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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Should the Lemmy devs create a way to make the votes anonymous?
I’m not sure if there is a good way to have the content federate anonymously. Even if there was, it would be a vector for spam.
Vote manipulation is a growing problem on Reddit. It’s only getting worse with all the AI spam bots and they don’t have an incentive to stop it. Why trust a review on Reddit if bots are upvoting/downvoting on behalf of a company, or worse what happens in news communities when a well funded group wants to change perspectives.
Admins need to know if the votes/likes coming in are legitimate, else they should block them. It’s too easy to abuse anonymous votes to affect how content is ranked.
I left a long comment in the other thread which I will link in a moment, but I think either
- We keep the current setup, but we put in more effort to make new users aware that vote records are visible to admins/mods
- We make it public for everyone and take steps to deal with the new issues that it could cause
Other comment on the benefits/issues: https://lemmy.ca/comment/11097046
I will also add that I think in the long run, as we try to figure out how to differentiate between humans and machines, the only real reliably solution I see is to focus on elevating the individual. Having people with long histories validate their reality by living and documenting it.
I don’t upvote something that I’d be ashamed for someone to see I upvote. I might make an exception for pornographic content, but even with that, if it’s pseudononymous in that it’s not attached to my personal public life, I don’t mind if someone can trace through and see what a specific account I use for those purposes has liked and disliked.
The current trust model already relies on a user’s home instance accurately reporting user activity and not injecting fake activity. Hiding real user votes behind pseudonymous tokens doesn’t change that at all.
As far as I can tell, the activity ranking algorithms don’t actually differentiate between up and down votes anyway. All votes are considered engagement.
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.
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’m guessing we saw the same one, and that’s literally the only instance I’ve completely blocked.
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.
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!
I would rather vote identities being blocked from scraping. I don’t care about other users or admins. I would rather that level of information be unavailable to outside commercial sources, especially any timings based metadata that could be used to derive dwell time and other psychological metrics.
Thats probably a complete nonstarter in a federated network. The metadata needs to be sent via Activitypub, ergo it has to be public.
I think you’re looking for a different type of community then, like an image board.
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.
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.
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.
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.
1 I had assumed votes were private 2 If I don’t hear soon that votes are private, I’ll simply stop participating and return to lurking. I’ll eventually just wander off to the next thing that doesn’t expose my votes to potential bots and/or abusive actors.
I think most users assume votes are private and most will have a similar reaction to learning about this unintuitive negative feature of anything built on ActivityPub, including Lemmy.
I think it is worth reading the actual discussion on github. Having votes public and having them visibly public on the web interface has compelling reasons. Namely enshittification hardening.
It’s also quite natural to stand by your words (or vote). I personally don’t think people should feel like the internet is their anonimized alt character of life. And if they need/want that, just do a throwaway account and hard vpn. Otherwise NSA (or equivalents) track us anyway.
Your votes are as public as your posts. I see you have no problem posting so I don’t understand what the issue is.
Right? Big whoop, votes are public. Oh no, people might find out I’m an an-com from my voting patterns, instead of from my comments
When I first signed up for reddit, the upvotes and downvotes were not only separately tallied, but also showed the usernames of the most recent people who did them if you hovered over the button. Then very shortly after that they changed it so that it made votes private by default, and you could override it in the settings, but almost nobody went to check that box back on. Eventually, they completely removed that feature around the time upvotes and downvotes were combined into one. which along with vote fuzzing was one of the worst changes to reddit comments, imo.
Lemmy feels like old reddit right now, which is a great spot to be in. I don’t think you necessarily need public vote info, but maybe it could be enabled on a per-community basis? I can see some communities like politics not wanting to add additional drama to the equation while other more content driven communities might enjoy knowing who was giving the feedback.
Vote fuzzing is the worst. Reddit said their main reason for implementing it was to prevent vote manipulation… seriously? Vote fuzzing laid the groundwork for vote manipulation.
Do you mean manipulation from the admins? Because from the spammers perspective not being able to see if your votes went through is pretty inconvenient
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…
Its best if the rules are the same for anyone, but public votes is something power hungry mods will eventually abuse. If you dare upvote the wrong post you will get banned.
