Probably better to post in the github issue rather than replying here.
I’m seeing lots of comments here saying that server admins can already see vote data, and therefore it is not private.
But from my point of view, having a handful of people able to extract voting data using their position of trust on the lemmy network is very different from broadcasting voting data to everyone on lemmy. And although you can argue that it is possible to create a new server and federate and blah-blah-blah to view votes; that argument sounds to me like “don’t bother locking your front door, because that type of lock can be defeated by a lock-picking tools.”
And even aside from all that discussion about who can access what; there is another key point that I think is overlooked: Making voter information public makes it ‘normal’ thing to monitor and discuss. Currently there is an expectation that people won’t look at or discuss that information (even if they hypothetically could get access). But by making it public, the expectation then is that everyone will look at that information. That would create a change in tone and meaning of votes and discussion around votes.
Not only admins can see the votes, but anyone on Fediverse (except regular Lemmy users) can see them.
Security through obscurity is prone to failure when it is used by itself. If people want their votes to actually be private then another method of securing their privacy should be created.
We aren’t talking about security though. We’re talking about what information should be presented on lemmy.
Let me put it this way: have you personally ever tried to see who upvoted or downvoted a particular lemmy post? And if you did, did you talk about what you saw?
My point is that currently basically no one sees the data. The expectation is that no one is looking. And it is not socially acceptable to discuss who is voting for what. But if the votes were changed to public then everyone would see it, the expectation would be that it is common knowledge, and so obviously it will be discussed. Is that what we want on lemmy?
Your first comment expands on both privacy and security. There is no privacy without some type of security.
Now to answer your questions: Yes and yes. Users from c/all were downvoting posts from a small community I’m a part of because they don’t agree with. I couldn’t see the posts from small communities that are important to me because of that. Now we have the possibility to sort by “scaled”, which fixes that. Sometimes there are discussions that are very relevant as to who is voting for what. But that discussion has nothing to do with privacy, which was your first point and went unacknowledged on your second comment.
I sure don’t, let the mods see it for their communities but not for everyone
But this isn’t security! No one is claiming that not making vote history visible through the UI is a means to keep things secure!
using their position of trust on the lemmy network
Being a lemmy admin is not a “position of trust” - anyone can fire up a single-person instance for themselves and be a lemmy admin. You can also just view a post on mbin to see votes.
I think votes should be displayed publicly at the bottom of the comments section for each post. Make people stand by their convictions.
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
It will also strengthen the hive mind, exponentially.
I think part of the motive is to make brigading harder (show if users or bots are colluding to vote things up or down)
Hard yes from me, thank you.
I would say no. I don’t want some dumbass to interogate me about why I downvotes thia and why I upvoted that.
Ignore them?
They already can with effort. No reason not to add it.
Yes there is. They might not bother most of the time because it’s annoying. Having vote information accessible at a glance might create a situation where people have more sterile discussion and create more drama about votes because they see it. And that sounds annoying.
I hope I’m wrong.
If it’s effort, virtually nobody does it. Convenience is king since the beginning of the internet.
absolutely a horrible idea. please for the love of god don’t do this, it will only lead to people getting dunked on for how they upvote/downvote.
Yes this should have been done already. Reddit it’s structured the way it is to better serve the manipulative intentions of the company behind it. Another useful thing would be to have votes on each user profile to flag bots easily. Bots are a threat to this platform, extreme transparency is one way to counter them the other is to add restrictions.
Didn’t kbin have a separate mechanism for supporting a post in a more public way? I can’t remember how that worked now, but it was in addition to the regular voting I think?
It’s called ‘boosting’ and I believe mbin kept it as well.
Yeah. It’s the repost functionality common on Mastodon.
Back on Kbin.social I would have some followers from Mastodon, and when I saw a neat comment I would sometimes boost it and thereby push it straight to their feeds.
Same thing would work on Mbin, except that i don’t have followers. Oh well, I still boost posts I find neat.
Kbin has upvote, downvote, and boost. Boost comes from the microblogging side, kbin does both content aggregation like Lemmy and microblogging like Mastodon. On the content aggregation side boost counts as 2 upvotes and it functions as normal for the microblogging side. Kbin.social is the only Kbin instance I used, I expect that it works the same on other Kbin instances and on Mbin but I don’t know for sure.
I use MBin and it works pretty much as you described, it has upvote (similar to Mastodon like) and boost (similar to Mastodon repost)
Both upvotes and boosts are public on Mbin, but downvotes aren’t (to prevent harassment)
Nah. Votes are already visible to people using other applications than Lemmy, so let people use those if they want to see how people voted. It’s fine as-is.
They are? Where? I mod a Community and I’ve never seen anything that isn’t explicitly for Admins that can see them.
I’m not sure which ones, I only use Lemmy.
There are merits for it and against it. My biggest concerns would be privacy regarding data scrapers .
Regarding poor behavior, I really think that ultimately comes down to moderation on the platform. I’ve only had a few poor experiences but I am also someone who sometimes sees certain threads as dumpster fires and refrains from joining in or refrains from responding when I feel there isn’t any form of discussion or chatter to be had. I can understand that it likely happens more often than not but I also believe that moderation is the only reasonable way of curbing it. Moderation teams have to make it clear that the behavior is not welcome and that it will be dealt with.
