There was a widely held belief that votes should be private yet it was repeatedly pointed out that a quick visit to an Mbin instance was enough to see all the upvotes and that Lemmy admins already have a quick and easy UI for upvotes and downvotes (with predictable results).
Vote privacy may be especially important because it’s really easy for a malicious server to get set up, unbeknownst to anybody else, and just pull vote data that other servers freely provide.
Honestly, I’m beginning to think that maybe up/downvotes shouldn’t federate, with each instance having it’s own score for each post. Though maybe that makes the score-based sorts less useful on small or private instances. Or alternatively, each instance could send a single up or down vote based on the ratio of voted from it’s users if any had interacted with something, to let vote score be mostly coming from within one’s instance but still with some amount from outside to sort the timeline with. Could make it take more effort to manipulate the rankings since one would have to either make bots on many different instances or set up multiple whole instances for it instead of just bots on a single one.
PieFed has a way to keep votes (more) private. From 11 months ago:
Vote privacy may be especially important because it’s really easy for a malicious server to get set up, unbeknownst to anybody else, and just pull vote data that other servers freely provide.
There’s an argument to be made for banning people who consistently downvote content that’s a good fit for a community.
Honestly, I’m beginning to think that maybe up/downvotes shouldn’t federate, with each instance having it’s own score for each post. Though maybe that makes the score-based sorts less useful on small or private instances. Or alternatively, each instance could send a single up or down vote based on the ratio of voted from it’s users if any had interacted with something, to let vote score be mostly coming from within one’s instance but still with some amount from outside to sort the timeline with. Could make it take more effort to manipulate the rankings since one would have to either make bots on many different instances or set up multiple whole instances for it instead of just bots on a single one.
The way blahaj works is downvotes don’t federate, only upvotes. I like it better that way.
That might be one of the most visible issues I consistently run across. It’s really obnoxious.
It also begs the question of why they’re even there in the first place.
Not to mention spinning up an instance with thousands of accounts to downvote brigade.
Its definitely not a black and white problem.