Upvotes seem to just federate as likes and dislikes.
I get this is obviously intended behaviour on part of actpub but I’d love for there to be a pseudo-anonymous voting system too. Maybe an option to hash user credentials when added to likes to ensure that they’re unique whilst obfuscating the original user.
There is already a foolproof method that is immune to any abuse of trust by admins; create an alt account.
Hash them with the post ID appended, so a user can’t be identified across posts
I mean, seems pretty pseudoanonymous to me, unless Musk had another kid he named apj2k36 or something.
People have really weird usernames sometimes
Same was the case on /kbin, and while Mbin got rid of the downvotes, it still has public upvotes.
kbin also got rid of the ability to view downvotes. I believe either before the fork or at least before the implosion while mbin were still mostly just pulling from upstream.
There are some instances that disable downvotes altogether!
Oof, hell no. That’s some Facebook level cancer right there when they removed downvotes.
It’s just a form of white washing that makes the same people who made up being offended by “black lists” and “master branch”.
Edit: Y’all do realize the irony of exercising your ability to downvote a comment that is defending your ability to downvote?
Some people seem to really hate down votes. I don’t give a shit either way.
I don’t know this name, I read its part of the Fediverse… Does this affect us?
Yes, it is probably the oldest or second oldest server suite in the fediverse (diaspora is maybe older).
It was an early supporter of statusnet and pump.io, which are the earlier versions of ActivityPub.
It originally used it’s own protocol to talk to other friendica instances, but a lot of plug-ins came out adding support for everything, even Facebook support for a while.
This isn’t just a Frendica thing; you can see this from Mastodon, mbin/kbin, etc. Many people seem to think upvotes and downvotes are private, but the reality is that they’re publicly available information by default in ActivityPub. Lemmy just hides the information on the front-end for “normal” users; If you’re a moderator you can clearly see everything.
If one wants truly pseudonymous voting, they’re free to try out PieFed. See the announcement post for this feature for more details.
How to fo that?
Asumming you meant “do”, go to friendica (friendica.world) and paste the fedilink (press the rainbow button) into the searchbar.
I mod a small community with like 6 monthly users, I’m the only one who post or comment and the average post have 3/4 upvotes and 1 downvote. And I always ask myself who is downvoting my submissions, because it’s make no sense to me that someone take the job of pressing the downvote button on a link to a EDM set. Couldn’t they just block the community?
It’s not about blocking, it’s about sending a message.
No, sometimes it is about blocking.
If you run a small community like several of us do, even a small amount of downvotes can completely shut down a discussion from ever being seen by anyone else. It’s a way petty assholes have of trying to kill conversation in small communities because they don’t like something about what you said or how you said it.
If someone neither wants to contribute nor lurk, and merely drag down a community, they shouldn’t be allowed to continue to be a part of it at all.
I understand that if you are exploring on all and so, sometimes some communities you couldn’t care less appear on the feed, it’s happens all the time to me with sports news and related, but I just block them and move on.
Some people just downvote for the sake of it.
Use https://tesseract.dubvee.org/home/all/scaled to show downvotes
Assess whether banning makes sense for someone who only downvotes content
How exactly can I see who downvoted? Can’t seem to find it in the regular view, and the debug info only shows the vote count, not the voter.
I’d also like to know as I’m in the same boat you are. I’m just leaving this comment to remember to look later and see if you got an answer.
Or you can be an instance admin. Iirc In the next lemmy version (1.0.0), mods will also be able to view votes in their communities.
mods will also be able to view votes in their communities.
You can already do this using tesseract, by the way (not tesseract.dubvee.org, strangely?)
On t.lemmy.dbzer0.com i can see both upvotes and downvotes (for all my modded comms):
I guess the feature was already merged in one of the past Lemmy versions then?
I think it’s been implemented this whole time, but it’s just that the default lemmy-ui doesn’t show it
You can already do it with a database query iirc.
I think lemmy instance admins can see this too. Doesn’t even have to be a friendica instance
Any instance admin can see the vote history.
