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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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.
The developers of Lemmy do not seem interested in anything less than banning people instance-wide, even from communities that they have never posted in before, so ironically shadowbanning is too subtle for them.
But I thought the only way someone could be shadowbanned now is at the individual user level? It would be nice to increase transparency even further - e.g. a message pops up if you try to reply to someone saying like “this user has blocked you” (possibly everyone from that instance) so that people do not waste time trying to get a message across that the recipient will never read.
Wait a minute, so any admin can see which posts do I upvote/downvote?
Yep. On kbin I think any user can too.
On mbin users can only see who upvoted a post. An admin can of course still go into the db and look there, but for users and mods there is no way to see who downvoted a post
There is a reductions tab on mbin, which shows downvotes
There was and is not anymore
Then maybe it is still around on some instances?
Either way, it is only a matter of time for another fediverse software to show downvotes, or someone to spin up a vote info page which gets its information via undisclosed legitimate fediverse instances so you cannot defederate them.I was actually the one removing it. I implemented the support for incoming downvotes and because I and others had concerns to keep showing remote users downvotes publicly we / I removed it.
That’s a pretty reasonable compromise, and probably explains my confusion.
Why didn’t you do the same for remote upvotes?
Yep and they ban people as they see fit, across different communities, based on votes anywhere
Furthermore, anyone can spin up a Lemmy server if they want to see people’s votes. It’s not very hard or load the same post in kbin/mbin.
Yes, by looking in the DB or the data that’s federated as it comes through
There’s now a UI feature that allows admins to see votes without needing to manually query the database
For what it’s worth, admins/employees on Reddit (or any other website) can also see upvote records.
this is different, oc is talking about “any admin”. Anyone can make a lemmy server and become a server admin from which they might be able to see the voters
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.
I agree! I believe seeing who upvoted or downvoted a post aids in identifying rabid downvoters and bots. However, I personally use mobile Lemmy apps and am unable to access that data.
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!
Lemmy downvotes really have no consequences though, besides user ego.
If votes are anonymous and federated, it’s very easy for me to add or subtract 900 votes from whatever I want.
You should consider anything you do on social media to be public. Even if Facebook tries to claim that it’s not.
Oh I like a pessimistic view - partly because it makes a discussion spicier, but also because it’s important for a user to understand the power that an instance owner wields!
Admin of a small instance, I have banned 2 accounts for another instance that were downvoting almost all content in a threads without any other interaction. They were being disruptive to the flow at the time, much like @ericjmorey@discuss.online describes.
Oh man, this is awesome - it’s wonderful hearing from the practitioners of the art!
I’m just trying to figure out what driver establishing the tipping point for breaking or the ban hammer - is there any empirical data to drive these decisions, or is the fediverse user base small enough that you act on “feel” or “professional instinct”?
Managing emerging technologies fascinates me so any input - including the germs you’ve already volunteered - is very much appreciated 👍
For me and my (very - it may be down to just me logging in, but a couple of the communities have a few people that read/vote) small instance it comes down to feel (“Don’t be a dick”). Dave, the admin of lemmy.nz (about 80 users per week) has the same in their side board as their “Rule”. Dave and I set up our *nz instances in the same week and we chat often. He might not be quire as quick with the ban hammer as I might be though.
When you are this small even a small outside problem can have huge effects on your instance
They’re purposely disruptive to the community, they are not part of the community.
That’s a strong viewpoint and I appreciate where you’re coming from, but how many votedicks does it take to derail a post? I appreciate the fediverse is reasonably small in comparison to othe headline social media sites, but does banning one or two bots or people do enough to save posts from getting bombed?
with *nz content on my instance, very few
If it’s early? One.
why ban them?
They were describing someone who downvoted everything seconds within the post arriving.
yes, and any instance owner on any federated instance. Oh, and anyone on Kbin.
What you upvote/downvote, when you upvote/downvote. With some database queries, they can also read DMs that are on their server (i.e. if you message someone on my server).
