Probably better to post in the github issue rather than replying here.
I say make them public. It was like that on Kbin and it never brought trouble.
Lemmy devs are considering making all votes public - have your say
Submitted 2 months ago by rimu@piefed.social to fediverse@lemmy.world
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/4967
Comments
SorteKanin@feddit.dk 2 months ago
Many people in this thread seem to not realize that votes are essentially public already - this is only about whether the Lemmy UI should make it a bit easier to see the votes. They can already be seen quite easily if you know how.
However, there is an easy solution to this problem. This is clearly a controversial decision, so don’t make a choice for everyone. Make it an option. Any admin can decide for themselves whether their instance should allow users to see votes.
That also means that users can decide to go to instances where the votes are hidden or public.
This approach leaves the choice to the individual, rather than forcing the choice on everyone.
Jilanico@lemmy.world 2 months ago
It’s confusing enough understanding how federation works for the less technically inclined. I don’t think we should also expect them to figure out which instance is privacy-conscious. Privacy of votes should be baked into Lemmy. Even kbin users shouldn’t be able to see it.
If users want to advertise their approval/disapproval of posts they can use public comments in tandem with private votes.
SorteKanin@feddit.dk 2 months ago
Privacy of votes should be baked into Lemmy. Even kbin users shouldn’t be able to see it.
This is impossible. The underlying protocol, ActivityPub does not have the concept of private votes. It is not up to Lemmy to decide. You’d need to revise the protocol for this and good luck with that.
Kaboom@reddthat.com 2 months ago
Votes are already public. This isn’t a change
pivot_root@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Yeah. Just look from a kbin instance, or if you host your own instance, you can run a Postgres query to find them.
intensely_human@lemm.ee 2 months ago
How are votes public? Someone’s been carpet-bombing my comments lately. I’d love to know who it is.
PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
Servers can see who voted on what, even if the vote is on another server.
So if you view the vote from a server that makes the views public (like a kbin server) or you run your own Lemmy server, then you can see it.
pivot_root@lemmy.world 2 months ago
The easiest way to to take a look through a kbin/mbin instance, which exposes the vote information through the interface. The harder but equally valid way is to run your own Lemmy instance. Other instances will tell yours exactly who voted for what, and as an admin, you even get an option on Lemmy’s web interface to see it.
PoliticalAgitator@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Yes, and there’s no genuine argument otherwise.
If you want Lemmy to grow and not be completely overrun with bots posting propaganda and signal boosting extremism, showing votes is the only way forward. It’s the only mechanism by which independent parties can discover and expose things like “every post and comment by this account is upvoted by these 20 other accounts that have never posted and whose names follow the same formula”.
The privacy you’re mourning never existed in the first place and it can’t exist on any platform. For Lemmy, it’s required for federation. On sites like Reddit, you have privacy from other users, but not from the company or anyone they sell that data to.
Since true privacy isn’t an option, it would be far better to be open about that lack of privacy. This thread is already riddled with people who thought their votes were private, rather than just inconvient to look up. That’s far more dangerous and deceptive.
This needs to happen, regardless of the ill-informed tantrums it may cause. If you want to upvote pornography without it being used against you, create accounts that are strictly for pornography and properly compartmentalize your accounts.
auzy@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Problem is, it actually encourages a hive mind. I’ve already had 2 people try to bully me.
I’d go one step further. Upvotes down votes and totals should be hidden entirely. This would encourage people to post based on their own without external influence
Valmond@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Hear hear!
Well said and argued.
+1
imaqtpie@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
This would be a catastrophic mistake. Please don’t.
SorteKanin@feddit.dk 2 months ago
Please be aware that votes are effectively public already, just not shown in the Lemmy UI.
FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today 2 months ago
On multiple occasions a moderator has reached out to me and informed me an account existed purely to go through my comments and downvote me. I assume this is a common occurance and we could combat it better if we could see the votes.
irinotecan@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I worry though that public votes will enable unstable people to stalk you. Vote the wrong way? Why, I’ll just create some bot accounts to constantly downvote you, and I’ll harass you with replies to every comment you make, reminding everyone that you vote against the grain and shouldn’t be trusted!
laverabe@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Yeah there is already too much of a hivemind already, we don’t need to make votes public, it would only enshrine a permanent 100% groupthink. It is a very bad idea.
FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today 2 months ago
I assure you that unstable people already stalk others and vote histories are already visible to those who try hard enough.
GoodEye8@lemm.ee 2 months ago
You could make the saame argument against commenting, say the wrong thing and you get harassed. But what do you do with someone harassing you? You block them. What do you do when someone is harassing you by downvoting you? You most likely suck it up because you don’t know who is downvoting you.
I would argue it’s more a tool against harassment than a tool for harassment, especially since anyone determined enough can already access that information.
laverabe@lemmy.world 2 months ago
That must have been an admin, mods can’t see votes as far as I’m aware. Only domain administrators can see votes
lightnsfw@reddthat.com 2 months ago
Easier to just ignore downvotes the instance I’m on doesn’t show them and it’s great. If someone can’t be bothered to explain how I’m wrong I don’t care about their opinion anyway.
dezmd@lemmy.world 2 months ago
VOTES ARE ALREADY PUBLIC.
If you are using Lemmy because you want privacy, you’ve already missed the boat, everything is wide assed open for datamining and advertising fingerprinting.
I’d hoped for an open system with open APIs and open implementations that allow everyone equal access to the system and bring equal accountability.
If people just want Reddit style fiefdoms with no real public accountability possible, then make a blackjack and hookers fork.
I’m really not interested in a system that bakes in more authoritarian secrecy and control, which could very well be an unexpected outcome of backlash to how this has been presented.
laverabe@lemmy.world 2 months ago
The source code for Lemmy is free for all to view and modify, there will be no authoritarianism… And if it were to happen all of Lemmy administrators would either refuse the upgrade and stay retrograde, or quickly fork. The devs don’t really have total control of thousands of servers to have free reign to do stuff like reddit corp does.
I’m all for vote privacy in the UI. There are just too many downsides to public votes, and not as much weight to the positives in my opinion. People should not be afraid of backlash from down voting if a post does not contribute, it’ll only create echo chambers/ unchallenged groupthink.
x00z@lemmy.world 2 months ago
It should actually be made more private.
SorteKanin@feddit.dk 2 months ago
How? The ActivityPub protocol has no support for private votes. Also, private votes would be private for mods and admins as well, which would make downvote brigading and vote manipulation very hard to detect and moderate.
maegul@lemmy.ml 2 months ago
Hmmm … is it not really possible at all? Just riffing here … the identity of a voter isn’t necessary, just a means to ensure the uniqueness of a voter so there’s no duplication etc. So … could a hash of the voter’s ID be distributed with the vote to prevent duplication?
Gormadt@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 months ago
Considering making votes public, not considering making mod actions inform the user they occur.
I can see where they’re priorities are.
Making votes something mods can see is one thing but public is while other can of worms.
intensely_human@lemm.ee 2 months ago
Asymmetrical visibly of votes is more problematic than letting everyone see them
Aradina@lemmy.ml 2 months ago
Votes are already public? If they weren’t, federation of votes wouldn’t be possible.
CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social 2 months ago
hypothetically, I suppose it could alternately be done by instances just federating the number of votes from their instance and only storing who voted what internally. Though then you might get issues with very easy vote manipulation if a server just says a lot of people voted a certain way without needing to make accounts to “justify” the fake votes.
corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
If I can’t vote privately then I don’t vote.
They should put the rest of the nails in this coffin. Go full clique.
SorteKanin@feddit.dk 2 months ago
If I can’t vote privately then I don’t vote.
Then you should not vote on the fediverse at all, since votes have been public since the beginning. The Lemmy UI just doesn’t let you see the votes.
