Probably better to post in the github issue rather than replying here.
Yes, and there’s no genuine argument otherwise.
If you want Lemmy to grow and not be completely overrun with bots posting propaganda and signal boosting extremism, showing votes is the only way forward. It’s the only mechanism by which independent parties can discover and expose things like “every post and comment by this account is upvoted by these 20 other accounts that have never posted and whose names follow the same formula”.
The privacy you’re mourning never existed in the first place and it can’t exist on any platform. For Lemmy, it’s required for federation. On sites like Reddit, you have privacy from other users, but not from the company or anyone they sell that data to.
Since true privacy isn’t an option, it would be far better to be open about that lack of privacy. This thread is already riddled with people who thought their votes were private, rather than just inconvient to look up. That’s far more dangerous and deceptive.
This needs to happen, regardless of the ill-informed tantrums it may cause. If you want to upvote pornography without it being used against you, create accounts that are strictly for pornography and properly compartmentalize your accounts.
Problem is, it actually encourages a hive mind. I’ve already had 2 people try to bully me.
I’d go one step further. Upvotes down votes and totals should be hidden entirely. This would encourage people to post based on their own without external influence It reduces the incentive to use bots
Problem is, it actually encourages a hive mind. I’ve already had 2 people try to bully me.
Then tell those people to get fucked.
I’d go one step further. Upvotes down votes and totals should be hidden entirely.
Unless you have an actual implementation of how that would work, telling us “what you’d do” is just a fantasy. You can’t “hide” things from federation – they’re either included, removed or made inconvenient to access.
Does “posting without external influence” even have any value besides sounding cool? The entire concept of Lemmy and Reddit is that external influence floats and sinks content. If you want unranked, anonymous content, you want 4chan (which is of course riddled with extremists and good content is almost entirely drowned out with worthless shitposts).
Personally, I’d rather that “external influence” was as fair and open and accountable as possible, rather than “I wonder if 500 of those votes are just Russian bots”.
My implementation would be hide it from the UI by default for instances
Also, never said unranked… I meant simply hide the rankings. Part of the disadvantage of showing the totals on the UI means that high upvotes make it seem like it was highly popular. It also means that people don’t mindlessly upvote posts simply because there were a lot of upvotes. By hiding them, you know its popular, but no how popular. It changes the way people interact so it’s more normal.
Showing Upvotes/downvotes doesn’t show whether they are bots are not. It just means they’ll upvote/downvote more random shit and mess around wit the rest of the posts, so more crap rises to the top because they’re interfering with the rankings.
There are easier ways to identify bots… And, it just aids abusive people. I don’t think it will assist with bots at all… Sorry.
Also, never said unranked… I meant simply hide the rankings
Sounds trash to me. Fortunately it would be trivial for me to add them back in because again, all you’re doing is making the information inconvenient.
It also means that people don’t mindlessly upvote posts simply because there were a lot of upvotes
Is that how your mind works? I’ve never once done this and I’m extremely skeptical that anyone does. Sounds to me like you don’t like the content and have decided that nobody really does, they’re just upvoting it because it was upvoted.
Showing Upvotes/downvotes doesn’t show whether they are bots are not. It just means they’ll upvote/downvote more random shit and mess around wit the rest of the posts, so more crap rises to the top because they’re interfering with the rankings.
A log of votes is the data you need to discover bots. It doesn’t magically reveal them, nor did I claim it would.
Voting on random shit might make a slightly more plausible voting log for a bot but that’s going to be far more obvious than you think, won’t actually interfere with the rankings if it’s truly random and once again, not having rankings shown doesn’t address this problem either.
Votes and rankings are always knowable, even if you hide them from the UI. If there is a pressure to make bots plausible through random voting, that pressure exists regardless of it being shown on the default UI. All you’re doing is misleading users about what information they’re exposing.
There are easier ways to identify bots
Describe them.
And, it just aids abusive people
You’ve already claimed to be a victim of them and your solution does nothing to address it. You’re just adding another value to the list of poorly obscured information, because it’s what you personally want.
Yes, bias is a thing. Ever hear of the placebo effect? It gives people a bias before clicking the link.
