Submitted 3 weeks ago by npdean@lemmy.today to youshouldknow@lemmy.world
I recently learned that voting on lemmy is not anonymous. Anyone can get information about who has upvoted and downvoted a post or comment.
In combination with your IP, this is a massive privacy (maybe even physical security) risk. Also, people can target you for your votes.
Sadly, this is something where I would prefer Reddit over Lemmy. Big tech scrapes data from both places anyways, at least Reddit is safe.
Why are you saying IP addresses are publicly shown here and why is (almost) no one correcting you? That would’ve been an enormous privacy risk that would’ve required intentionally fucking users over. Just doesn’t even make sense to write what you did about IP addresses. Seems like you’re just hoping to cause some panic.
Admins can get them. It is not available to everyone.
Only the admin of your instance can see your IP address, it doesn't get federated to other instances.
Who says that Reddit isn’t selling upvote/downvote and IP info? Or sharing with govts?
Okay so then why fearmonger? You’re thinking that a handful of people in the world having your IP and also opinions is somehow more dangerous than anything else on the Internet?
Only admins of your instance.
Don’t tell anyone, but your posts and comments are also public.
I know you are being sarcastic and edgy but point is that voting is assumed to be private by the average person because it is anonymous in elections, it is anonymous on the closest social platform Reddit and popular websites like youtube.
I don’t know how to break this… But voting in Lemmy is not choosing a president.
Voting is like booing or clapping in a public agora. It’s not private. If you assume is private that’s on you.
Not even on your beloved reddit. Reddit admins know all your votes.
It’s a federated platform. How could voting have been anonymous?
Besides, nothing requires you to vote on posts. If you’re not comfortable voting, then don’t vote.
And reddit also has a problen where you can use bots to farm upvotes and because you cant see that information means you cant tell if posts are legit or propaganda
Only you can see this comment Daniskarma. The Leering League of Lemmy SEES you Daniskarma and we have taken notice. Cease your efforts to spread information about public posts and comments, or ELSE Daniskarma. We’re watching you.
Why is this comment completely empty?
While it is important to know that voting is not private (nor truly is direct messaging), that is not in itself a danger.
Lemmy is community driven, and so it is — broadly speaking — governed by community norms and the platform is responsive to the needs of those norms. If someone is harassing or mistreating you on the basis of your voting, then you can take it up with an admin. I’ve seen people called out for the use of vote manipulation, but I’m not sure what it would look like to be targeted based on your votes.
By the way, there are also mechanisms for publicly addressing grievances with mods and admins.
Most importantly, recognize that it does take time to adjust to the reality that no one cares about the fake internet points here. Reddit uses dark patterns to manipulate users into equating votes with worthiness. Having a lot of karma on reddit contributes to a person’s reputation and credibility there. Here, no one cares, or even sees, a person’s vote totals. Like most everything else, it’s technically public, but it’s not visible or indicated.
Why does reddit want you to care about your karma? For engagement and metrics. If people are only incentivized to share genuine interests and human interaction, then they won’t scroll mindlessly for quite as long. If every post and comment is incentivized for maximum virality, then Reddit can sell more eyeballs to advertisers. Plus, if people care enough about their fake points, they will literally pay to buy reputation. Reddit doesn’t care about your well-being, just your ad impressions. Like any other social media corp.
Welcome to a better, healthier, more transparent place. We are far from perfect, but no one here will use dark patterns to mine you for content.
if someone is harassing or mistreating you on the basis of your voting, then you can take it up with an amin.
this is a highly demanding solution for a misbehavior that takes very little energy to engage in. at least in my experience with admins, even when you have an effective one that doesn’t mean they will be effective in the coming months or years. ultimately a lot of people will end up having to explain somebody else’s bad behavior to another who just might not care.
but never mind that. what I’ve actually got to wonder is what does having votes public even accomplish positively? is the goal to help users understand each other based on actions we made that up to this point we thought were anonymous?
Votes are public more of a side effect of the fact that Lemmy is federated, rather than intentionally as something to be publicly visible, I don’t believe you can go find someone’s vote history just from the normal Lemmy ui, but someone could create their own Lemmy/mastodon/kbin version (or just some custom scraper that speaks activity pub and pretends to be one of these) to start collecting vote counts.
Votes being tied to accounts makes it slightly harder to do vote manipulation, but only slightly. It would be as simple as having my server tell the server of the original post that 5000 users that totally exist voted on this post. Of course you could do the same by actually creating 5000 fake accounts on your server, but that’s marginally more work, and also slightly more detectable. There’s a lot of trust in the activity pub protocol.