I wish friendica had a mobile app. I spend more time on my phone
Its webui is responsive (i think), its compatible with the mastodon api.
Raccoon for Friendica is great if you’re on Android.
I was thinking just now how there seems to be people who downvotes threads for no apparent reason, even seemingly innocuous and neutral ones… for example “Kingdom Come has sold 2 million units” 3 downvotes; “This New Algorithm for Sorting Books Is Close to Perfection” 5 downvotes; you get the idea. Now everyone is entitled to their opinion, but It makes me wonder if someone(s) is spam downvoting for some motive.
My guess is accidentally hitting the button while scrolling, and too lazy to change it.
The first isn’t really interesting, and the second is clickbait. I wouldn’t say there is no reason for downvoting them.
You are NOT supposed to downvote things that “aren’t really interesting”, you are actively ruining other people’s user experience on here by doing that as downvoted posts get less visibility.
Well yes, the visibility thing would be the point. Interesting and relevant content is upvoted, becoming more visible to more people, and uninteresting and irrelevant content is downvoted, becoming less visible and shown to fewer people.
Your interests are not identical with interests of other people.
Some people might think it’s not interesting because it’s not appropriate content for that community, and that by downvoting they are improving the quality for everyone. I don’t think every instance/community has a unified consensus on how exactly to use voting, and some people are always going to do their own thing regardless.
Some people only browse global feeds and downvote stuff as if they’re trying to train the Netflix recommendation algorithm, completely ignoring the rules of the community it originates from
I remember that being a problem back on Reddit (though I always found people upvoting low-effort stuff that wasn’t community/sub-appropriate to be more of a problem). It’s kind of a site-wide UX issue though really, if a new casual user is just presented with a list of posts then they might genuinely be unaware of (or perhaps just uninterested in) where they came from and what their votes mean.
This is one of the reasons why I’d love to see a more expanded method of reacting to content rather than simply upvoting or dowvoting; something like, say, user-side thread or post tagging, with things like “verified”, “clickbait”, and mood reacts like “happy” vs “sad”, and usefulness reacts like “solved, thanks” vs “closed as duplicate”, etc. We need more and better axes.
(Axises? Axeses?
Asses?)Interesting idea, but how do you decide on what the universally-agreed on reactions are? Have too many and they may as well just be comments!
A fair point that I admittedly don’t know how to solve. The closest I’ve got to a “functional” idea is to focus on splitting the two (I think? maybe three) things that an “upvote” is interpreted as, and supplementing with also the opposite / counter message:
- “I like what this post is about” (basically a like / heart / kudos)
- “I found this information useful / verified / checked” (a more proper upvote)
- (optionally) “I want this information to be more easily found”
Pretty much everything else can be a comment, as you say, but the purpose and reception of a message should also be as streamlined to communicate as possible.
Might just be people who are used to having an algorithm so they dislike stuff they don’t want to see more of.
Which is a problem
Every thread will get downvoted by someone for some reason. You would go insane trying to make sense of it.
That’s true, but since witnessing the waves of spam that flooded Kbin before its disappearance, I try to keep an eye open for this kind of shit.
I’m not sure about the downvotes part (i failed to recreate this lmao) but you can already view upvotes with mbin. Piefed solves this problem with a option to make your votes private but only with untrusted instances (but from my tests it didn’t work? weird)
IIRC, piefed’s private votes are disabled for “trusted” instances. You can see which instances are trusted here.
Damn, so this is how I find out we’re least trustworthy part of the commonwealth.
That is stupid and defeats the point and makes me rethink my decision to support piefed.
Bummer.
It depends what your threat model is. Admins being dickheads about who downvoted what was the main issue at the time so I made it about choosing which admins to trust.
If future Lemmy versions show votes to mods (not just admins) then Pandora’s box would be well and truly open so we’d need to rethink this.
Yeah I guess for me I don’t really trust any admins. At the end of the day that’s a permanent database of user activity which could be passed along to anyone, so ideally the minimum threat surface would be that it exists only on the home instance.
