and defederate single user instances manipulating votes.
Do not want.
Absolutely braindead decision by the devs. I’ll be quitting Lemmy if/when this is pushed through. Unbelievably stupid.
Please be aware that votes are already public, they just aren’t shown in the UI. Other apps than Lemmy show the votes.
I know. But don’t you have to be an instance asmin to see them? Or can anyone do it? I feel like most people have no idea how to do it? Seems like a change if everyone can easily do it.
I know. But don’t you have to be an instance asmin to see them? Or can anyone do it? I feel like most people have no idea how to do it? Seems like a change if everyone can easily do it.
Maybe make it possible for a server to only share aggregate votes on a given post?
Like a proxy vote, where only the server knows who it belonged too.
I actually like the idea of being able to see how many upvotes/downvotes came from specific instances much more than seeing the actual users. It would cover some of the positives mentioned in the github discussion:
-Could help fight bot and multiple-account voting (if we assume that people who make multiple accounts do it on the same instance)
-Could help identify voting-patterns from specific servers (obviously)
And then if something looks suspicious, the admins can already see who voted, so they could check out whether some user is abusing the mechanics.
I find that this approach might be worth talking about, but making user votes visible to all seems very unnecessary.
Sure, but then you’re trusting the server not to just lie about the totals.
I mean, that’s already true and why the federation model is used in the first place. If another instance can’t be trusted, you can disconnect your own from it (extremely easy if you self-host, if you are a standard member of a larger instance it might require convincing)
My understanding is that admins already have access to see who votes. This feature is to make then visible to everyone.
I think they should focus more on getting rid of bots, and get a little less ban happy on the people that are calling out bots or bullshit.
I’d love to see what mod removed content or banned someone.
Make it optional and opt-in.
They simply want to police it better to suit their agenda
admins and owners of any federated instance can already see votes.
Let’s create separate accounts for voting and for posting so to improve anonymity and freedom of expression.
I have been considering building it into PieFed. There would be a pool of 1000+ bot accounts which will vote on behalf of anyone who wants it. When a vote is cast one of the proxies would be randomly chosen to federate the vote instead.
I have this brilliant original idea, scroll down, and here you & @A_A@lemmy.world are…
I was thinking an app like Voyager could help vote from a non-posting account. Maybe it’d need to route through a proxy to better obscure the connection between a posting and non-posting account. Seeing PieFed, suppose you could try that route instead but your idea might be more secure. Folks just have to trust you I suppose hehe. Maybe one could build greater trust with a Lemmy app (Voyager) than an instance (PieFed) if they proved the app kept stuff private locally, or am I wrong?
User’s votes anonymization through this system looks quite nice for me.
I like the idea - if the lemmy devs do implement public voting I’d definitely move over. Not only does it maintain the (current) state of voter visibility, but it also protects from the frequently cited admin and kbin/mbin exploits. Trusting one admin is far easier than trusting every admin.
Please don’t man, that makes matter even worst.
Literally what Ill do if this happens. One account that gets no notifications posts no content and votes, then another account where I comment.
I say yes!!
I have a particular set of people that actually follow me from community to community, just to downvote what I say and the articles I post. All because I posted an article about the Green Party to the c/politics sub. lol
So if you are determined enough to do that, then ya shouldn’t be upset that people can see what you’re doing.
You don’t, you just pretend that you do.
Hey, wow! What a coincidence. Funny that you would show up at the EXACT time I am talking about people following me. Crazy coincidence, don’t ya think?
It’d be super fun to see who it is following me and downvoting me, right? I mean, not that YOU’D ever do that, right? All because I posted a Green Party article to a politics sub. You suuuurrreee wouldn’t be the type of person to do that, I bet! Right?
Yeah, but then what?
So you have confirmed that you have a fan club that likes to downvote you. What would you even do with this info?
Well I’d call them out on it and ask why they feel the need to do that.
Maybe, just maybe, if they know people could see how obsessive they are, it would take the fun out of the stalking.
I mean, at the end of the day, I don’t care THAT much one way or the other. I just think it would be funny to give them a shoutout and welcome them to another round of downvoting.
I posted an article about a ninety-year-old woman being the oldest person to graduate from Illinois University. 9 downvotes within one minute of posting it. lmao
Right now they are laughing and rubbing their hands together when I post something, just so they can downvote it. Which is funny and sad. Like am I really that important?! lol
So public or not public, I don’t care, but we can vote for, I’d say yes.
