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this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2024
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Hard no from me
I don't want some nutjob with too much time stalking me because I upvoted something about climate change or downvoted some bigoted shit. We all know those fuckos are out there
Voting on Reddit-like platforms is soft moderation by a community, and if you disincentive that, the whole model kinda falls apart IMO
Your votes are already public. It’s a matter of (a) do we want to make it slightly easier for the people who aren’t technically inclined to see them too (b) do we want people acting with the awareness that they’re public.
(a) doesn’t have a clear answer to me. The answer to (b), though, is clearly yes.
People say this all the time, but it's not really the case.
I don't think privacy is a binary thing that one either has or does not - there are degrees of privacy. Currently what we have is mostly private, requiring either technical skill or admin access to circumvent. This is a pretty high bar which 99% of people would not be able to reach. You're proposing removing the bar entirely because it is not high enough.
What if some troll sets up a website that indexes/publishes this data? What technical skill would be required then?
The data is public and ignorance is not bliss. People need to be made aware of this. If this will lead to people being more careful about what they post online or how they interact with a public social media service, then all the better.
They'd get defederated.
Ok, yeah, theoretically.
But we're talking about putting voting info into the UI for anyone to see. Not highly motivated and skilled bad actors.
And the "we should not make it available for the public at large because it will lead to abuse" is also theoretical.
Anyway, I'm already on record saying that I don't like the voting system and that we should get rid of it altogether. Voting on content used to be about collective curation, not a constant popularity contest.
I'm also on record saying that we need to stop relying on systems that only give us the illusion of privacy and depend on the software developers for culture shaping.
If making the vote public gets people to be exposed to these fundamental issues of the current design, and leads us to search for better solutions, then I'm all for it.
It's not theoretical to se how people consistently behave when there's less friction for toxic behavior. You should look into it if you're not already aware of the very predictable negative outcomes that stem from removing those frictions.
I mean in the specific case of "giving vote visibility to everyone will cause more harassment based on who-voted-on-what". It's theoretical because this has not been implemented yet.
We've already seen that kind of harrasment on major platforms including X and those owned by Meta.
This feels a bit of a conversation-shutting argument. Lots of things (good and bad) will happen on a platform that has billions of users. The real question is to about many of those instances happened solely due to the data being (easily) available to the public.
In any case, I really don't think that the solution to the problem of targeted harassment is by providing quote-unquote-privacy. Today, people want to obfuscate votes. Tomorrow it will be subscription lists and later it will be even posts/comments. By then it will be better to just use a closed network or just go full darknet. I'd rather we spent more time educating the people on how to use actually secure and private communications platform instead of sacrificing Transparency and Accountability for the sake of a vocal minority who will keep trying to turn the "Open Social Web" (which is meant to be open and public) into their exclusive, cocooned service.
It's in the mbin ui already
So the technical-skill-bar is transforming a lemmy link into the equivalent on an mbin instance? That is huge.
It's not quite that simple. As far as I'm aware, it's difficult to fetch from another instance "after the fact" what all the votes are for a particular user or comment; you have to be signed up to receive updates on it, and then after the fact you can go hunting around in your own instance's DB and see what all the votes were (or your UI can do it, if it's supported).
But, yes, there are instance softwares that will do it, and no one's defederating from every one of those instances (nor I think should they). Someone posted a link to an mbin instance breaking down the votes for this post. Votes are not private.
I ran
curl "https://mbin.grits.dev/u/mozz/outbox?page=1" -H 'accept: application/activity+json'and I could see your outbox. Apparently mbin does not put Like/Dislike activities in there, only your comments/posts/notes.In a world where ActivityPub is only used in server-to-server, this would be fine. If we ever get to a (IMNSHO, better) scenario where we have more clients talking AP directly, then this will not work, and mbin will have to add those as well.
All of this to say:
Yes. That's what I said. I'm actually not 100% sure about it; for all I know there's some way to get it, but AFAIK all the existing softwares don't publish votes "after the fact", only at the time to current subscribers. But then, of course, it's kind of a moot point because you can just grab it from any mbin instance's DB through the UI without needing to do anything special or any particular knowledge.
Not really. You can have your client talking to all the servers and grabbing votes for whatever you're subscribed to, and losing votes for anything you're not subscribed to. It works basically exactly that way for one-user instances already.
Tru dat. 100% agreed. It seems like there are all these people in this thread arguing that their votes need to be private. Their votes are not private, and will never be private, for as long as ActivityPub is what they're using. I can see some value, maybe, to making it slightly difficult to extract the information instead of just giving it for free to everyone, but holding onto the idea of your votes being private is a gateway to unhappiness and only unhappiness.
How do you know who you're defederating with? When I set up my instance, the list of federated instances was thousands. How do you know which one is scraping the data?
Incorrect. I said that I see no obvious answer as to whether to remove the bar -- that's the (a) part. What I'm proposing to do is definitely to educate people about the existence of the bar and the fact that they shouldn't be voting on porn, or contentious political topics from an account with their real name, or etc etc like that.
More than 1% of the currently active Lemmy users are actively running a server (it's 1.4%, 649 active instances out of 45k MAU), so I think the number is definitely less than 99% of people who wouldn't know how to do it in the first place (or find an mbin or Friendica server or etc).
The broader point about it being fairly difficult / fairly rare to have the knowledge, I can agree with, but I wasn't saying necessarily that we should make it easier for the 98.6% of people to do; just that everyone should be aware that it's possible so they can make their voting decisions with that knowledge in mind.