Also, I kind of just don’t get the point of obfuscating for some and not others unless there are some politics going on behind the scenes, which just gives me even more cause for concern. I think this is a killer feature for piefed and really addresses a major concern I have with Lemmy so it is just disheartening to hear that the functionality has been nerfed for seemingly no good reason.
I hear ya. There was quite a bit of back-and-forth about it and we ended up with a compromise. It would be good to have more configurability of this to suit different preferences.
There’s a niche out there for a max-privacy instance. No server logs, no email verification, automatic deletion of old content. And if it was running PieFed, no trusted instances set.
Not a niche I want to pursue but someone could.
Do you have a link to any discussions on this? I have browsed local posts on piefed.social but can’t find it. I’d be curious to see more context in support of the trusted instance concept.
Check this out for general background discussion https://piefed.social/post/205362. The idea to differentiate by trusted instances was mine and not discussed there. Pretty sure there was some discussion about it in the Matrix channel which is lost to time.
During the recent roadmap planning one of the potential units of work was to sort all this out https://piefed.social/post/411591 but it didn’t garner significant interest and didn’t make it through to the final version of the roadmap.
Ah, well that sucks :( i thought it just used a different strategy to do so if it was trusted, not outright disable it.
Will correct it, thanks
IIRC PieFed’s method is to send the upvote using a second random username not connected to your username.
Petty mods or users would abuse this
Mods can already see voting data, at least through the API on the latest version of Lemmy.
How can I see this in the community I mod?
It’s already possible to see if you really want to look. Friendica is just another way.
I was thinking that it would make sense to federate upvotes, but with the hash of your username instead of your actual handle. Would this work?
How long until it gets abused, and trolls start brigading though instances that hide their votes?
Nothing stops defederation, though.
That creates an incentive for trolls to create accounts at the popular instances using this mechanism in order to destroy their reputation.
But they can just be banned from those instances?
How would that work? How would an admin separate downvotes from brigaders and legitimate users who happen to downvote a comment?
Banning trolls would be doable - they’d have patterns where they target specific users across many different communities. If the same user downvotes everything I’ve ever said, from controversial political takes to pictures of food to posts about gardening, that’s probably a malicious user.
But “brigading” doesn’t mean anything and I don’t respect the concept. You can’t ban it because you can’t define it in a way that doesn’t include normal usage of the site.
If the same user downvotes everything I’ve ever said,
Right. How would you know what “the same user” is? Let’s say that your posts get downvoted at random intervals by 5-10 users in the first 45-120 minutes. They all have different user names. What are you going to do? Create a report against any particular user and hope that the mods look into it?
Or mentally unwell people stalking.
One of the advantages of votes being public is that it keeps instance owners honest and, perhaps more importantly, means they know other instance owners are honest.
If they weren’t public it would be easy to modify your lemmy instance to send 10 votes with fake hashes for every real vote. There would be constant accusations of brigading and faking votes.
I’m honestly surprised it hasn’t already become rampant.
The userbase is small enough that hashing would be easy cracked by a determined person. Even with salting, iterating through the entire userbase and hashing each username+salt to check for a match would probably not take long
Replace “hashing” with “encrypted” (perhaps just using a symmetric key that the admin sets up) and then it gets impossible to know for any outsiders who is the real user behind the vote.
I for one just wish people understood once and for all that anything you do on social media is public.
If you are not comfortable backing up your opinion or action, then don’t do it.
Assuming each user will always encrypt to the same value, this still loses to statistical attacks.
As a simple example, users are e.g. more likely to vote on threads they comment in. With data reaching back far enough, people who exhibit “normal” behavior will be identified with high certainty.
Just make a rainbow table and get the usernames back.
Piefed already does this, because it is the way.
this is an icky issue because lemmy sends votes with empty addressing, so remote instances should count them but not show them to anyone. however mastodon (and *key) sends likes with empty addressing too, but considers them public. lemmy is (surprisingly) right here and should request that the rest of fedi respects the protocol and hides stuff based on its addressing. maybe open issues on mastodon and friendica
also this issue probably exists when seeing lemmy posts on any microblogging instance