In fact, showing rankings actually makes it easier for bots because of that bias, they just randomly click stuff to appear neutral, and upvote their target posts, which when they say +1.4k, you’ll be biased into thinking it’s a popular opinion. Hence why hiding them by default actually maybe has benefits. There are no advantages to seeing the votes other than abuse. Name some.
As you said, they’re already accessible, so there is no point of bloating the code. Let’s not make them even more so and encourage abuse.
What problem is being solved here by doing this?
After reading your exciting new definition of the placebo effect and being asked to “name some advantages” that have been in every comment I’ve made, I think I know everything I need to about the quality of your opinions.
Hear hear!
Well said and argued.
+1
Thanks.
This is a copy and past from my reply another community, sorry if you are reading it again:
I’m at the completely opposite end of the spectrum of most people, they should be public to all. It makes it clear whether the guy downvoting you is doing so maliciously or as a non-participant. Same for upvotes. Otherwise, just get rid of it and find some better mechanism. The people saying “NO!” or that they should be anonymous don’t really have a reason, your comment history is already giving you away and no one has a problem with that.
The worst thing public upvotes/downvotes might lead to are the same things your comments are already profiled for by the same people that would and perhaps a random getting mad at your downvote or upvote and voting back, which doesn’t matter that much with the current karma system. The benefits, however, are a clear vision of where those upvotes and downvotes are coming from, without it you are a blind person in a social networks but with it you can tell who is interacting with you and you can investigate why and even make judgement calls because you can see whether they interact like a jerk.
No drama witch hunts, accountability for the way you are interacting online, the the benefits outweighs the drawbacks, but people don’t want it because they feel insecure about it. I specially favor it because it could be a first step for a form of crowdsourced moderation (speculated on it here), where you can choose the people you think are voting comments to your taste to eventually have a select group large enough to determine which should show up first and which shouldn’t show at all, and it could be completely complementary to existing systems. Don’t want to see “yes, I agree” comments sorting as the most relevant? You might choose people who do not upvote but have engaged with the rest of the thread for comments you consider more informative.
No one from kbin/mbin instances can check out the downvotes you make, since this attitude has been so widespread many don’t report it to those instances. They can see people who upvote, and the sky hasn’t fallen because of it. Anonymity largely only helps the minority making the drama remain hidden.
word it better dude. i can’t comprehend what you just said.
Sorry dude, maybe you can read other better worded comments in this thread that share the same sentiment.
What porn have you up voted? Hmm let’s find out.
That would be an argument to support alts natively in regards to the sub and instances you are participating in, and isn’t that compromising as it can already be checked.
I don’t even think generally anyone even tries to reveal any personally identifiable details to social network account on reddit let alone lemmy. Maybe influencers and people seeking recognition, but they are going to be using alts anyway.
Forget downvotes, if you are anyone of note and people know your username, they are going to spend hours searching through your comment history, and that’s going to be far more incriminating than an upvote or a downvote.
Nice, weird Al
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I saw some other’s commenting about “private ballot boxes” but I think that’s a false equivalency. You Vote in a democracy on policy and representation, not discourse. You’re basically saying your upvote/downvote is being used to police conversation and who you think best represents you.
It has similarities though, as pointed out in orher comments. For one, a user might be more careful with downvotes if they are afraid of negative consequences e.g. harassment. With piblic votes, there would therefore be a bias towards upvotes and and people abstaining from downvotes, i.e. less interaction in total.
Downvotes serve a purpose today, letting us quickly scan which comments are controversial or even harmful to the conversation. I, for one, usually sort most threads by votes and then skip the comments with many downvotes but for controversial topics, I instead seek out the comments that have both many upvotes and downvotes.
These would be harder to find given the above bias.
I agree it would lead to less interaction, but the interaction lost would only be downvotes being used as a disagree button. No one is going to get harassed for downvoting a bot posting an ad or someone just completely off-topic, that which the downvote is suppose to be used for. In your scenario you point out that the comments you seek out have so many upvotes-downvotes because it’s controversial, not that it doesn’t add to the discussion.
If a website could be sure none of their users are malicious/bots and all of the users are perfectly rational and virtuous then public or private voting wouldn’t matter either way. That being nearly impossible, why not a reputation based system like Stack Exchange? Only when an account meets certain requirements they can vote.