GoodEye8@lemm.ee 2 months ago
Your votes already aren’t private, they’re simply not easily accessible. I won’t get into the technical details but the short version is that every instance owner who is federated with your instance already knows how you’ve voted. Someone could make a website right now that collects votes and shows how someone has voted or who upvoted/downvoted a post or comment. It’s already public information.
Atomic@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
You don’t. You never have. Voting already is not private
MerchantsOfMisery@lemmy.ml 2 months ago
That just makes me feel like never up/downvoting anything on Lemmy. I think it’s super creepy that the devs and seemingly most people on Lemmy are A-OK with this.
JackbyDev@programming.dev 2 months ago
You need to explain why because either they’re misunderstanding something or the two of you are using different definitions of private.
AshMan85@lemmy.world 2 months ago
likes and votes should be anonymous and user names should only be displayed for comments.
SorteKanin@feddit.dk 2 months ago
Votes are public in the underlying protocol - mbin users and lemmy admins can see votes. They are not anonymous. This is only about whether votes should be displayed in Lemmy.
Socsa@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
This kills the Lemmy.
Kusimulkku@lemm.ee 2 months ago
How come?
Socsa@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
Because it is giving in to the already problematic functionality of AP, which is the fact that way too much user telemetry is exposed to way to may people as it stands. Work should focus on making AP more private, not less.
There is nothing in the AP spec which states that user strings need to be plaintext. Lemmy should be building out tools which allow AP participants to optionally participate via tokenized user strings.
_Sprite@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Idk if I trust that some powermod won’t send me to hell if I vote against something they strongly believe in, akwardtheturtle style
UniversalMonk@lemmy.world 2 months ago
akwardtheturtle
Now there’s a name I haven’t heard in a while…
lemmy_in@lemm.ee 2 months ago
Mods of communities can already see votes in communities they moderate. Admins of instances can already see votes on all content.
threelonmusketeers@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
Mods of communities can already see votes in communities they moderate
I moderate a few communities, and I don’t believe this is the case.
GBU_28@lemm.ee 2 months ago
Already happening
samus12345@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Nah. Votes are already visible to people using other applications than Lemmy, so let people use those if they want to see how people voted. It’s fine as-is.
AceTKen@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
They are? Where? I mod a Community and I’ve never seen anything that isn’t explicitly for Admins that can see them.
samus12345@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I’m not sure which ones, I only use Lemmy.
otter@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
Potential positives:
- it would make it less surprising to users that don’t realize that any admin can review voting activity
- it would make it easier for non-admin users to study voting activity and find abuse
- it would make it consistent with other platforms that we federate with, which can already see votes
Potential downsides:
-
People will report voting activity that they don’t like, even if it’s not malicious. Admins will need to set up rules on what is / isn’t ok, and take action against people that spam reports. It would also help to have automated tools to review voting activity since it’s hard to do that manually.
-
It’s another
MerchantsOfMisery@lemmy.ml 2 months ago
The fact that the devs even considered this is a bad sign, IMO. How out of touch does one have to be to think this is a good thing in any capacity?
Danitos@reddthat.com 2 months ago
Disagree. They showed their arguments, and those seem pretty valid to me, even though I disagree. IMO being open, transparent and promoting community discussion is a good sign.
lorty@lemmy.ml 2 months ago
How so? Most social media shows who liked stuff, it does make sense to consider it for lemmy.
MerchantsOfMisery@lemmy.ml 2 months ago
Most social media is garbage for reasons including that.
TubularTittyFrog@lemmy.world 2 months ago
a lot of software people are incredibly naive when it comes to how human beings interact and behave.
SorteKanin@feddit.dk 2 months ago
Please realize that votes are effectively public already, just not shown in the Lemmy UI.
muntedcrocodile@lemm.ee 2 months ago
I dont see the issue letting people see them. They are already public making it more accessible just increases equallity.
echolalia@lemmy.ml 2 months ago
I think they should be public. They’re already accessible for mbin posts and anyone administrating a lemmy instance. It should be clear to all users that their votes are already not private.