There have been a lot of discussions about whether voting on Lemmy should be public. Some threadiverse platforms actually take the step of displaying votes and reactions publicly for that very reason.
I won’t attempt to recap those discussions here, but you may be able to search for them.
Most importantly, recognize that it does take time to adjust to the reality that no one cares about the fake internet points here.
Oh but they do.
It also informs how comments are sorted under each post (unless you choose New or Old by default).
IMHO the voting system is the best part of both reddit and lemmy: it gives certain powers to the majority. It gives a rough picture of how other people - even those that do not comment - feel about opinions.
Voting functions completely differently between the two sites. I didn’t say that voting doesn’t matter, I said that no one cares about the “points.”
People can and do use voting to let others know about interesting content or to express displeasure at seeing a post (which is why it is sometimes surprising to see any downvotes on certain posts such as the nice one I was responding to in the screenshot).
What people don’t use them for is a measure of merit or reputation. Voting here functions much more like reddit used to years ago. It helps sort content by what people want to see.
I took it up with a mod. They said it is public information. That is how I learned about it. Mods won’t do shit if they favor the abuser.
I like piefed because it lets you see at a glance if someone is a serial downvoter. On each piefed user profile is a thing called “attitude” and it’s a ratio of your upvotes vs downvotes. 100% means the person doesn’t downvote people. 50% means they downvote and upvote equally. 0% is only downvotes.
It shows up for people outside piefed too so i see you too lemmy angry people.
I would never downvote cereal.
Unless it was grape nuts. That shit is like eating gravel.
Here’s how you Grape Nut:
Pour a small pile (like a cup or so) in a bowl.
Take a spoonful of peanut butter and use the backside of the spoon to mix up the PB and GN. Smash it together for longer than you think until it’s well mixed.
Top with a drizzle of honey and then pour milk over it.
S-tier breakfast.
Raisin bran gang!
This just sounds like Reddit account karma score all over again? But with a percentage displayed instead of total.
Reddit karma is how others feel about what you say. Piefed’s attitude is how you feel about what other people say.
Slightly different but i see your point.
oh no. I should upvote more. I’m really bat about voting at all 😓
Why would you let others police your behavior?
at least Reddit is safe.
Lmao, what!? Reddit tries their best to know exactly who you are, where you live, your education, where you work, etc… And then they sell that data to anyone.
You are confusing privacy and security
They have that data, true. But they don’t harass me.
Russia really should just leave Ukraine, though. (Sorry, I just saw the context for this a few minutes ago and can’t help myself).
Dont care who knows but I too agree with this.
It is not the context for this post, people have made it the context. It is the reason for this post.
Maybe context is the wrong word.
Sir, this is the Fediverse.
It is nowhere explicitly made clear to users that voting is public. It should be made clear if it is going to be
It’s the other way around here: Everything is public except where it’s made clear that it won’t be (e.g. email address, password).
For what it’s worth, your instance of choice is particularly negligent in regard to informing its users. Compare lemmy.today/legal to lemmy.world/legal, or their respective signup pages for examples. There’s little that Lemmy itself or the community at large can do about that 😞
The IP address thing is not real, though
Just choose a nickname that is word+4 random digits and don’t reuse it on other services
This is the way. Randomise your usernames and use a password manager to keep track of them.
I don’t think IP addresses federate? I think only your instance admin can see your IP address. In any case, though, you should generally always assume that your up/down votes on any service are recorded and tied to your username. If you can come back later and change your vote, that vote is tied to your username. It may not be visible to other users, but the server admins can absolutely see what you’re doing.
Reddit might not make your votes publicly visible, but they’re absolutely tracking them and using that information to select what you see, including advertising. They might not directly share those votes with advertisers, but they almost certainly are sharing your interests based on your votes. And you should assume Reddit and others will comply if the government comes asking for what users liked a post the government opposes, or who downvoted a post praising a new government initiative.
It depends on your threat model, but your threat model might change. Freedom of speech might be curtailed by politicians even when that’s supposed to be unconstitutional. What might be safe to do online now might become unsafe in a year or two.
YSK: every action you take online, even as simple as an Upvote or Like, might be recorded and may come back to haunt you
Reddit is one entity, and by providing a service it is bound by a variety of privacy and data protection regulations. On the fediverse anyone can accumulate any of that information and store it for years, and they are not bound by any such data management or privacy laws. It's absolutely shocking to me that a place which is otherwise quite obsessed with privacy just brushes aside this distinction. As it stands a vote on the fediverse is far more likely to have real consequences versus one on reddit if, say, ones phone is searched at a border.
