Lemmy votes ARE public, should they be anonymous?

Submitted ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨lalo@discuss.tchncs.de⁩ to ⁨fediverse@lemmy.world⁩

Currently, almost anyone in the Fediverse can see Lemmys votes. Lemmy admins can see votes, as well as mods. Only regular Lemmy users can’t. Should the Lemmy devs create a way to make the votes anonymous?

There is a discussion going on right now considering “making the Lemmy votes public” but I think that premisse is just wrong. The votes are public already, they’re just hidden from Lemmy users. Anyone from a kbin/mbin/fedia instance can check out the votes if they are so inclined.

The users right now may fall into a false sense of privacy when voting because the votes are hidden from Lemmy users. If you want to vote something and not show up on the vote list, please create another account to support that type of content and don’t tell anyone.

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Comments

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Xirup@yiffit.net ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Wait a minute, so any admin can see which posts do I upvote/downvote?

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- Link@rentadrunk.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Furthermore, anyone can spin up a Lemmy server if they want to see people’s votes. It’s not very hard or load the same post in kbin/mbin.
  
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- otter@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  For what it’s worth, admins/employees on Reddit (or any other website) can also see upvote records.
  
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  - Jumuta@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    this is different, oc is talking about “any admin”. Anyone can make a lemmy server and become a server admin from which they might be able to see the voters
    
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- bamboo@lemm.ee ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Yep. On kbin I think any user can too.
  
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- GBU_28@lemm.ee ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Yep and they ban people as they see fit, across different communities, based on votes anywhere
  
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- Munkisquisher@lemmy.nz ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Yes, by looking in the DB or the data that’s federated as it comes through
  
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- FiskFisk33@startrek.website ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  yes, and any instance owner on any federated instance. Oh, and anyone on Kbin.
  
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Coelacanth@feddit.nu ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I always thought anonymous voting was preferable, or at least non-public. I don’t want “why did you downvote me bro!?”-arguments to occur, and I don’t want to know who approves of my comments or not. I think thinking of votes as an amorphous blob representing general public opinion on Lemmy is preferable to getting into the weeds of who exactly likes your posts and comments.

We could also have “karma” on Lemmy, but while technically tracked the environment is better off without it being public in my opinion. I view voting records similarly.

If botting becomes enough of an issue that regular users need to report vote manipulation bots I’ll be fine with conceding my stance.

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- corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  As a comment on the other discussion says, there’s a reason ballots are secret.
  
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  - blanketswithsmallpox@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    In reality you should be able to get an anonymized reference number to show your vote was tabulated correctly though.
    
    Right now it comes down to an actual official finding your paper ballot with hand marked tracking and presuming to the computer read it correctly on an overall vote total.
    
    Being able to do this anonymously and securely is where the problems lie. Which is also why digital only voting still isn’t a thing anywhere.
    
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  - ZDL@ttrpg.network ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    There’s also a reason why votes in parliaments aren’t secret.
    
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- ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I agree. As long as anonymous voting doesn’t cause obvious trolling/spam issues, it should be preferred.
  
  One of the reasons I’ve always found Facebook off-putting and never used it (even before learning about the shady practices) are the very visible votes. I tend to overanalyse any reaction and would judge people based on their votes on my posts, even if I consciously tried to avoid it. Similarly, I imagine some other people would do the same and I’d feel like I’m under surveillance.
  
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- Quetzalcutlass@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  
  We could also have “karma” on Lemmy, but while technically tracked the environment is better off without it being public in my opinion. I view voting records similarly.
  
  It’s strange that they removed total account karma visibility a while back but are now thinking about making votes public.
  
  I think a good compromise (since Lemmy already tracks that data) is to show the upvote/downvote ratio a user receives, without showing their total karma. That’d help you spot toxic users without incentivising karma whoring.
  
  Similarly, a display of how often a user upvotes versus downvotes others would help spot bots and trolls without completely obliterating privacy like their suggestion would.
  
  (But ultimately none of this solves the problem of privacy on the Fediverse being one federated bad actor away from nonexistence)
  
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- Socsa@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  It honestly just opens up a whole shitty can of worms. Are admins ready to weigh in every time someone fakes a vote history screenshot showing that so and so up voted a bomb threat before the post got removed?
  
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otter@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Should the Lemmy devs create a way to make the votes anonymous?

I’m not sure if there is a good way to have the content federate anonymously. Even if there was, it would be a vector for spam.