To boot, on the website tweakers.net one can actually vote -1, …, +3.
- +3: “Spotlight comments are of such high quality and substantive value that they clearly stand out above the rest”
- +2: “Informative and interesting comments that are a useful addition to the discussion in an on-topic thread or the information in the article”
- +1: “Nice on-topic responses with knowledge that is common knowledge”
- +0: “Comments that do not contain a relevant contribution, but are posted with good intentions”
- -1: “Flamebaits, trolls, misplaced jokes, unnecessarily hurtful comments and other comments that violate our terms and conditions or house rules”
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Any implementation is of course free to use a reputation system, but it seems hard to implement. You don’t necessarily know all the votes a remote user has received. Say you get a vote to a post from a user who you’ve never heard about before. But actually this user is a well-respected member of their own instance and has been on that instance for years. Meanwhile, your instance believes this is an inactive spammer or new account or something.
Couldn’t you have the main instance take care of it? I don’t exactly know how activitypub handles votes but if they’re reported back to the users home instance it could be calculated there.
For example if I had a reputation of 12 and I posted on a different instance and got enough votes to get 1 extra reputation those votes would be reported back to my instance which would update my rep accordingly.
But how would I, an external instance, know your true reputation? Would I need to ask your home instance and just trust that? So when I ask “what level of trust should I put in this user”, a malicious instance could just say “a million reputation points” and I just need to trust that? I don’t see how this is going to work.
Yeah that’s fair, but without some form of centralization I don’t see how you establish trust. Unless you have every instance scan every users history but that would be pretty inefficient
This is actually something I have not thought of, the only issue is that people are going to use it as a I like this instead of this is high quality, which I think is the biggest hindrance of that. This is also going to be nearly impossible to moderate on a federation level because an instance could be spun up that would lie about the reputation of an account and everyone would just go to that instance due to the fact that it doesn’t have that restriction
Baked in visibility of votes and blocking that only works one way makes Lemmy (and anything based on ActivityPub) less functional from an end user standpoint. Wish I knew a decent, somewhat popular alternative that implemented these features
Yea these things are unfortunately hard dealbreakers for some people. Hopefully the situation can improve in the future.
So the annoying neckbeard i downvoted for being an annoying neckbeard is gonna DM me?
Yes
No joke, if I start getting harassed over votes on this site ill probably just leave. Its already pretty toxic.
You should be reporting and then blocking a user that harasses you in that manner. Those tools are available to you for a reason.
It hasn’t even started yet and somebody is pulling the ‘why aren’t you just blocking them’ shit.
Okay, well, what are your expectations for an (edit: public) online space? What makes blocking unreasonable people an unreasonable option for you?
To be clear, I’m not trying to lay the responsibility exclusively on users here. Trolls and agitators have been around as long as the Internet has. But moderators are volunteers and don’t have the bandwidth to diligently police their spaces 100% of the time.
Reputation, whether informed by a voting system or not, has always been an important component of excluding bad behavior in pseudonymous communities. I don’t think it is a reasonable expectation that you can participate in a space without spending any effort in keeping it clean for yourself and others (not that I think your position is necessarily that severe.) Reporting bad behavior should be the minimum expectation, and I see the block list as a fallback for when moderation efforts are insufficient or don’t align well with the user’s expectations.
IMO the problem is not that you can’t block them but tooling. It is true that with the appropriate tools and work you can farm the data yourself and get everyone’s votes, but realistically most people aren’t going to go out of their way to do that. I see no reason why this would make lemmy better and instead just gives ammunition to bad actors. The poster above you is asking why we need to do more things to avoid bad actors as an effect of the change instead of avoiding that outcome. We know there will be bad actors, but we don’t need to make things easy for them. Maybe you were never gonna stop the guy willing to make an instance and look through all your votes, but you’d stop all the ones who wouldn’t be willing to put in the effort.
I can see the logic in that. I feel like the easier it is for someone to misbehave, the more quickly they’ll be weeded out from a community, but I agree that there might be an increase in the effort required by individual users because of something like this.
So, federated network advantages here: you can always modify your instance’s hosting code to patch this out, at least for the users on your instance.
