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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Wait a minute, so any admin can see which posts do I upvote/downvote?
I’m an instance owner and mod. I’ll describe what we see.
Like anyone else, I can check a post or comment and see the upvote and downvote counts. If I click on a specific menu item by a post or comment I can also see who voted which way.
I check it often and to date have only banned two users, out of thousands, who were consistently downvoting posts. These bot accounts were literally voting within seconds of the post going federated.
It’s a useful feature on my end and I think others should be able to see it.
Thamk you for the insight, instance administrator views are valuable and unique.
At the risk of sounding like I’m presenting a bad faith argument, why ban them? I don’t like the whole “free market” analogy but surely it’s one of the liberating features of federated servers, being able to to largely express your votes or content as you see fit within the legal framework of the host nation. Wouldn’t the odd one or two mass downvoters/upvoters/theyvoters ultimately be a statistical abberation or is the fediverse still small enough for this sort of shit to carry weight?
Open criticism of my view welcome, as always!
They’re purposely disruptive to the community, they are not part of the community.
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Any instances that actually show public downvotes? I’ve seen people talk about them but haven’t seen them yet
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.
If votes became truly public, what would stop a malicious user from automating crawling the fediverse to get a list of every up and down vote a targeted user has ever made? Admins can currently do this, I assume given enough time and intent? Yuck.
I really hope a solution is found and if Lemmy goes the way of truly public votes, it would probably turn this into a nonparticipatory medium for me, I’d still read posts but not vote or comment.
Edit: also, most casual Lemmy users aren’t aware of public votes and would be upset that it already works this way, and only particularly invested or curious users are even reading this thread.
There’s nothing stopping a malicious user from doing that right now. Be aware that anyone who wants can already see your votes.
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.
As a comment on the other discussion says, there’s a reason ballots are secret.
Everyone’s fleshed out a lot of the discussions so I’ll just bullet point my opinion to try to better explain the discourse I’m seeing on here
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I view “Lemmy” like it’s a Community Center with group discussions, Community gatherings, and/or lectures with public comments. If you’re in the crowd “Booing” (downvoting) without standing up and making your position clear, you’re not adding anything to the discussion.
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Downvote/Upvote is not like “Booth Voting” at all. You have ONE vote in a democracy, that’s the core principle. You don’t vote Yes for a candidate then vote No for another. You don’t see a ticker above the booth tallying everyone’s vote that was before you (voter manipulation, why hidden scores became a thing).
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I think this would go over a lot better if mods had the choice of how to present the votes. Opt in or out of showing voters, opt in or out of showing scores or eliminating downvotes or even upvotes if you want. Give the power to the community and create useful tools for mods to try out.
Multiple votes is not why we have secret ballots IRL. Votes during referenda where you don’t vote for one candidate are also secret.
The purpose of secrecy is to protect from repercussions (ie worker vs boss, person vs family, tenant vs landlord…)
I’m not being pedantic. It matters here, because your votes can have repercussion if they’re easy to see at all times. I don’t want to be harassed because I downvoted an obsessive tankie.
That’s just not the same at all. How many times do you get to vote on the referenda? I’m really interested to know where this mindset comes from that a social media upvote/downvote is anything like a real political “vote”. It’s completely different except the name, is that where the confusion is coming from? Is this an age/demographic thing?
You can vote no or yes on a referendum. The Upvote is for comments that contribute, the downvote is for off-topic not that you disagree with the policy! By continuing this logic you’re exposing you want to continue “Voting” on whether you agree with a topic in “privacy”. That’s not how public discourse works, which this is. You guys are acting like everyone is a guest speaker and you’re the X-factor judge deciding if they should continue or get off the stage.
Anyone looking at the actual voting system on here would not say it’s democratic or fair/balanced. There are no protections or even logic to construct a system like that because we’re not voting on policies! This is a town square, not your local council. You’re wanting to walk into the square and vote on the flowers or people walking by, that’s not how public interaction should work!
In every single thread the downvote is abused as a “I disagree” or as a reactionary “I don’t like this person”. It does absolutely nothing for the conversation, it’s solely for others to feel better if the numbers match their own personality or to dissuade the person who’s being downvoted from voicing their opinion.
This whole event is rather sad and disheartening like a depressing xkcd
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If I vote something I’m expressing my opinion just like I would with 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; users 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.
No I’m worried about powertripping mods… That’s the issue.
Why is this so universal?
Because too many mods are power tripping assholes and I say that as someone whose been a mod in various corners of the Internet since at least 2000.
The best mods, and admins, are nearly invisible and as close to drama free as possible.
I am Palestinian and I just got banned from world news ml for saying that some Israeli hostages experienced rape/sexual assault/abuse without “credible evidence”. Somehow the mod equated this with me not giving a fuck about Palestinian prisoners of war.
No my man… I was raped myself as a teen. So to me, all rapes are equal no matter who does it to whom.
I will always downvote ai shit. Brigade 100%. I’m fact this reminds me I need to get through all the ai subs and downvote everything again.
We need to reveal downvotes so we can identify the ai lovers.
And then?
Also brigade them
You make a good point for anonymity of the votes
Thanks, that’s what I was getting at, but I still also hate ai shit.
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.
User choice would be best indeed. The problem is that currently the votes are public but hidden from Lemmy regular users. Anonymize votes seems to be such a big problem the devs don’t even want to consider it.
I hear you, but problem or not, the devs shouldn’t be making major decisions for the user base after the fact. Anonymous voting might be a problem at first, but so will people who are broadsided by the decision. Not to mention the users who will use an open voting system to bully users they disagree with. You have to foresee problems will come with any decision, and a percentage of users will flee for each bad, meaning the safest choice is user base safety over forced decisions. Ultimately sad truth is, leaving things as they are is a much easier call for devs.