It sounds like everyone but mods should be able to see voters. But of course they will use straw accounts. What if only votes on your own post/comment were revealed to you? Like some pointed out, they are already not anonymous to anyone who wants to try hard enough to get the data because of federation. So the question is who do we want to be able to see that data easily? It’s a GUI modification in any case. Who are we making the gui modification for?
Sounds like mods and admins can already do this, and if the barrier to entry to being an admin is firing up a Docker container, I don’t see the purpose in restricting users from seeing it
Yes they should, unfortunately I don’t think that’s technically possible with the fediverse model as the servers have to communicate that info over Activity pub, at least that’s my understanding of it.
It’s not technically possible with any model. Votes on Reddit are only kept private from other users – staff could look them up or reveal them to someone any time they wanted and you’d never know.
Even if you allowed voting without an account (which would be so easily manipulated that it would be worthless), you’d still be identifiable from your IP.
On Kbin the votes are 100% public for anyone. I’ve migrated to Lemmy after the frequent server issues with Kbin and I miss that part dearly. It was very easy to gauge whether someone was engaging in a good or bad faith discussion by checking the votes within a discussion. That being said, personally I’m very light on my downvotes, and I can see how someone more trigger-happy would see it as worrying. Personally I see the vote transparency as healthy though.
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.
the world is an interesting place, the very reasons you gave “for” it is why I was against it. I don’t agree that it won’t cause witch hunts, and from the POV of the commentor it might be nice, but from the POV of the person who is giving the vote, it’s a severe downgrade.
Especially considering the fact that if the person downvoted but didn’t leave a comment afterward they likely would not have downvoted in the first place if it wasn’t anonymous because they don’t want to have to deal with the social interaction of someone trying to push them to explain further. Not everything needs a detailed this is why I feel this way, that’s why there is a upvo and down vote system in the first place, to prevent everyone from leaving a comment of I agree with this / I disagree with this / this is on topic / this is off topic
In addition to this, to say that no one’s giving reasons of why voting should be private, I don’t think that’s a truthful statement there are plenty of reasons that people have provided via privacy, security and sometimes just mental state.
You mentioned that you want to have a system where you choose what people you see and the people you don’t agree with don’t appear., I think that type of environment is extremely unhealthy for a social media platform. It’s why other platforms that have curated that content is starting to become a cesspool. I really don’t want to see lemmy become one big Echo chamber, it’s not healthy to have only one ideology that you see at all times and let’s face it that’s what that system you’re proposing would introduce.
Additionally the system your proposing is going to run into the same issue as the other websites that have attempted to do, this sort of system leads to new people inadvertently getting filtered out as untrustworthy, which will mean that they’re not getting activity on their posts/ comments as well which means that they’re just going to move on to another platform.
Honestly, I think I would rather just have the score system be removed as a whole then see that type of system implemented
I know that’s probably why you do, like I said, people feel really insecure about it. I don’t really respect irrational insecurity though. Your comment history could also lead to witch hunts, yet no worries there… If it does need to be handled, it should be done by automatically deleting your old up/downvotes and comments. But no one is asking for that with comments either… They only take in issue because they don’t want to be held accountable to their votes, even if the probability is practically zero and extremely exceptional.
If you really don’t want to explain why you are downvoting, I really don’t think people should be downvoting. I very rarely downvote, and there are plenty of comments I neither upvote or downvote simply because not everything should be rated nor am I capable of doing so. It is toxic.
You already have a system where people with alts and moderation privileges decide what you see and don’t see, this will happen regardless with information saturation. What I want to have is putting that in the hands of the users. Whether it will be good or bad will depend on the users, and because it would be complementary, you could still accept the traditional or default method. More choice is not bad, it is the users that make it bad, and in this case, they would make it bad only for themselves. But it would also be easy to work this system into something like https://ground.news , where as with a homogeneous imposition you don’t have a choice nor even an idea of what is being censored if you don’t go out of your way to find out. If it’s completely transparent, you could even look through the eye of another user’s moderation settings to see the sort of content they are getting.