But I won’t cry if Lemmy doesn’t make the votes public. And I doubt there will be many Lemmy users that want their votes public, so I don’t think it’s gonna happen.
Them I want my haters too. Where are you people
Wow I want my obsessed about me haters too. Where are you people
Go post an article about the Green Party into the c/politics sub. Not only will you get plenty of people following you to downvote, but you’ll get called a “russian troll farm employee” every single day. So double win!!
I could go either way, but I don’t think “other platforms have public voting” doesn’t seem all that convincing. Who cares? I don’t care who voted on what, and I doubt most others do either.
While there are workarounds, leaving it as is at least weeds out the majority of trolls who aren’t technically inclined enough to go pull up A to see how B voted on C.
Yes. The act of voting a comment up or down shouldn’t be much different to hitting reply to that comment.
Upvote/downvote systems do exist to overcome those “+1” “-1” posts on old forums. You are not voting for the legislative elections. You are just interacting with another person comment/post in a way that does not require writing. If post comments, are not anonymous, upvotes/downvotes shouldn’t be anonymous as well.
What happens when foreign actors intent on influencing public policy decide to harass everyone critical of their issue? People will just stop being critical of the foreign narrative to stop the harassment, and you’ll wind up with posts that are completely against the public interest and for the foreign narrative.
You can already see this effect to some degree in comments, it’ll only get worse if everything is made public in the UI.
As counterintuitive as it is, regulated secrecy is necessary in all democratic processes, and I would argue that includes online forum debates.
It would actually be nice if community mods had the capability to turn the community to anonymous for comments and posts as well. Is knowing who posts the information more important than the information itself? If it’s worthwhile to share from one person, it’s worthwhile to share from everyone else so identity isn’t all that important.
This is a copy and past from my reply another community, sorry if you are reading it again:
I’m at the completely opposite end of the spectrum of most people, they should be public to all. It makes it clear whether the guy downvoting you is doing so maliciously or as a non-participant. Same for upvotes. Otherwise, just get rid of it and find some better mechanism. The people saying “NO!” or that they should be anonymous don’t really have a reason, your comment history is already giving you away and no one has a problem with that.
The worst thing public upvotes/downvotes might lead to are the same things your comments are already profiled for by the same people that would and perhaps a random getting mad at your downvote or upvote and voting back, which doesn’t matter that much with the current karma system. The benefits, however, are a clear vision of where those upvotes and downvotes are coming from, without it you are a blind person in a social networks but with it you can tell who is interacting with you and you can investigate why and even make judgement calls because you can see whether they interact like a jerk.
No drama witch hunts, accountability for the way you are interacting online, the the benefits outweighs the drawbacks, but people don’t want it because they are insecure. I specially favor it because it could be a first step for a form of crowdsourced moderation, where you can choose the people you think are voting comments to your taste to eventually have a select group large enough to determine which should show up first and which shouldn’t show at all, and it could be completely complementary to existing systems. Don’t want to see “yes, I agree” comments sorting as the most relevant? You might choose people who do not upvote but have engaged with the rest of the thread for comments you consider more informative.
No one from kbin/mbin instances can check out the downvotes you make, since this attitude has been so widespread many don’t report it to those instances. They can see people who upvote, and the sky hasn’t fallen because of it.
What porn have you up voted? Hmm let’s find out.
That would be an argument to support alts natively in regards to the sub and instances you are participating in, and isn’t that compromising as it can already be checked.
word it better dude. i can’t comprehend what you just said.
Sorry dude, maybe you can read other better worded comments in this thread that share the same sentiment.
I’m down for more transparency. Lets make them public!
You know what this feature is really useful for? Seeing who upvotes spammers to preemptively block them. Admittedly, I haven’t had much of a use for that aspect since kbin.social died, but it was neat while it lasted.
Sorry, what’s an upvote spammer and why are they undesirable?
Of is talking about accounts that upvote spam content. For the most part those accounts will be the spammer’s alts that will be posting spam when the current account gets banned. Blocking them while they are still being used for vote manipulation means you wouldn’t have to see their spam in the future.
I think someone mentioned something along those lines int he GitHub thread and made the great point that maybe this should only be available to mods or admins, I forget. i thought it was reasonable.
To spam on here I suppose it’d be good to try to start a popular community on your own instance and then see who usually reports and downvotes spam, then block them from accounts you plan to use to astroturf or otherwise send spam.
Sigh
arent they already though?
It’s instance specific.
