I know, public votes, that’s how Lemmy and the Fediverse work.
It bothers me a little though.
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Best way to handle it would be to separate out your votes from your comment/post history.
Create an account just for voting.
If someone reported someone else for downvoting them in a community I moderate, I’d ban the reporter for abusing the report system.
PieFed has a way to keep votes (more) private. From 11 months ago:
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.
There’s an argument to be made for banning people who consistently downvote content that’s a good fit for a community.
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.
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.
Not to mention spinning up an instance with thousands of accounts to downvote brigade.
Its definitely not a black and white problem.
Can you report their report of your downvote?
I bet they’d report the report of the report of the downvote.
Joking aside, this private message is kind of intimidating and I would consider reporting it. This kind of behavior is not what is good for a healthy lemmy community.
Reported to who? His mum? Fucking loser
whom* 🙇🏼♂️
oh no! Better run before the downvote police find you
You laugh, but that’s been a thing for generations in some form or another.
Honestly, who cares. if you get banned for bullshit, make a new account on a different server, you got your access back.
I am making new accounts every half year or so on different servers and migrate my data each time. It is the upside of federation.
this is why i love blahaj.zone <3
It bothers you that someone would report it? Or that someone took the time/effort to actually directly message you claiming that they did so?
Public votes could be an issue is my point. They probably didn’t report it, no rules were broken. It’s just to be annoying.
On reddit I didn’t wonder if people would scrutinize my votes if I wanted to go against the flow for whatever reason (comments are a different dynamic)
i personally don’t like the public votes in the same way i don’t like public comments or profiles. Pre-lemmy i just didn’t make accounts and didn’t interact with stuff, but here i’ve tried to consciously push myself to interact because imo lemmy (and libre social media in general) is worth the slight sacrifice of privacy.
r*ddit was the de-facto knowledge base of the internet, and letting corporations control the knowledge humanity creates publicly is a huge fuck-up we can only fight with strong legislative action (never gonna happen) or by collectively moving to libre alternatives. ik im preaching to the choir here, but my point in saying this is that we’re doing small but not negligible amounts of good by interacting here even at a loss of personal privacy - only you can decide if that’s worthwhile under your personal threat model.
also worth considering that on the other place people could absolutely scrutinize your votes, since administrators could almost definitely see them the same way they can here. the difference is just that here the admins are whoever chooses to run a server, rather than whoever r*ddit chooses to allow access to. definitely opens it up to more people, but imo feels more honest this way where it’s not faking a level of privacy it doesn’t have.
another note cuz im already rambling, iirc piefed has an interesting idea for this where only “trusted” servers federate the actual votes, and untrusted ones get fake alt accounts that total to the same numbers. i’m not sure i personally care about this, since to me this whole social media shit is already public domain, but if that appeals to you it might be worth checking out
As I said tgo someone else above, I think this is a cop-out.
If Fedi’s features suck expressing support by giving them a pass on implementation or privacy issues isn’t helpful either to improve the issues or in the process of making open alternatives more popular.
For the record, nothing is being gained here in terms of features. Up/downvoting already doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do and it already isn’t reliable or consistent across instances/services pretty much at all. Being public is the cherry on top of the “wanted to look like we have the feature but we really, really don’t” sundae.
Of course I’m not claiming reddit respects privacy as a whole, I’m specifically talking between basic users.
Thanks for the Piefed info, I’ll look into it. made an account a while back, it’s quite good.
It’s specifically a (shitty) intimidation move. “Don’t downvote me again or a mod/admin will happen.” Pretty pathetic as far as intimidation moves go but that’s keyboard warriors for you.
Unfortunately public votes aren’t a choice, it’s a requirement for how the system works. Reddit also knew who voted for what, but it was safely hidden on their servers.
Every post and every vote is replicated across all the Lemmy servers (well, simplification, but mostly true).
Server owners don’t have to share it, but the information is in the database so it’s always going to be possible for someone to make a tool that displays it.
There’s not really an alternative - the Lemmy server needs to know what each person has voted on so it displays to them, so they can only vote once, etc. Not to mention that if it was anonymous, you could probably engineer a malicious system on other Lemmy servers to do massive vote manipulation even easier.
I’m not seeing a way to both make things distributed and anonymous.
deleted by creator
Counterpoint: public votes make it possible to spot users who try to manipulate the platform by voting with multiple accounts.