My biggest concerns would be privacy regarding data scrapers .
The protocol already exposes votes, so they already have that. It’s just not currently visible in the Lemmy web UI. You can, as other people on here have pointed out, already go to any kbin/mbin instance federated with a lemmy instance and view upvotes on a post or comment on that lemmy instance. Not downvotes, but kbin/mbin don’t propagate downvotes.
I understand that this information is already basically public but there is a thin barrier to the average nitwit user accessing such information and going in a rampage screwing with people who have downvoted them. I’ll say this, if they make it more public I think I will just simply stop voting. I will continue to use Lemmy but only as a passive user.
I don’t even run with votes enabled(I can vote but can’t see scores) on my clients, but like yeah this will definitely make me second guess any type of interaction with voting for both directions because I don’t want to become a target for harassment. It defeats the purpose in my opinion of having the system in the first place if someone can’t truthfully vote the way they want.
I think in one sense it can be good. Sometimes it is counterproductive to downvote someone from 1 to 0. I think this would prevent that, as the first downvote is probably the most important one.
But I agree that making any data public will allow everyone to be categorized easily. “This person dislikes this content and likes other content.”
Remember, you are giving this info to everyone. Mark Zuckerberg will be able to see what you like and dislike in all public votes.
Remember, you are giving this info to everyone. Mark Zuckerberg will be able to see what you like and dislike in all public votes.
ActivityPub is designed to be public though. Lemmy’s current choice not to display the details of voting information does not prevent Zuckerberg or anyone else running a compatible instance from receiving all those details and looking at them.
As an aside, I currently prefer mbin’s style of keeping the vote totals separate. I think it provides more useful context to be able to tell the difference between a post with 0 upvotes and 5 downvotes, and a post with 35 upvotes and 40 downvotes, rather than having them both display -5.
Also, not sure if this is different on Lemmy, but a fresh post is at 0/0, it does not start off with an upvote from the user who posted it. I kind of like that, but I’m not sure how much it matters
This is an interesting conundrum.
On one hand it would help locate foreign agent bots/bad faith actors faster and recognize vote manipulation by bot farms.
On the other it will lead to even more account-stalking problems, user drama, and would further enable vote dogpiling if you see certain known users voted a certain way.I’m inclined to say no. They are already “public” if one wants to put in the effort to admin a standalone instance or run alts on multiple services they can see if they care- I personally don’t really care
I think they should focus more on getting rid of bots, and get a little less ban happy on the people that are calling out bots or bullshit.
I’d love to see what mod removed content or banned someone.
Moderation logs are already public.
Standard disclaimer that you’re gonna find objectionable content in there, browse at your own peril.
On your instance it can be found here: https://lemmy.today/modlog
It doesn’t show which mod though, just that a mod did something. Unless I’m missing something.
It does look like your instance’s mod log anonymizes all actions, at least the first couple pages I skimmed seemed to be that way.
I’m not sure if that’s a Lemmy thing in general or if it’s something lemmy.today has configured. On my instance, which runs Mbin, the moderation log looks like it has the option to anonymize the mod name (which I think is new since last I checked), but that isn’t being used universally.
It’s unfortunate because it really has the feel that there is a mod that has no business being a mod and has been going on a power trip. I have no way of figuring out who.
Seems fine? Voting was, at best, only slightly anonymous anyway because other platforms that get the AP action will happily tell you exactly who did what when even if the Lemmy UI doesn’t.
And, honestly, if you don’t want your fake and nearly anonymous internet name associated with doing something, eh, maybe that’s a sign you shouldn’t do it?
Yeah - dont upvote laydyboys unless you want all to know you like them. Its a sign you shouldnt do it.
Also all books you lend from the library should be public knowledge. No hiding!!
If you don’t want others to know you like ladyboys, you should not join a social network service that will send your likes to every other server in the network. A network that has a long history of making these interactions public, mind.
There are Reddit alternatives that don’t do this. If you’re afraid of people finding out you like ladyboys, you should consider using one of those services.
Also all books you lend from the library should be public knowledge.
Terrible analogy. You can consume the post without anyone knowing. Voting is more akin to signing the guestbook.
Voting is more akin to signing the guestbook.
Meh, that’s rather just “I was here” or “I read this”. Voting is more like “I liked/disliked this book”.
You can also keep that opinion to yourself when reading a book from a library. Voting in this case is like signing that you like/dislike it in the back cover
It wasn’t an analogy- just an equally great idea.
So you would say they’re comparable then? Maybe even analogous?
I mean, nice strawman but what was more happening was you were telling your friend you liked ladyboys, and then your friend ran outside and told anyone and everyone who would listen that you liked ladyboys.
The only real change here is the Lemmy UI would stop lying to you about votes being private, because they never were.
On the contrary, I like gentlemangirls.
dont upvote laydyboys unless you want all to know you like them. Its a sign you shouldnt do it.
This. Unironically.
There is no such thing as privacy in the public internet. There never was. I take it as a given that if some loser decides to look me up they will dig even my IRC chat logs from some server I used to connect almost 30 years ago.
Anything you do in the public internet, you need to ready to own it publicly. If you want/need real privacy, this is the wrong place to be.
That’s creepy