Vote manipulation is a growing problem on Reddit, and it’s only getting worse with all the AI spam bots. They don’t have an incentive to stop it and it’s only going to get worse.

Admins need to know if the votes/likes coming in are legitimate, else they should block them. It’s too easy to abuse anonymous votes to affect how content and ideas are ranked.

I left a long comment in the other thread which I will link in a moment, but I think either

We keep the current setup, but we put in more effort to make new users aware that vote records are visible to admins/mods

We make it public for everyone and take steps to deal with the new issues that it could cause
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- Dave@lemmy.nz ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  
  Admins need to know if the votes/likes coming in are legitimate, else they should block them. It’s too easy to abuse anonymous votes to affect how content is ranked.
  
  This is a very real problem right now. Admins that are on to it use the votes to identify swarms of users that follow each other around upvoting each other’s spam/troll posts.
  
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  - Socsa@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    And that is still possible with pseudonymous tokens votes. You just end up banning tokens for malicious voting activity, and users for malicious posting activity. It’s at best a very mild adjustment to moderation workflows.
    
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- andrewrgross@slrpnk.net ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I will also add that I think in the long run, as we try to figure out how to differentiate between humans and machines, the only real reliably solution I see is to focus on elevating the individual. Having people with long histories validate their reality by living and documenting it.
  
  I don’t upvote something that I’d be ashamed for someone to see I upvote. I might make an exception for pornographic content, but even with that, if it’s pseudononymous in that it’s not attached to my personal public life, I don’t mind if someone can trace through and see what a specific account I use for those purposes has liked and disliked.
  
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- Socsa@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  The current trust model already relies on a user’s home instance accurately reporting user activity and not injecting fake activity. Hiding real user votes behind pseudonymous tokens doesn’t change that at all.
  
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unconfirmedsourcesDOTgov@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
“If you have nothing to hide then you have nothing to fear.”

Given the strong presence of the privacy community on Lemmy, I have to say that I’m a bit shocked to hear so many in these discussions chiming in to support voting transparency.

I’m on board with the idea of using ring signatures to validate the legitimacy of a vote and moderating spammers based on metadata.

Or, for something (potentially) easier to implement, aggregating vote tallies at the instance level (votes visible to your instance admin and mods) and federating the votes anonymously by instance, so you might see something like:

lemmy.world: 9 up, 2 down

discuss.tchncs.de: 3 up, 4 down

Etc

Up/down votes are the method of community moderation that sets Reddit apart from many other platforms. If the Lemmy community is trying to capture some of that magic, which is good for both highlighting gems AND burying turds, radical transparency isn’t the path to get there.

In fact, I’d argue that the secret ballot has already been thoroughly discussed and tested throughout history and there are plenty of legitimate examples of why it would be better if they were more secret than they are today.

Many people have brought up the idea of brigading, but would this truly get better if votes are public? Is it hard to imagine noticing that an account you generally trust has voted and matching their vote, even subconsciously?

For those who feel that they aren’t able to post on Lemmy because downvotes make you feel sad, my feeling is that if you make posts in a community and they consistently get down voted to oblivion, you’re in the wrong place. The people in that community don’t value your contributions, and you should find another place to share them. This is the system working as intended and the mods should be thankful that such a system has been implemented.

The last point I’ll make is about the potential for a chilling effect - making users less likely to interact with a post in any way due to a fear of retaliation. Look - if you’re looking for a platform where all of your activity is public, those are out there. Why should we make Lemmy look just like every other platform?
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- michaelmrose@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  
  Is it hard to imagine noticing that an account you generally trust has voted and matching their vote, even subconsciously?
  
  Not only is it not hard to imagine its easy to imagine the benefits of using this information automatically. I could imagine a client side script which re-ordered content based on who I trusted who had up or down voted it.
  
  So I have users A B C D E F who are known to me who have voted on a given post. D and E are idiots I disregard their votes. F literally hates everything I love so I count his votes inversely. A and B are fantastic I count them x10 I tend to agree with C so I count his x2.
  
  Not only can I potentially re-score threads and comments based on whom I trust I can if I really trust someone’s opinion apply their weights as well, and the weights of the folks upstream.
  
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  - unconfirmedsourcesDOTgov@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Yes, I too salivate at the idea that I could simply disappear all of the ideas I disagree with, but that is exactly how to turn a community into an echo chamber.
    