What you cannot do is prevent other federated instances from publishing the votes submitted to content on their instance. But if you’re accessing that content through your local instance, they can modify the upvote button to pop up a dialog saying something like: “The instance that hosts this content has elected to make usernames visible for upvote/downvote. Would you still like to vote?”
Personally: In many ways I don’t mind. I’m on the internet with my real name. I don’t mind being accountable for my behaviour online. I might be a little more cautious about upvoting something controversial or NSFW, but largely it wouldn’t change my behaviour.
Yes, absolutely. I am for pseudonyms but transparency. I would be very keen on having colors of the usernames to signify how old the username is. Also having a possibility to load block lists from files ( like github ) to allow sharing the block lists of the trolls
.
Ok
Lemmy is already a privacy nightmare, in some way. There was a comment showing the screengrab of those peiple who upvoted and downvoted a post. Basically, if you self-host an instance, you’ll have access to these. This can easily be weaponized by certain organizations that want to create profiling of lemmy users, e.g NSA and Intelligence agencies.
If you’re afraid of triple letter agencies you probably shouldn’t engage in social media at all.
The privacy concerns are about coercion from the user base. The bar to spin up a private instance to get to the voting data is far too high for 99% of the users.
Different tool, different purpose.
Lemmy was never designed to be private in that way, nor was ActivityPub. You should expect the things you post publicly on the Internet to be public.
I expect that for posts but not for votes. Inherently, we don’t want our votes to be public - that kind of defeat the purpose.
I’d be curious to know where that expectation is coming from. On average I’d expect a majority of folks have that expectation carried over from Reddit. Another poster somewhere mentioned that there are several other social media platforms that don’t have private voting, and I wonder if the expectations would be different from people who came from those.
Personally I think the transparency on votes here has been refreshing and am sad to see platforms pushing to make it private. But then, I grew up in a time before Facebook, when it was understood that you used a pseudonym, not your real identity, and needed to be careful about what you chose to share on the Internet. If you had concerns about being judged for a specific opinion or a hobby or whatever, you could just make a separate account for those topics. Kind of like how some folks only keep a Reddit account around these days for porn.
Public voting is much more of an political and self-conscious act. There is a reason voting in democracies is private.
And there is also a difference if I have to deploy special measures to see who votes how, or if it is made very easy to see and use. Ultimately there should be some kind of crypto algorithm that hides how a user voted from activitypub.
I have to disagree. It should not be a consequential or self-conscious act if you aren’t using your real identity. (If you are, the expectation that you should be very careful with how you participate remains unchanged. This isn’t LinkedIn and it shouldn’t be trying to be.)
Commenters on the GitHub issue have put it better than I can:
An average user absolutely benefits from being able to see who voted on a post or comment and what their vote was. A person noticing that someone is actively down voting their content in a deliberate way empowers the user to have it dealt with. Mods might not [cue in to] that kind of targeted harassment.
Your vote isn’t private in either case regardless. At most you need to know someone’s birthday, first name, and last name to find someone’s voting record in America (might depend state by state). Someone willing to set up a Lemmy instance to see your votes is also capable of then setting up bots to specifically target you with down votes, which is the more egregious of the two actions.
People who use the fediverse need to get used to the fact that things are not private here, that’s the point of interoperability, trying to convince them that they have fake privacy is just going to make them feel self entitled and violated when they learn that nothing here is really private, which shouldn’t really be expected as it is a public and decentralized forum.
I don’t think users are done any favours by pretending they are private as bad actors can already do whatever odious crap they want to and it leads people into a false sense of security. For example someone liking controversial content on an account which can be traced to an identity they may need to keep separate is already taking a massive risk under a false assumption of privacy.
For example someone liking controversial content
On reddit you basically have to sort by controversial today and lemmy isn’t far behind. There is a hive mind today where people jump on the hive mind and hate wagon. And public voting will increase that, the whole idea that we need to watch out for the dissident malicious actor stalking social media attests to that. That is something that needs to be tackled through a kind of automated or extremely efficient moderative response to detect bots and voting patterns of malicious actors. Of course the question is if anything can be done at all against this shift in zeitgeist.