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.
All it will take is for folks to look and see you voted in something and they won’t see the context or will misunderstand your intentions and they’ll ban you. This shit happened back on Reddit too and it sucked. They’d blanket ban people who interacted in a community without looking at what you actually did.
It sounds like everyone but mods should be able to see voters. But of course they will use straw accounts. What if only votes on your own post/comment were revealed to you? Like some pointed out, they are already not anonymous to anyone who wants to try hard enough to get the data because of federation. So the question is who do we want to be able to see that data easily? It’s a GUI modification in any case. Who are we making the gui modification for?
Sounds like mods and admins can already do this, and if the barrier to entry to being an admin is firing up a Docker container, I don’t see the purpose in restricting users from seeing it
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.
The point of privacy is pretty shaky in this context, tbh. Anybody using the fediverse is ensured pseudonymity already, the privacy issue should be whether your account(s) can be linked to your real life identity against your will.
In that regard I can only see positives to making voting public. Foremost it could create some accountability to the system, and maybe minimise the lazier drive-by, doom scroll votes?
I completely agree with the idea of more accountability. We are real people in acting public right here, we should be constantly aware that our actions have consequences. If you don’t want your pseudonym associated with a vote, don’t do it. It’s kinda like the opposite of 4chan, where instand of anonymous controversial content on top, here we have human-curated content being pushed up.
The problem with every system is it will eventually be broken down by someone smarter and used to manipulate the user-base that grew to trust its safety to market something. Be it ideas or products, the only true safety net we have is a choice in the decision. The second a choice is forced, is the second groups split away. Each user at least deserves the safety of choice if we expect them to trust in any larger system. Decisions being made by a smaller group of individuals for the larger whole, doesn’t exactly have the best history if we look at the world around us. Don’t get me wrong… Trust would be great, but we have to trust that going from one extreme to another will inevitably create a another new problem.
With the current way that ActivityPub works, this isn’t really possible. Every vote needs to be signed by some real user; if that changed such that anonymous votes were accepted then there’s nothing to stop any random person from adding 5 or 5,000 anonymous votes.
What it the instance signs the activity? Then it propagates to others instances after local validation. That way only local admins would have access to voting data. Malicious instances could still be defederated/blocked/have votes disregarded.
The problem with that is, can you really trust most instances out there? If you’re a sketchy admin, it’s not that hard to convince a handful of people to use your instance and have a couple dozen anonymous votes at your disposal to influence certain topics. There’s no way to detect it, not even the other users.
That would then mean that small instances would have to prove themselves before being accepted in the wider network of instances and just end up centralizing the fediverse.
With the votes being public, while you can create as many accounts as you want, you still have to publicly use a bunch of bot accounts which makes it more easily detectable. And of course, there’s no way your instance can get away with impersonating you, because you could see it sneaking votes or comments.
I wish it could be more private, but I can’t think of a way you can prevent vote manipulation without revealing who actually voted for what or rely on trust. Another way to look at it would be, what if Lemmy didn’t use instances but instead some sort of decentralized system where each user is its own entity. How would we obfuscate the votes then? Anyone can publish a message to the network, so you need to tie it to some identity, and you circle right back to the problem.
For privacy, there’s always alt accounts and recycling accounts often. Or treat the votes as if you were commenting “+1” or “-1”.
Unless someone comes up with some crypto scheme to somehow anonymously prove that a user has voted, and has voted only once, and the user has credible history being a real person.
Personally, it’s a tradeoff I chose as the price of entry for being able to participate in this while being fully independent of some benevolent person/organization/company/private equity firm. Nobody can take away my API or my apps or shove me ads. I can post entire 4K HDR clips if I want. I can have an offline copy of it if I want to read on a plane trip. I can index Lemmy, I can search Lemmy.
We already depend on trusting instances for a lot of what’s going on here, I don’t see why we shouldn’t be able to defederate untrusted ones.
That would then mean that small instances would have to prove themselves before being accepted in the wider network of instances and just end up centralizing the fediverse.
Most of us want the Fediverse to eternally decentralise. Imho, this would be the optimal scenario. Whitelists would be a major obstacle to the décentralisation effort.
Other posts have already posted it better than I could, but my tl;dr is: one of the good things about Lemmy compared to the “competition” is that votes are public – or at least the fact that someone voted is.
I wouldn’t mind restricting access to how a user voted, in particular if in the future something like multi-choice upvotes becomes a thing, or even something I’d love to see as is dual-voting (“I downvoted because I don’t like it but I upvoted it because you are absolutely right about it”, this is absolutely different than not voting at all if the who is voting is being tracked).
But on a fundamental level, in the least instance admins have to be able to know who votes for our version of the system to even work compared to the competition.
dual-voting (“I downvoted because I don’t like it but I upvoted it because you are absolutely right about it")
This is the most interesting take i have seen on the matter. it’s not a score out of five, why shouldn’t you up and down vote the same post?
you make an objectionable but very interesting point?
you are essentially right but you are belligerent and can’t spell?
upvote and downvote.
Get rid of votes.
They’re only useful for ranking content and content is only useful in the context of ad revenue.
You don’t have to be on reddit anymore.
Yes, a return to the unstructured
hellscapeglory of unranked comments of yesteryear. Every thread starting with a resounding “First!!1!!”. Relevant or interesting things hidden on page 5 of 31. Spam lurking around every corner, as a treat.I do want to find the most relevant topics at the top of a community, though.
I agree, downvotes lead to a toxic online social environment
Downvoted
Lol
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.