    So I have users A B C D E F who are known to me who have voted on a given post. D and E are idiots I disregard their votes. F literally hates everything I love so I count his votes inversely. A and B are fantastic I count them x10 I tend to agree with C so I count his x2.
    
    What you are suggesting here is, as I’m understanding it, a way to only get feedback from people you agree with and to never experience a critical discussion of ideas based on their merits.
    
    Now, I’m not here to suggest that Lemmy is some kind of shining beacon of drama-free intellectualism, where every idea is discussed without bias or agenda, but I DO think it is valuable to hear from people whose lived experiences led them to a different conclusion than the one I’ve reached. Obviously there needs to be a mechanism to remove trolls from the discussion, but I fear a world where we only see content that we agree with, because then we will truly be removed from reality, and that’s not why I’m here.
    
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  - OpenStars@discuss.online ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I want to have the ability to turn on my echo chamber, when I want it, and also to be able to turn it off, when I want to step outside of it for awhile. This doesn’t have to be a toggle - it could be having an alt on a different instance.
    
    I don’t want this choice made for me by people who think they know better how to run my own life than me. They can write an appeal that I will consider, but ultimately I want to make my own choice.
    
    Having votes be publicly viewable allows us all the freedom to do as we choose with that information - including to ignore them entirely. What I would probably do with it is make large block lists of people on lemmy.ml, since it turns out that user blocks of an instance don’t block all that much. Fwiw, for everyone I’ve blocked in the past, I look through the post history to see if they merely are being disagreeable on a particular matter but overall are capable of contributing something substantive to a conversation, or are nothing more than a troll, setting out to vomit their emotions upon everyone worldwide across the Fediverse.
    
    I’ve been a mod before, on Reddit, and am under no illusions anymore that everyone is worth listening to - a downvote from someone rational I will give serious thought about, but an idiot is an idiot, even if a community mod hasn’t banned them (yet?).
    
    It’s like autocorrect: feel free to make suggestions, but it would be nice if I could have control when I want it, including/especially not wasting my time.
    
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- Socsa@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Agreed. 10/10.
  
  And you don’t even need real crypto here to start. The home instance can just send vote actions as fixed unique tokens. The way the trust framework currently works, this is literally a drop-in replacement and introduces no new spam/brigade vulns which don’t already exist from a rogue instance. It would be imperfect, and may still make it possible to correlate and infer vote patterns for a sufficiently motivated adve, but it would raise the bar for protecting user telemetry by a huge factor with very minimal effort. I’m honestly a bit surprised it hasn’t been done already.
  
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Tudsamfa@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Always in favor of taking power from mods that they can abuse and simply do not need.

The 1 “You think you can come into MY instance, and downvote ME?” post I read was 1 too many.

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- asymmetric@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  The infallible Admiral Patrick perma-banned me from UnpopularOpinion for downvoting his posts. What a great guy - and by great guy, I mean twat.
  
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- Solemn@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I’m guessing we saw the same one, and that’s literally the only instance I’ve completely blocked.
  
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  - Blackmist@feddit.uk ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Was it midwest.social by any chance?
    
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- Zipitydew@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  That’s funny because I saw some initial comments made which then started this discussion. And what you’re suggesting was the intent. The issue as they (one of Lemmy’s developers) said was essentially frustration that their echo chamber had been pierced.
  
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- Socsa@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  On Lemmy the concern isn’t even mod abuse - it’s just how much user telemetry is pushed around in plaintext which makes me uncomfortable. I’m sure there are already instances which do nothing but listen to AP traffic actively building activity and interest profiles on Lemmy users. Say what you will, but at least on reddit they have to buy that shit. And if such a rogue admin is even a little bit enterprising, there are a bunch of potential IP deanonymization attacks possible by serving up content targeted to specific users during specific times of day. And probably a bunch of other shady shit I haven’t thought of.
  
  Honestly it’s more than a bit suspicious to me that AP and Lemmy has put seemingly zero effort into mitigating this sort of thing.
  
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  - OpenStars@discuss.online ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    The version code hasn’t even hit 0.2 yet. Lemmy was founded by people who got banned from Reddit for being too toxic & extremist leftists, so went off to make their own replacement. They do what they like, and bc Rust is a difficult language to work with, not that many are willing to help.
    
    Then after Huffman’s debacle, we started to see Kbin, Mbin, Piefed, Sublinks, and perhaps more - but none even as advanced as Lemmy yet.
    