You can see who upvoted a post by putting the URL to the post or comment into any connected mbin server and clicking “favorites”. Downvotes are restricted by default (but admins can see those of course).
The only information admins can see is the information on their server. For Lemmy, that means a server would need to be subscribed to all communities you’re active in for that information to be available. If you want I can DM what upvotes of yours my server knows about.
I can see that in some circumstances, votes might need to be public due to protocol, otherwise public votes have their own uses, and so are private ones.
Eh, I don’t personally care.
But it could lead to nastiness as lemmy expands. If enough people go to the trouble of looking it up, you get some of them being assholes because people are prone to being assholes. That leads to drama. Drama leads to nastiness and worse things sometimes.
If that’s going to be part of how lemmy works, so be it, I’m way too old to skip using a block list for assholes. But it might bite federated services in the ass, so it probably should be on the list to get implemented.
Sounds like opinions are pretty mixed. Maybe we should put it to a vote.
But then how do we decide if that vote should be public or not…
They should just stay mostly hidden as they are now. I was harassed 3 times while using kbin for my voting habits. When I brought it up to ernest, him and mostly everyone else defended it, even though at the time I was actively being annoyed by someone.
It’ll make less people vote in the long run and will scare people off.
Nothing worse than hopping on something I do for leisure to realize that thread I voted on a week ago has now come back to bite me in the ass because the OP decided to go on a crusade and harass everyone that downvoted them.
Please be vocal about this because I’ve seen two people say they didn’t see this behavior. ❤️
yep, tyranny of the majority is still tyranny. It’s worth defending the 3% who disagree with the majority opinion cause, more often than not, sometimes the majority is wrong…
Defending the secret vote is the key to a functioning democracy, without it you just get cliques and in-groups who bully the outsiders. No one wins in that scenario, as critical thinking and critique are actively discouraged.
Even for delusional tech bro bullshit, the idea that public voting on an anonymous forum will do anything other than create drama is pretty fucking detached from reality.
Sure, if and when we get the ability to ignore federated votes
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.
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.
Always in favor of taking power from mods that they can abuse and simply do not need.
The 1 “You think you can come into MY instance, and downvote ME?” post I read was 1 too many.
I’m guessing we saw the same one, and that’s literally the only instance I’ve completely blocked.
Was it midwest.social by any chance?
No, vegantheoryclub.org actually
On Lemmy the concern isn’t even mod abuse - it’s just how much user telemetry is pushed around in plaintext which makes me uncomfortable. I’m sure there are already instances which do nothing but listen to AP traffic actively building activity and interest profiles on Lemmy users. Say what you will, but at least on reddit they have to buy that shit. And if such a rogue admin is even a little bit enterprising, there are a bunch of potential IP deanonymization attacks possible by serving up content targeted to specific users during specific times of day. And probably a bunch of other shady shit I haven’t thought of.
Honestly it’s more than a bit suspicious to me that AP and Lemmy has put seemingly zero effort into mitigating this sort of thing.
I like your funny words, magic man!
The version code hasn’t even hit 0.2 yet. Lemmy was founded by people who got banned from Reddit for being too toxic & extremist leftists, so went off to make their own replacement. They do what they like, and bc Rust is a difficult language to work with, not that many are willing to help.
Then after Huffman’s debacle, we started to see Kbin, Mbin, Piefed, Sublinks, and perhaps more - but none even as advanced as Lemmy yet.
But more to the point, that’s just the nature of an open network. Wouldn’t Wikipedia suffer from the same issues? Though less of an issue than a social media framework I would wager.
That’s funny because I saw some initial comments made which then started this discussion. And what you’re suggesting was the intent. The issue as they (one of Lemmy’s developers) said was essentially frustration that their echo chamber had been pierced.
The infallible Admiral Patrick perma-banned me from UnpopularOpinion for downvoting his posts. What a great guy - and by great guy, I mean twat.