Not sure where you are pulling the “new users get filtered out as untrustworthy”, the system I’m proposing would do not such thing. This seems more like a projected insecurity without specific examples that can be countered.
Without a karma system, the problem then goes back to which comments show up first and which might not show up at all. That’s just a traditional forum thread, where the newest comments do.
If you really don’t want to explain why you are down-voting, I really don’t think people should be down-voting.
there are many times that you can down-vote without a requirement of explaining. Sometimes your point has already been made by another person, other times it’s just a really bad take or the person is so dead-set that honestly you couldn’t change the persons mind even if you explained it. Sometimes the comment is just hostile to the current situation or the OP, sometimes the comment is just super off-topic. Some situations allow for down-votes without explaining it.
I personally down-vote for off-topic and harassing posts as it helps the system sort what is considered helpful to the discussion. I would refuse to down-vote for harassing and off-topic if this system is in place, as it creates an attack vector for the person to come after me, a situation that would require either blocking them or bugging a mod for, which is something that personally I just don’t want to deal with in my life so I would simply just not participate in the vote.
Not sure where you are pulling the “new users get filtered out as untrustworthy”,
The type of system proposed inherently causes it as a side effect. When you have a system that is crowdsourced from the popular opinion, you create an echo chamber that only shows content from sources that have been deemed as appropriate, as such not only do you lose the arguing side, you also lose content from people who are not established/just starting out as they are not profiled as that side. as for examples? Two examples of sites that use that style system include Stackoverflow, which uses a rep system to decide how much access you can get into, and some of the larger reddit sites which went off the karma system to even allow posting in them. There are also other examples in reddit, but the karma block system was the most predominant (followed by sub rule filters which filtered out based off bias).
I do believe that a karma system is best type of system however I believe that the metric should be hidden from sight. This will allow for helpful comments to rise to the top, but will remove the hard focus “score” ideology that everyone has. In this system you wouldn’t know if you were down-voted in the first place, which means you wouldn’t be aware of someone maliciously down-voting you, and it would also do what you want where it would force someone if they had a super big issue with what was posted to actually comment on it. That being said, this system can not exist in a federated environment so therefore the next best thing is either anonymous (to all but mods/admins due to moderation and federation control reasons) or just not having the system as a whole.
If those are your examples, then you are misunderstanding my proposition. Some of the reasons you suggest to downvote are not good reasons to me, but that’s point, everyone has their own criteria and their own preferences for the comments they would like to be reading over others. By denying them the ability to choose, you are imposing an arbitrary and fallible karma system. Hiding it really doesn’t fix it, you are denying the alternative because you feel the absolute worst case will occur. Yet right now it is possible, and does not happen.
How about pseudonymous as a compromise? Votes could be publicly federated but tied to some uuid instead of the username. That way you still have the same anti spam ability (can see that a user upvoted these things from this instance at this time) but can’t tie it directly to comments or actual user accounts without some extra osint.
It might be theoretically possible to correlate the uuids with an account’s activity and dox the user in some cases, especially with some instances having a single user, but it would be very difficult or impossible to do on larger instances and would add an extra layer. Single user instances would be kind of impossible to make totally private anyway because they can be identified by instance.
No, there is no real need. An account is already pseudo-anonymous. Full anonymity adds no real value beyond making it easier to manipulate vote tallies with bot accounts undetected.
edit: As a side note, this is one of the more transparent social media communities. It’s not terribly privacy-oriented in general. The enhanced transparency is part of its appeal.
I am the admin of a website where we have a place where our users can post custom content and rate the content of others.
We have discussed how it works and should work many times and came to the conclusion that we’d never want it to be public. Any report of abuse will be checked by the website owner directly in the database and even admins don’t have full access. Everybody tries to stay as far away from the personal ratings as possible.
We also noticed that it would be a lot more fragile when there are not many voters. A whole group that is negative about something wouldn’t get as much harassment as a single person having a unique opinion.
On our website we have a comment section that isn’t anonymous, and we even noticed that people often don’t post something negative when it would be obvious that they are the only one who has voted/rated something. (“Negative” is almost always constructive in our case)
These are just a few things that I think add to this discussion.