    But more to the point, that’s just the nature of an open network. Wouldn’t Wikipedia suffer from the same issues? Though less of an issue than a social media framework I would wager.
    
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  - Tudsamfa@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I like your funny words, magic man!
    
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j4k3@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I would rather vote identities being blocked from scraping. I don’t care about other users or admins. I would rather that level of information be unavailable to outside commercial sources, especially any timings based metadata that could’ve used to derive dwell time and other psychological metrics.

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- Microw@lemm.ee ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Thats probably a complete nonstarter in a federated network. The metadata needs to be sent via Activitypub, ergo it has to be public.
  
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- Damage@slrpnk.net ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I think you’re looking for a different type of community then, like an image board.
  
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TheEntity@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
On Kbin the votes are 100% public for anyone. I’ve migrated to Lemmy after the frequent server issues with Kbin and I miss that part dearly. It was very easy to gauge whether someone was engaging in a good or bad faith discussion by checking the votes within a discussion. That being said, personally I’m very light on my downvotes, and I can see how someone more trigger-happy would see it as worrying. Personally I see the vote transparency as healthy though.

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souperk@reddthat.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
For anyone interested, there are a few papers on cryptographically secure voting, where both voter anonymity and election integrity are preserved.

Most designs consider three separate entities, where if you accumulate the information between those entities you would be able to identify a voter and his vote, but each entity on itself does not hold enough information.

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- Vlyn@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  The problem isn’t keeping votes anonymous, that’s easy. The problem is bots/spam. You could just create a new instance and then upvote a post from another instance a thousand times. If the votes are anonymous for the other instance it’s tough to say if they are genuine users or just bots.
  
  That’s the main issue here, when votes are anonymous you could easily just spam votes with no way to trace it back. If it’s a rogue instance then fine, you can ban the whole instance. But imagine if lemmy.world starts using fake votes in the background towards other instances.
  
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  - nimpnin@sopuli.xyz ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    What keeps from doing that right now? You can just create an instance and bot accounts on that
    
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  - souperk@reddthat.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    If you are worried about duplicates, aka a single bot spamming multiple votes, then that’s feasible to mitigate.
    
    If you are worried about multiple bots spamming one vote each, that’s harder to mitigate and it comes down to how the instances handles bot accounts in general. IMO it’s best to ignore the bot problem and instead focus on designing a vote weighting system that favors similar instances.
    
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- A_A@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Thanks @souperk@reddthat.com,
  i believe many users will be interested in these papers about cryptographically secure voting.
  
  Amongst them there would be :
  @rimu@piefed.social
  @SorteKanin@feddit.dk
  @brbposting@sh.itjust.works
  
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  - souperk@reddthat.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Found this review
    
    www.mdpi.com/2073-8994/14/5/858
    
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  - SorteKanin@feddit.dk ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    This isn’t going to solve anything. Cryptographically secure voting helps when you can ensure that each person only gets to vote once. But anyone can just sign up for more accounts or make loads of bot accounts and vote multiple times. This solves nothing.
    
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- wazoobonkerbrain@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  That’s interesting. I have read multiple comments to the effect that it would not be possible for lemmy to implement anonymous voting because the underlying ActivityPub protocol does not support it. So it sounds like solutions do exist, although I suppose the effort required to modify ActivityPub is too much, more likely the feature will be included in some successor to the fediverse.
  
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- brbposting@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Wow neat!! Eating our cake & having it
  
  Thanks @A_A@lemmy.world
  
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snek@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
There is enough drama as it is. This will just open the door to shadowbanning and stalking and other horrors we have escaped by leaving reddit. It’s enough that it’s party available on kbin.

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- OpenStars@discuss.online ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  The developers of Lemmy do not seem interested in anything less than banning people instance-wide, even from communities that they have never posted in before, so ironically shadowbanning is too subtle for them.
  
  But I thought the only way someone could be shadowbanned now is at the individual user level? It would be nice to increase transparency even further - e.g. a message pops up if you try to reply to someone saying like “this user has blocked you” (possibly everyone from that instance) so that people do not waste time trying to get a message across that the recipient will never read.
  
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mihnt@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
They should just stay mostly hidden as they are now. I was harassed 3 times while using kbin for my voting habits. When I brought it up to ernest, him and mostly everyone else defended it, even though at the time I was actively being annoyed by someone.