That just happened recently with a new user account that has been posting a ton. No one noticed they were doing this until they started harassing users and their harassment comments were showing a pattern of upvotes. Who would upvote a user harassing others like that? Well, themselves.
It’s also convenient that you could check a post with suspiciously high vote engagement and see that (for example) a bunch of “users” from a new instance have brigaded it. Luckily if this has happened yet on lemmy I haven’t seen it at least, and I hope and assume people won’t care about votes here enough to do it, but the transparency is nice to have imo
It’s an option everyone should disable.
I believe this is only an UI thing for yourself, this doesn’t prevent other users from seeing your votes by going on other websites or using certain tools.
You do realize that’s only for you though, right? 😅😶
amidalablankstare.jpg
I do. I was just making an observation/suggestion.
Your suggestion was self-inflicted blinding? 😶
Blind from upvotes and downvotes? Who cares.
sudo downvote
doas downvote
plantpowerphysicist is not in the sudoers file. this incident will be reported.
That’s an interesting case.
Yes, anyone can check vote on lemvote.org and i apologize for this lousy message. In this case, you mass downvoted several posts in a row.
I never vote
That’s the balance though: privacy is the antagonist of transparency in its nature.
And that’s w good thing in my opinion because this discussion is depending on the subject and not an ultimate right or wrong.
For the specific topic I actually value the transparency more than my personal privacy because it makes manipulation of opinion more transparent.
Yeeeeah, I’m gonna say if a different social network tried to pull that move you would not be taking that line.
There’s a frequent undercurrent of “it’s fine because it’s Fedi” that I don’t subscribe to. Fedi moderation sucks ass and some of their hacks to visually replicate features from other social networks that don’t replicate the functionality suck as well. You could argue that up/downvotes shouldn’t exist at all, and I may agree with you, but this is a bug, not a feature.
I have to be very clear: That’s simply wrong and I have no idea how you come to the conclusion that my statement was Lemmy /Fedi specific in any way…
All other social media do have this information and just don’t provide it to their end users.
My take for how I read this specific case (public communication/information platform) is: Either full anonymity or pseudonymous transparency.
For other cases I’d even argue for personal linked transparency. For others I’d be against having behavioral transparency and would prioritize privacy even higher.
“Social media” as umbrella term is btw too broad for me personally to say “they should do X”
That’s a weird change of perspective there. I’m not sure I understand what you’re saying.
To be clear, yes, all social media with likes/votes has information about the likes/votes. That’s all likes/votes is.
The question is whether you surface that information to users. For a system like ActivityPub there are some hard limiters to how much you can keep that info hidden or build features around withholding information from users at all because the entire thing is built on the notion that anybody can be hosting an instance.
My point is that I’m not going to treat it differently or have different expectations of it just because it works in a different way. And if anything, I’d have some additional privacy concerns for a system like than I would for a less open system.
So from there I’m not sure what your argument is. Are you saying that you disagree that Fedi has the same expectations for privacy and usability than other social networks? That they have the same expectations but get there some other way? I’m not trying to put words in your mouth here, I’m trying to understand what you’re saying.
Oh I think I see the misunderstanding, thanks for your answer!
I had no specific technology or even "social media in my mind at all when writing my first post. Instead I tried to convey my personal preference on the scale “absolute transparency” to “absolute privacy” for the specific case of “seeing who votes in which direction from user about users”.
I completely agree with your statement “don’t treat it differently because of underlying tech decisions”.
For me the answer to the privacy question depends on the specific use case (and who provides/ controls it).
And to answer your question: I only try to describe “my” wishes, not how I think fedi developers see the situation.
Bit confused, what would they even do with a report of downvote? Doesn’t make sense.
Plus don’t even understand why someone cares so much about downvoting that they would message you and report it. The upvote/ downvote means seriously nothing. It’s “thin air”.
Put down your device and it has no impact on your live. Continue using Lemmy and it will have no impact on how you use Lemmy.
There are or were some mods of communities/admins of instances (not sure which they were, probably admins can only see that) who have taken action against users who downvote in their communities. I’ve seen both situations of mods taking action on users who downvote every post in a community and also against users who downvote once in their community. Say that to say, some mods/admins will take action over downvotes.
I mean it makes sense to block accounts when mass-downvoting of every post in a community happens. But apart from that scenario it is very dumb.