This could be mitigate considerably with simple voting agents, as piefed tried to do, but this idea was killed by idiotic forum politics over fears of "vote manipulation."
Yes, this is not hyperbole - the otherwise "privacy focused" leaders of the fediverse are more concerned with fake Internet points than real privacy concerns.
It’s the nature of the beast. Federated software holds no secrets.
Related: sopuli.xyz/post/31369487
It might not be a secret but voting should be a private thing, like most irl voting. It is nowhere explicitly stated to the users, no apps or website says it.
I want you to know
that you are skibidi sigma rizzler from ohio ?
?
In combination with your IP, this is a massive privacy (maybe even physical security) risk.
Your IP would only be seen by your instance (which is inevitable, you gotta connect to it after all). But there’s no way for anyone else to look up your IP.
I read that since images are hosted on the instance they were posted to, any instance hosting pictures you load, even if they’re DMd to you can get your ip. So someone could just DM you a picture from their own instance if they wanted it for whatever reason. I have not personally verified, but just adding it here because this comment seems to be the most succinct and accurate one I currently see.
In combination with your IP, this is a massive privacy (maybe even physical security) risk. Also, people can target you for your votes.
No.
It would be unusual to be able to exactly identify someone purely from their IP, but let’s say someone posted from their work IP in a small company. It would substantially lower the bar to dox them.
Let’s go further and ponder if an authoritarian regime setup an admin and started coorelating dissent ip’s collected from user when they did things like paying parking fines, or signing their online tax forms.
Let’s say that they collected all that and trained an LLM on it, then when you go to get a passport renewed or are stopped for a traffic violation and ask the LLM if you’re a dangerous person based on their criteria.
It’s not a direct problem, but it has slippery slope all over it.
My votes are a massive privacy risk? How? I’m putting them out there publicly willingly. As is the nature of the internet.
Are you sure about that? Reddit is a fucking cesspool.
It is not a cesspool if you stick to niche communities and avoid scrolling r/all
Oh no now the lemmy.ml retard mods will know I downvote them when I see them lol
Sure they will be interested in your petty downvotes.
Or pathetic remarks
A lot of people here still refuse to understand that Lemmy, as it currently exists, is a privacy nightmare, and the voting thing is just the top of the iceberg. There are several de-anonymization attacks possible involving dynamically serving different content to different users. This, combined with the public voting makes it possible that someone can dox an account and expose a lot more information than other forums where that information is more private.
Public votes also open the fediverse up to much worse astroturfing IMO. It's incredible feedback for bots and trolls to see exactly who is interacting with their posts and comments. It's frustrating that a bunch of people here have convinced themselves of the opposite, and insist that public voting is the only way to combat brigades and trolls, which is an incredibly shortsighted stance which doesn't scale nearly as well as it does in the other direction.
iirc someone got banned from like 25 subs because they downvoted a single post that said “I want YOU to generate more AI slop” and the mod got pissed and power tripped super hard
Just don’t say anything that you wouldn’t say in public. I’m willing to defend anything I’ve ever said here.
What do you mean by dox here? I usually think of dox as being, real name, real address, etc. But I’m having trouble seeing how even my Lemmy instance admin could figure that out about me.
this is why i vote at random, like two-face doing his quarter thing
If you’re an instance admin, for any post, you can just click “view votes” and see everything tied to usernames, even outside your own instance. Moderators can too, but it’s restricted to the communities they moderate.
Seems like a good thing to me. Should be a better known feature.
How would I go about seeing this information for myself?
I’ll downvote everyone here if I damn well please it!!!
I dsiagree that transparent upvotes are in issue. In fact i think it’s a powerful feature for community to self correct and resist astro turfing.
On reddit votes have become meaningless because they are not 1 person == 1 vote and its completely astroturfed. You can literally got to buyredditvotes dot com (not real but real ones are very close just google it) and stuff any post with votes and nobody will ever know.
Transparent interactions are key for community health even if behind anonymous nicknames. So all interactions should be transparent.
My only issue is that many lemmy instances are blocking popular VPN services which is very dangerous. I understand the bot argument but user safety suffers hard here.
It was something I had to learn, coming from Reddit.
But I made my peace with it. Let the mods* see my up/downvotes. If that becomes a problem then, well, the Lemmyverse isn’t right for me.
* I was told that anyone can see this, with a little effort.
But I have not heard about this applying to IPs.
Obviously someone running an instance (an admin) can see who visits that instance; that’s just how servers work. If you can’t live with that you must use Tor or VPN.