It’ll make less people vote in the long run and will scare people off.

Nothing worse than hopping on something I do for leisure to realize that thread I voted on a week ago has now come back to bite me in the ass because the OP decided to go on a crusade and harass everyone that downvoted them.

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- Socsa@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Even for delusional tech bro bullshit, the idea that public voting on an anonymous forum will do anything other than create drama is pretty fucking detached from reality.
  
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- JackbyDev@programming.dev ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Please be vocal about this because I’ve seen two people say they didn’t see this behavior. ❤️
  
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- laverabe@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  yep, tyranny of the majority is still tyranny. It’s worth defending the 3% who disagree with the majority opinion cause, more often than not, sometimes the majority is wrong…
  
  Defending the secret vote is the key to a functioning democracy, without it you just get cliques and in-groups who bully the outsiders. No one wins in that scenario, as critical thinking and critique are actively discouraged.
  
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- OpenStars@discuss.online ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  If OP mass-downvotes you, then ban them. As it is, you have the ability to mass-downvote them, without them even knowing that it is you doing it. Or maybe you wouldn’t do that, but some would - I hope you see how unequal that relationship is.
  
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sudo42@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
1 I had assumed votes were private 2 If I don’t hear soon that votes are private, I’ll simply stop participating and return to lurking. I’ll eventually just wander off to the next thing that doesn’t expose my votes to potential bots and/or abusive actors.

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mozz@mbin.grits.dev ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
With the current way that ActivityPub works, this isn’t really possible. If votes are anonymous then there’s nothing to stop any random person from adding 5 or 5,000 anonymous votes.

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Furbag@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
When I first signed up for reddit, the upvotes and downvotes were not only separately tallied, but also showed the usernames of people who did them. Then very shortly after that they changed it so that it made votes private by default, and you could override it in the settings, but almost nobody went to check that box back on. Eventually, they completely removed that feature around the time upvotes and downvotes were combined into one. which along with vote fuzzing was one of the worst changes to reddit comments, imo.

Lemmy feels like old reddit right now, which is a great spot to be in. I don’t think you necessarily need public vote info, but maybe it could be enabled on a per-community basis? I can see some communities like politics not wanting to add additional drama to the equation while other more content driven communities might enjoy knowing who was giving the feedback.

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ZDL@ttrpg.network ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
To me the anonymity of voting is the problem, so the solution is to make them public for all, not to find ways of making them more private.

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Carrolade@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
No, there is no real need. An account is already pseudo-anonymous. Full anonymity adds no real value beyond making it easier to manipulate vote tallies with bot accounts undetected.

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Tywele@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I think votes shouldn’t be anonymous. Transparency is important to weed out trolls and bots.

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null@slrpnk.net ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Sounds like opinions are pretty mixed. Maybe we should put it to a vote.

But then how do we decide if that vote should be public or not…

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TheObviousSolution@lemm.ee ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I’m at the completely opposite end of the spectrum, 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.

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RustyShackleford@literature.cafe ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Wouldn’t it be easier to leave it as an option for each user on Lemmy?

If users want anonymity, let them have it. If they want to share their vote, let them do that. Forcing one option on others without the voice of the usually silent majority isn’t going to fix anything, it’s just going to scare some people away or start posts requesting it private again; or optional.

Not to mention, using this method you will quickly see how many users really wanted this option based on how many leave privacy enabled or disabled, instead of listening to a current vocal minority.

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deedan06_@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Its best if the rules are the same for anyone, but public votes is something power hungry mods will eventually abuse. If you dare upvote the wrong post you will get banned.

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Damage@slrpnk.net ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
If I vote something I’m expressing my opinion just like I would with a comment, and those are not anonymous.
I get that people are worried about griefers and psychos, but anonymity is just a (poor) cure for the symptoms, not for the disease; people who don’t behave should be banned, and if their instance turns out to be a detriment to the community, they should be defederated.

The anonymity we should ensure is the one of the person behind the username, to avoid doxxing and cyber-bullying.

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laverabe@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Yes they should, unfortunately I don’t think that’s technically possible with the fediverse model as the servers have to communicate that info over Activity pub, at least that’s my understanding of it.

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x00z@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I am the admin of a website where we have a place where our users can post custom content and rate the content of others.

We have discussed how it works and should work many times and came to the conclusion that we’d never want it to be public. Any report of abuse will be checked by the website owner directly in the database and even admins don’t have full access. Everybody tries to stay as far away from the personal ratings as possible.