Someone could make a lemmy instance just to get voting behavior and make a website with cool graphs and stuff today and the only thing that could stop them is defederation. If Lemmy gets popular, this is just an inevitability.
Imagine if a large instance decided to do that today. Imagine if lemmy.world released lemmy.world/votes. Would people defederate just for that? Remember: Mbin already displays scores and I don’t think anyone has defederated over it.
Might as well put it on the interface so everyone understands it isn’t private. Rip off the bandaid.
pivot_root@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Exactly. If private votes were intended, Lemmy servers would have had voting privacy setting where the vote is federated as
@privacy-vote-{sha256sum userid & postid}@instance.fooinstead of the actual voter’s username.rglullis@communick.news 2 months ago
Not privacy-protecting. You can easily deduct the voter by enumeration.
buddascrayon@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I understand that this information is already basically public but there is a thin barrier to the average nitwit user accessing such information and going in a rampage screwing with people who have downloaded them. I’ll say this, if they make it more public I think I will just simply stop voting. I will continue to use Lemmy but only as a passive user.
moon@lemmy.cafe 2 months ago
Should be a server setting, just like how some servers can choose to show combined votes or separate up/down votes.
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 2 months ago
What’s the benefit?
Like, what’s the actual user experience gain from seeing someone else’s votes? Is it just so the average joe can profile users, like for identifying bots or whatever?
empireOfLove2@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 months ago
This is an interesting conundrum.
On one hand it would help locate foreign agent bots/bad faith actors faster and recognize vote manipulation by bot farms.
On the other it will lead to even more account-stalking problems, user drama, and would further enable vote dogpiling if you see certain known users voted a certain way.I’m inclined to say no. They are already “public” if one wants to put in the effort to admin a standalone instance or run alts on multiple services they can see if they care- I personally don’t really care
CynicusRex@lemmy.ml 2 months ago
If a website could be sure none of their users are malicious/bots and all of the users are perfectly rational and virtuous then public or private voting wouldn’t matter either way. That being nearly impossible, why not a reputation based system like Stack Exchange? Only when an account meets certain requirements they can vote.
To boot, on the website tweakers.net one can actually vote -1, …, +3.
- +3: “Spotlight comments are of such high quality and substantive value that they clearly stand out above the rest”
- +2: “Informative and interesting comments that are a useful addition to the discussion in an on-topic thread or the information in the article”
- +1: “Nice on-topic responses with knowledge that is common knowledge”
- +0: “Comments that do not contain a relevant contribution, but are posted with good intentions”
- -1: “Flamebaits, trolls, misplaced jokes, unnecessarily hurtful comments and other comments that violate our terms and conditions or house rules”
wesker@lemmy.sdf.org 2 months ago
I support this.
raynethackery@lemmy.world 2 months ago
No.
nondescripthandle@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 months ago
Guarentee you will start witch hunts by making the votes more accessible. But if you want every user to be able to do that then go ahead. My ability to keep myself occupied here is already not that largs, maybe some witch hunts are what we need to drive engagement up /s
ClamDrinker@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I am kind of afraid that if voting becomes more public than it already is, it will lead exactly to more of the kind of “zero-content downvote” accounts mentioned in the ticket. Because some people are just wildly irrational when it comes to touchy subjects, and aint nobody got time to spend an eternity with them dismantling their beliefs so they understand the nuance you see that they don’t. So it kind of incentivizes people to create an account like that to ensure a crazy person doesn’t latch on to the account you’re trying to have normal discussions with.
Emmie@lemm.ee 2 months ago
If they are shown to mods and admins then all the positives from the list are already included no?
vga@sopuli.xyz 2 months ago
Aren’t they already practically public, given the federation?
SomeGuy69@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Yup. Host your own instance and you could even write a browser plugin to make them visible to every user.