You say that, but you simply have to be using something that isn't Lemmy and that information is there (doubly so if you're an admin on any of these systems)
Except that it is, people with the skills already bridged that gap for everyone.
https://kbin.earth/m/fediverse@lemmy.world/t/267356/Lemmy-devs-are-considering-making-all-votes-public-have-your/favourites
Hmmm I see a bunch of my friends have not upvoted my post. I will contact them to ask why not and ensure that they do.
Yeah, just like rglullis actually dragged downvoters into the public on a few occasions, to pressure them to explain their downvotes.
Ach, well, a known method to create a nice discussion
I agree with the general point that privacy isn't a binary thing, but I don't think the bar is nearly so high, as it simply takes opening the post in the right kbin(/mbin?) instance. This requires neither technical skill nor admin privileges.
piefed is already extremely redditty maintaining behind-the-scenes 'karma' and 'attitude' for users whether they signed up for it or not. why shouldn't this info be public instead of in the hands of admins only?
https://join.piefed.social/2024/06/22/piefed-features-for-growing-healthy-communities/
Oof, I'd rather just stick to Lemmy and let people see my votes rather than deal with karma.
Summed up my whole sense of humor in half a throwaway sentence ;-)
Seriously though, interesting read, thank you kux… you can really feel the author’s frustration and yet I can’t help but feel that they are interested in a certain kind of idealistic online community. Reddit but with a really restrictive HOA where everyone has the exact same color mailbox.
Admin access means nothing if you can set up your own instance in an afternoon, federate with everything, then get all the votes copied to your database. I have done this just to prove it could be done, btw.
(b) will just lead to fewer up and down votes, i.e. less engagement. That in turn could lead to slowly bleeding out.
I would like a (c) where my instances collects all the votes on the post, and then transmits an anonymized aggregate.
That would require a major change to the ActivityPub standard, which is not easy or trivial. This is at worst infeasible to impossible, at best something that is 5+ years away.
I agree with you. I remember arguing about this a year ago when people first discovered votes were public on Kbin. I don't want to obsess over who up- or downvoted me and I don't want anyone else doing that either. Discussions are healthier when voting is anonymous (or at least obscured as is currently the case).
If bots become such an overwhelming problem that all regular users need access to voting records to better report all the bots I'll maybe revisit my stance. But right now the gains seem dubious.
I'm dealing with one right now! lol It's crazy.
You don't even have serial downvoters. You have a few comments without many downvotes. You just consistently post the worst possible political pisstakes repeatedly and constantly and nobody likes them when they run across it every time.
Strange that you would say that. I haven't posted any political articles to this community. This is the fediverse community.
Really? So an article about a ninety year old woman, who finally graduates college, posted to my own sub, with 3 subscribers, and got 9 votes within a minute of posting is political? That doesn't seem like a political "pisstake."
Or 13 downvotes in my own educational sub about a college that gives out 3-year degrees. It has 2 subscribers in that sub. That doesn't seem like a political "pisstake."
Or 14 downvotes about a program serving underprivileged children and helping them go to college. and the downvotes were within 2 minutes of posting. To a sub that has 2 subscribers. That doesn't seem like a political "pisstake."
And since all my postings to a political sub are about third parties, from legit news orgs, seems kind of a stretch to call them "political pisstakes."
But wait, I haven't posted any of those articles to this community. So strange how you would know so much about what I post.
Of course, posting history is public. But I haven't checked your post history, because I don't care. Strange that you would check mine. And then not mention all of the non-political posts.
You know, what's really weird too? I posted some articles to the c/science committee. And even some posters there commented on how strange it was that my posts were being downvoted so much and so fast, when the articles weren't political at all.
Luckily the science people are cool, and the upvotes quickly outnumbered the downvotes.
But yeah, they were definitely curious about why so many downvotes so quickly on neutral science reporting.
But meh, probably just a coincidence.
I think maybe you are right. Because for sure there wouldn't be an incel loser, who is so butthurt about my not voting for his candidate, that he'd follow me around. And downvote articles and take screenshots of how much I post, or set up alternate accounts just to engage with me after I blocked him.
That's way too strange. There is no way a loser would be so pathetic to do that. All because he doesn't like the Green Party.
So now that I've thought about it, I agree with you.
It would be just too crazy that an incel loser like that would follow me around. I mean, sure he can't get a girlfriend, but hey, I'm sure he's not THAT mad at the world. :)
If they're a serial downvoter, then it's easier for you to track them and block them as well. Double edged sword i think
I thought blocks were one way - you can't see anything from the person you blocked, but they can still see your stuff?
That's why I'd like it.
So to catch a single "serial downvoter" you'd open up all your voting to vote stalkers? If it's a single person, honestly why does it matter?
Actually what's the case with vote stalker? I haven't seen them anywhere and i don't know what's so bad till have to hold off a feature just because of them.
Would be the people that would go through your vote history and then grief you based on it. Kinda like people that sift through people's comment history to grief them, just now it wouldn't allow any "anonymous" interaction with posts.
What might be interesting would be to have it displayed, but grouped by instance. That way we could see some data and potentially uncover troll instances or attempts to brigade the conversation without opening ourselves up to personal attacks.
Isn't the obvious thing to just have it be an option that admins can enable or disable? Maybe have a third option for only showing upvotes? Then it's up to each instance to decide, and users can decide to go to instances with the option their prefer.