On a backend yes. But it’s not as easy to get to as just opening your profile and forming opinion on you by looking at your voting history.
looking forward to chuds judging me for my voting history
I’m genuinely thrilled by how many here are wetting themselves at the thought of others knowing what or who they downvoted. That is really the extent of “privacy” awareness in most of this thread, wanting to get away with being dicks.
Downvotes are meant to balance out “likes”, and minimise people gaming the score system — but let’s be honest here, just as often they’re a “disagree” button. And sometimes they’re just bullying tools — an endless supply of “Kick me!” post-its to be distributed generously wherever.
Hot fix: end downvotes. Just yank them out of the system. Actually my preferred solution.
More realistic fix: make votes transparent, encourage accountability.
Hot fix: end downvotes. Just yank them out of the system. Actually my preferred solution.
God no. Websites with just upvotes have some of the worst threads because a small pocket of stubborn idiots keep upvoting each other.
Hot fix: end downvotes. Just yank them out of the system. Actually my preferred solution.
This is already possible - just go to an instance that has downvotes disabled, there are plenty of them.
Downvotes are one of the most important indicator if a post is trolling or nonsense. If it only shows the total, you lose all sense of perspective. A post could have 2 upvotes and 1 downvote or 10000 upvotes and 9999 downvoted, this massively changes the context of a post. Also why should I not use a vote to say I disagreed with something? I don’t always want to write a detailed explanation, especially not when people reply with “did an AI write this?” or simply ignore what I said. Most cases are not like your comment where there’s a valid reason to explain something.
I don’t always want to write a detailed explanation, especially not when people reply with “did an AI write this?"
No, much better that they have to wonder in private “did a not just downvote me?” 🙂 But I do appreciate you replying, much more than I would a vote in either direction.
Nah I’ll fuck off.
While I don’t necessarily think that votes should be made public, it would be nice if you could see your own votes. There have been a few times I wanted to find a post that I had seen, but didn’t save, and I couldn’t find it.
If you are on Android, Voyager shows what posts you upvoted and downvoted in the profile page.
I agree, would be nice if this was standard in web version.
I was of the assumption they were private. Please make them private then because I want no one looking at my votes
They can’t be completely private because instances have to share how many upvotes each post has. That’s a limitation of the fediverse, since everything is spread across many independent systems, data has to be exchanged across them.
As of now, they’re semi-private because end users can’t easily see who voted on a post/comment unless they manage an instance themselves.
I know the amount of votes has to be shared, but I don’t see why other moderators (hell, even mods of the main instance) need to be able to see who voted on what
This would require a major change in the underlying ActivityPub protocol. This isn’t going to happen for years, if ever.
absolutely a horrible idea. please for the love of god don’t do this, it will only lead to people getting dunked on for how they upvote/downvote.
Sure, but I think we can go further.
Filter the votes I see based on which users or instances I’ve blocked. I’ve blocked them for a reason.
This would require aggregating vote counts for every single user separately. I think that is simply computationally infeasible.
I’m not sure it would. If my instance knows who up and downvoted a post, then they can work it out on the fly per post without even needing to tell me who did what.
Personally I’m not even in favour of the simple up/downvote system. Everyone uses it differently. “I disagree with you but thanks for being civil” can be up or down depending on who you are.
Baked in visibility of votes and blocking that only works one way makes Lemmy (and anything based on ActivityPub) less functional from an end user standpoint. Wish I knew a decent, somewhat popular alternative that implemented these features
Yea these things are unfortunately hard dealbreakers for some people. Hopefully the situation can improve in the future.
ITT: Lots of people who have no idea how the tech works and couldn’t be bothered reading the comments before posting
The larger question is when will votes be private?
There are reasons democracies vote in a concealed ballot box
Enable admin access to which server it originated but more and you’re just hurting more than helping.
I saw some other’s commenting about “private ballot boxes” but I think that’s a false equivalency. You Vote in a democracy on policy and representation, not discourse. You’re basically saying your upvote/downvote is being used to police conversation and who you think best represents you.
It has similarities though, as pointed out in orher comments. For one, a user might be more careful with downvotes if they are afraid of negative consequences e.g. harassment. With piblic votes, there would therefore be a bias towards upvotes and and people abstaining from downvotes, i.e. less interaction in total.
Downvotes serve a purpose today, letting us quickly scan which comments are controversial or even harmful to the conversation. I, for one, usually sort most threads by votes and then skip the comments with many downvotes but for controversial topics, I instead seek out the comments that have both many upvotes and downvotes.
These would be harder to find given the above bias.