We also noticed that it would be a lot more fragile when there are not many voters. A whole group that is negative about something wouldn’t get as much harassment as a single person having a unique opinion.

On our website we have a comment section that isn’t anonymous, and we even noticed that people often don’t post something negative when it would be obvious that they are the only one who has voted/rated something. (“Negative” is almost always constructive in our case)

These are just a few things that I think add to this discussion.

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TechLich@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
How about pseudonymous as a compromise? Votes could be publicly federated but tied to some uuid instead of the username. That way you still have the same anti spam ability (can see that a user upvoted these things from this instance at this time) but can’t tie it directly to comments or actual user accounts without some extra osint.

It might be theoretically possible to correlate the uuids with an account’s activity and dox the user in some cases, especially with some instances having a single user, but it would be very difficult or impossible to do on larger instances and would add an extra layer. Single user instances would be kind of impossible to make totally private anyway because they can be identified by instance.

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ItsComplicated@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Overall my opinion is irrelevant, however, I think there is a huge difference in knowing a person votes vs how a person votes. The how should not be public, imo.

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ianovic69@feddit.uk ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I’m not technical and I’m also not young.

I think anyone coming into an online social platform who thinks that any part of it is private, is too naive and/or uneducated to be using that type of platform.

I’m sure there’s parts of platforms which are private, I just don’t think it’s advisable to assume that at any point.

You’re online, interacting with people. If you wanted privacy, don’t be there doing that. Post and behave as if you are publishing everything to a major commercial physical publication. Every post, every comment, every vote, every blocked user. On every one of your accounts.

Otherwise, you’ll get what’s coming to you. And I’m fine with that.

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MagicShel@programming.dev ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I’ve been thinking about this for several hours since I first became aware of the debate.

I don’t care that much in theory if anyone sees my votes. They aren’t anything I’m particularly private about. I care about conversation way more than up/down votes.

However, some people get a little upset about being downvoted. I think it will result in retaliatory downvotes. You already see that when two folks are arguing. I don’t normally waste my time downvoting a post I’m writing a rebuttal to, but when they are downvoting me I tend to do it back. I think if everyone had easy access, they would hunt down their down voters posts and retaliate regardless of the quality of the comments.

Lastly, I wonder if this will give rise to a client that lets you use one account to post/comment and a different one to vote. And if it does, will that be better all around? Then no one will be able to associate votes with a user. But it seems unnecessarily wasteful to create a whole account that does nothing but vote. It seems like it would deny mods (and everyone) a useful tool for identifying bad actors.

Technically, anyone could get access to the voters identity if they try hard enough but 99% of the users won’t put in that much effort. And technically someone could already use different accounts for different activities, but without reason to create a client to support that it’s too much of a pain to be worth the effort.

So I really think I’m on team status quo here.

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Socsa@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Yes, and this would be fairly easy to make them at least pseudonymous without even needing to modify activitypub itself.

That said, I still don’t support anything which lowers the friction of vote stalking like exposing votes in even more places. Technically people can look up my address from my license plate number if they really care to, but that doesn’t mean I want to list it in bold letters on my windshield.

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Cephalotrocity@biglemmowski.win ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
The more I spend time on Lemmy, the more I think it is in a lot of trouble. There are many serious issues that need to be addressed and I don’t see how most of them can be.

Federation is touted as a Good, but has many drawbacks. Privacy (as listed in this post for example) for one, instead of algorithm curated/focused content federated servers each enforce (subconsciously or overtly) a theme, rampant user generation off multiple servers rendering moderation pointless, and so on.

Then there is the rampant issue of moderation abuse. It seems that the only reason to be a moderator is to not be annoyed at other people forcing their opinions on you. This reminder that admins/mods get yet another way to subject the users to their biases is the nail in the coffin IMO. “You vote this way? Banned because my feelings matter more”.

Privacy is important for a lot of people and that is impossible to get on Lemmy unless something drastically changes, but it doesn’t sound like this is will ever happen. The people that can see your data is not under your control at all and I think this fact alone will never allow Lemmy to grow to a place we can be happy with.

If admins can see data without limits, everyone should be able to. All 5 of us once that realization sinks in.

;tldr I don’t think even admins should see peoples data but that seems impossible so…

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nanook@friendica.eskimo.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
No, it would encourage irresponsibility which already seems a major issue with lemmy.
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