So while I agree that everyone should be aware that up/downvotes + username are visible to anyone, I’m not sure about the IP argument.
I was unaware that it was unclear to anyone but children and the intellectually behind that anything you do on the Internet is traceable to you without significant countermeasures.
It’s literally impossible to have private upvotes and downvotes with a federated service. Additionally, a lot of other social media sites have public votes/likes, as long as the content is public. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Discord, LinkedIn, Telegram (if you consider it social media?), and probably some others all have public likes by default.
I remember learning about this and not giving a fuck. I vote stuff on occasion, but generally don’t vote or care about the votes on my comment.
Personally, I couldn’t care less.
Cool stuff right? Everyone can spy on you, and you can keep them guessing by behaving incongruent. Lots of fun!
How do you do this and where can I find this info because I’d like to know.
I’ll start by asking you if I upvoted or downvoted this post.
jeena@piefed.jeena.net 3 weeks ago
Why is public voting a massive privacy and physical threat but public posting and commenting is not?
Azzu@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
Would be my question as well. It seems quite obvious that if you participate in publicly viewable discussion, that the stuff you do is publicly viewable.
If you don’t want it associated to your physical person, use a VPN and unidentifiable account name.
npdean@lemmy.today 3 weeks ago
Reddit is safer than Lemmy. There cannot be witchhunts on lurkers. IP info is not accessible to anyone but the company.
GreenKnight23@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
dude is just bent out of shape because they got called out for disagreeing Russia should go home and leave Ukraine alone.
lemmy.world/comment/18706617
PhilipTheBucket@quokk.au 3 weeks ago
I mean it is kind of a dick move to spy on downvotes and then demand that someone respond to you. The dude is wrong as hell, but I do agree with the overall principle that not every vote needs to be subject to someone getting interrogated as to why they voted that way.
Their shock at finding out that it works that way is, of course, why the currently Lemmy UI is badly designed because it creates the illusion for people that their votes are private. They definitely should not do that.
Perspectivist@feddit.uk 3 weeks ago
You’re misrepresenting what they actually said.
Bloomcole@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Who’s ‘bent out of shape’?
Having to vent his little frustration from NATO fascists losing the war in a totally unrelated discussion about up/downvotes.
Go cry somewhere else.
Or better go volkssturm and go to the Ostfront like your example from the 1940.
You will be dealth with appropriately there.
npdean@lemmy.today 3 weeks ago
I am not bent out of shape. I said what I said and I stand by it. I am surprised about the public nature of my votes.
BlueEther@no.lastname.nz 3 weeks ago
I feel hat posts/comments are much more of a privacy exposure than any vote.
If the OP wants private voting vs their post/comments then two account would be the solution to that - this is how it is done in the backend on piefed
jeena@piefed.jeena.net 3 weeks ago
Also if only voting is so bad, just don't vote. Those votes are not used for anything but ranking in lists for others, you'll not see any difference for yourself if you stop voting.
sundray@lemmus.org 3 weeks ago
If you’re a lurker who votes, voting would be your only exposure.
npdean@lemmy.today 3 weeks ago
Both of them are but when a person comments, they willingly put out their opinion in the public. Voting is meant to be anonymous (like irl).
Also, votes have a massive amount as compared to comments. An average user might comment on 1 post for every 50 they vote on (a number I pulled out of my ass)
npdean@lemmy.today 3 weeks ago
Both of them are but when a person comments, they willingly put out their opinion in the public. Voting is meant to be anonymous (like irl).
Also, votes have a massive amount as compared to comments. An average user might comment on 1 post for every 50 they vote on (a number I pulled out of my ass)
dan@upvote.au 3 weeks ago
Says who? Voting/likes are public on a lot of social media sites. The only mainstream ones I can think of where it’s not are YouTube and reddit.
FelixCress@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Yes.
No.
Saleh@feddit.org 3 weeks ago
That is not true. Most votes irl are in fact public to the audience. Did you ever participate in a democratically organized group? Local council votes are usually done by raising hands. Votes in HOA meetings are usually done by raising hands. Your sports club deciding on a new executive and treasurer? Guess what. Raising hands.
9point6@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
On most social media the voting is public, see Facebook/Twitter likes. Hell back in the days of forums you could usually see the list of users that liked a given thread in most of the forum software I ever used. Reddit was the anomaly really
I think piefed has a feature where your votes never leave your instance, so are not exposed in this way (but obviously only appear on your home instance too)
Agree that it should be clearer to people coming from Reddit that that’s how it works though.