What is needed would be a way to anonymize voting through some kind of clever algorithm or blockchain or token or something. Or maybe that can’t work or then prevent any protection against bots.
Go a step further,
Make it mandatory to comment if you vote.
!I don’t really mean this, but could you imagine?!<
Maybe make it possible for a server to only share aggregate votes on a given post?
Like a proxy vote, where only the server knows who it belonged too.
Sure, but then you’re trusting the server not to just lie about the totals.
I mean, that’s already true and why the federation model is used in the first place. If another instance can’t be trusted, you can disconnect your own from it (extremely easy if you self-host, if you are a standard member of a larger instance it might require convincing)
Also true.
My understanding is that admins already have access to see who votes. This feature is to make then visible to everyone.
I actually like the idea of being able to see how many upvotes/downvotes came from specific instances much more than seeing the actual users. It would cover some of the positives mentioned in the github discussion:
-Could help fight bot and multiple-account voting (if we assume that people who make multiple accounts do it on the same instance)
-Could help identify voting-patterns from specific servers (obviously)And then if something looks suspicious, the admins can already see who voted, so they could check out whether some user is abusing the mechanics.
I find that this approach might be worth talking about, but making user votes visible to all seems very unnecessary.
I don’t want votes to be public, but they already are, so.
Someone can easily host a website to leak this information and people should know, instead of believing they are private
“easily” lol. It’s orders of magnitude more difficult than just pressing a button on someone’s account page. If people really want to jump through those hoops to see them then that’s fine. If that becomes a common occurrence then we should look into making votes more private or more public (so at least those site owners couldn’t lie about your votes). But now? I think it’s fine.
Someone can easily host a website to leak this information
Anyone with a kbin account see them by default, no need to create a special website for it
I don’t want votes to be public
You don’t even need an account to see upvotes. Just look it up on an mbin instance
Fedia displays details on up votes but not down. Which is slightly a shame because I’m mildly curious if the single down vote I get on ~70% of my comments is from like one guy I pissed off at some point. At the same time I don’t care enough to work around the system, so maybe it works?
What will this accomplish other than facilitate brigading?
It is information provided to the instance runners, mods, and other fedeverse platforms such as mastodon. It inherently tracks such to know if a user has previously liked/up voted an entry.
So you may have a conversation on here, and some users will know who is downvoting, some will only know who’s upcoming, and some will know none
I think part of the motive is to make brigading harder (show if users or bots are colluding to vote things up or down)
It will also strengthen the hive mind, exponentially.
I would like the option to make it public on my community. I have asked people not to downvote amateur bakers for just trying to improve their skills but some assholes don’t listen.
Absolutely braindead consideration by the devs. I’ll be quitting Lemmy if/when this is pushed through. Unbelievably stupid.
Your votes are already public and have been since you joined. There is just a slight barrier to entry to viewing the details that aren’t shown on frontends.
Please be aware that votes are already public, they just aren’t shown in the UI. Other apps than Lemmy show the votes.
I know. But don’t you have to be an instance admin to see them? Or can anyone do it? I feel like most people have no idea how to do it? Seems like a change if everyone can easily do it.
On Lemmy, only admins and mods can see them. But on many other fediverse apps, like Mbin for instance, the votes are public to anyone. For instance, here’s the votes for my comment you replied to as seen from Mbin.
Oh lol so even if the Lemmy devs made it private, mbin and others would let you see them anyway?
Also, what is mbin? A kbin fork?
Also rip. I’m really not a fan of public upvotes/downvotes. I think it will lead to people harassing each other. Let’s be realistic.
Yes, the underlying protocol does not support private votes. This has been mentioned plenty of times in the thread as well.
Yes it is a kbin fork I believe.
Also rip. I’m really not a fan of public upvotes/downvotes. I think it will lead to people harassing each other. Let’s be realistic.
I mean, I’m honestly not convinced it will lead to as many problems as people think it will. But I think we should let each instance decide for itself whether to have it public or not.
Well even if an instance decides to hide it, people on other platforms can still see it? Or do i misunderstand?
Yes, exactly.
I know. But don’t you have to be an instance admin to see them? Or can anyone do it? I feel like most people have no idea how to do it? Seems like a change if everyone can easily do it.