If this mean we’d be able to see who has up- / downvoted a comment on our own and possibly on other people’s posts then I’m all for it. This would be highly useful at filtering out the people here I want nothing to do with.
“Help me build my echo chamber.”
Echo chamber within echo chamber I guess.
It’s not the people whose opinions I disagree with who I usually block. It’s people making snide comments like this while fishing for upvotes. I’ll reserve my attention to the ones who have something to say rather than ones just wanting to make noise.
I vote for public votes. Your comments, history and activity is already public, what can you gain from “hidden” votes as much as privacy?
I think the best way to think about this is in terms of “affordances” of the platform and the balance of their merits. “Affordances” just mean the actions and behaviours enabled by the platform’s features (a jargon-y but useful word I’ve seen others use in these discussions).
Broader principles like privacy are important too, but I think can easily lead to less productive and relevant discussions, in part because many of the counters or complications will come down to the actual affordances.
From what I’ve read so far, I think everyone shares a pretty clear understanding of what public votes will lead to … a more heated and polarising dynamic, with potential abuse vectors opening up, and less honesty and openness in voting. And I think most share a distaste for that scenario. Either way, I do, and I’d encourage others to think about how it’s likely result of public votes and with the internet being the internet, is unlikely to be pleasant or fruitful.
While others have access to vote data, namely admins of instances, mods (for their communities) and members of platforms that make votes public like k/mbin, I don’t think this is decisive.
It’s about the behaviours that are being enabled and the balance of behaviours and how they interact to form community dynamics, with the fediverse itself being an important factor. An admin or mod having access to votes is part of making their job easier, which is a good thing. It’s power and responsibility. And the moment they violate the bounds of their role by “doxing” someone’s voting data, that’d obviously be a bad thing, but with countermeasures we can take. We can leave their instance or community and our instance can defederate from them … their account can be blocked and possibly banned by admins. On balance, this seems stable and fair enough to me.
In the case of other platforms, like k/mbin, that’s definitely more tricky. But again, defederation is always a possibility here if it becomes problematic enough (however dramatic that could end up). This is just the nature of the fediverse, that platforms will differ on things like this. Again, if people start abusing that information from other platforms and instances, blocking, banning are options, as is the nuclear option of defederation with any such instances (which is a core balancing feature of the fediverse).
As it presently stands, k/mbin are a minority of users on the threadiverse and so whatever their platform choices are don’t really affect the rest of the threadiverse.
In the end, you can only make the best platform that you can. That k/mbin do something we don’t want to do isn’t a good reason for following suite. If anything, it’s a good reason to stick with what we prefer and continue to make the argument with them on their choices.
I agree it’s an issue that it seems votes are private when they aren’t. Again, I come back to the balance of affordances, and I think they’re better as they are than with public votes. However misleading the privacy situation is, it can be handled by being more transparent with users by providing warnings etc.
Ultimately, the privacy problem on the fediverse is not going away any time soon … it’s the nature of decentralisation, and this should maybe be made more clear to more people! But making a better platform is a real problem in front of us right now and I think it’s better to focus on that than how the general issue of privacy or consistency with privacy is best served.
I think I saw someone mentioning in the GitHub dicussion that other platforms expose vote data. While true, many of those would be microblogging platforms (mastodon, twitter, bluesky etc), where, again, the balance of affordances becomes relevant. A “vote” there, normally called a “like” is a personal action between user accounts that are likely to follow each other with such being the core mechanic of the platform. On aggregators like lemmy/reddit, the core mechanic is making popular posts so that your content gets to the top of the feed (roughly anyway). While there’s a lot of overlap, there’s more angst here around what gets voted on and what doesn’t and less inter-personal accountability and bonding. Posts and discussions are more public affairs and less conversations between people.
I wonder if making votes public would create the need or desire for enabling more post-specific options for users, such as making a post that can’t be voted on or that doesn’t provide public voting data?
In the end, my bet would be that at the scale that lemmy is at, it won’t make too much of a difference if votes were made public. I think some would definitely encounter more unpleasantness and some would definitely find voting a more stressful affair, but we’re cosy enough that we’ll cope. Going forward though, public voting for an aggregator feels dangerous and hard to undo. Yes, it could be technically removed, but if a culture is established that is accustomed to it and become desensitised to the negatives, they’ll probably want to hold on to it.
PugJesus@lemmy.world 2 months ago
One of the things I liked back in Kbin was being able to see who upvoted. Some people were lurkers who didn’t comment, but it was still nice to always see them take an interest in the material. Felt more like they were a regular in the community.