I think votes shouldn’t be anonymous. Transparency is important to weed out trolls and bots. And public votes should be made easier accessible to every user not only admins/mods.
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.
I agree. As long as anonymous voting doesn’t cause obvious trolling/spam issues, it should be preferred.
One of the reasons I’ve always found Facebook off-putting and never used it (even before learning about the shady practices) are the very visible votes. I tend to overanalyse any reaction and would judge people based on their votes on my posts, even if I consciously tried to avoid it. Similarly, I imagine some other people would do the same and I’d feel like I’m under surveillance.
It honestly just opens up a whole shitty can of worms. Are admins ready to weigh in every time someone fakes a vote history screenshot showing that so and so up voted a bomb threat before the post got removed?
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.
It’s strange that they removed total account karma visibility a while back but are now thinking about making votes public.
I think a good compromise (since Lemmy already tracks that data) would have been to show the upvote/downvote ratio a user receives on their profile page, without showing their total karma. That’d help you spot toxic users without incentivising karma whoring.
Similarly, a display of how often a user upvotes versus downvotes others would help spot bots and trolls without completely obliterating privacy like their suggestion would.
(But ultimately none of this solves the problem of privacy on the Fediverse being one federated bad actor away from nonexistence)
As a comment on the other discussion says, there’s a reason ballots are secret.
In reality you should be able to get an anonymized reference number to show your vote was tabulated correctly though.
Right now it comes down to an actual official finding your paper ballot with hand marked tracking and presuming to the computer read it correctly on an overall vote total.
Being able to do this anonymously and securely is where the problems lie. Which is also why digital only voting still isn’t a thing anywhere.
In reality you should be able to get an anonymized reference number to show your vote was tabulated correctly though.
The reason there is no such thing in elections, is to prevent vote buying/extortion.
In Italy it’s such an extreme problem that any ballot where the party is not marked with a cross on the party logo and (if present) a block capital name next to it on the provided line, is automatically discounted, because stuff like writing a name a specific way or using crosses, checks, dots, or other symbols was used to track vote buying/voter intimidation in mafia controlled territories.
Some vote counters and polling station overseers would be on the take and keep track of if the votes they expected to see showed up when counting ballots and report back.
If you were able in any way to prove something beyond the equivalent of an “I voted” sticker it would immediately be used to ensure people voted a certain way or to exact some sort of backlash on those who didn’t.
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Because they’re supposed to be responsible to and represent the people who voted for them. Irrelevant to this situation.
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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?
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And now I definitely want to see whoever downvoted your post outed as cowards 👍👍
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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.
Couldn’t agree more, and if we passed around imaginary gold on Lemmy, I’d give you a dubloon for this.
I’m so, so glad to see I am not the only one that thinks this way.
Any instances that actually show public downvotes? I’ve seen people talk about them but haven’t seen them yet
Sill waiting for someone to show me how to see what someone up votes and down votes on Lemmy through a pre-existing Mbin or Mastodon instance. That’s really been the only convincing argument to make them public that I’ve heard. (That convinces me, I mean.) But nobody has shown it is possible through fedia.io for example. I tried but couldn’t see it, but it’s possible I was looking in the wrong place.
Here is a video of me doing it on my phone with fedia.io: https://files.catbox.moe/nb5rx1.mp4 For some reason it wouldn’t show me reduces (downvotes), though.
Ahhhh, okay. I was expecting it to be under a user but it is attached to the post. That makes targeted harassment marginally more difficult but regardless, I definitely can see that it’s trivial to see the upvotes (favorites) and downvotes (reduces).
Whether or not this is “good” or “bad” I’m still undecided on, but you’ve officially convinced me that it is trivial to see exactly who voted (and how) on a post (or comment). You do not need to “set up an instance” like many people say.
Fair enough. I do think you can view it under a users profile in some Mastodon clients- but only upvotes, not downvotes.
