Question I'd like to hear everyone's thoughts on possibly making votes public. This has been discussed in a lot of other issues, but here's a dedicated one for discussion. Positives Could help figh...
Probably better to post in the github issue rather than replying here.
I think it’s a bad idea. It’s just going to start harassment and witch hunts when someone gets a downvote they don’t like. Stalking is going to be a thing, people are going to aggregate all the votes you’ve done to make assumptions about you to then bully you. Once public, sources outside Lemmy will start gathering and cross referencing data about you.
In the US, when you vote, the vote is private to protect the person. Making votes public will only empower those that would abuse it. It very well could end Lemmy due to massive bulling, harassment, and the decline of activity.
i already have had multiple weirdos harass me on lemmy for not being leftist enough. i’ve blocked dozens now, and really kills the experience to have some crazy people go around and brigading your comments because you disagree with their political viewpoint slightly.
way too many people take the internet comments/points WAY too seriously…
I agree. I already tend to get tossed into a category because I don’t agree with a majority of the user base. If people can get categorized more by how they vote, and lemmy users are already pretty savvy, I can see a scenario where people get tagged.
Exactly. We need counter views. One of the problems with any type of social media has been echo chambers and the lack of healthy debate/conversation. People have forgotten how to have a civil debate/conversation with someone else. And people tend to act like, if you don’t 100% agree with me, than not only can we not be friends, but you’re actively an enemy. That shouldn’t be the case. We do not need everyone to agree on everything, it should be acceptable to have a different opinion.
With everything public, we’re going to have no healthy conversation since people will use previous votes (up or down) against someone. One of the issues is, an up/down vote by itself doesn’t give much insight into anything. It’s not like the vote itself is quantified. We already see people try this with digging into post history to make assumptions of someone and bring it up as “evidence”.
Man it doesn’t even need to devolve into a debate. You get berated just for having an opinion on something more and more. That’s the problem with the voting system anyways. People that don’t share an opinion with you shouldn’t even have an option to down vote. Just don’t vote at all. Up votes are for shared opinions. But even then the biggest gripe I had with reddit was the system has the up voted “popular” comments as the most viewed as well, leaving the opinions of people unseen without looking for them.
People are impressionable. If they see everyone agreeing with a comment they feel they need to skew their opinion towards the common dissent or risk being alienated. We’re communal creatures. And social media screwed with our heads with the need to fit in.
I thought the whole argument was the internet was an echo chamber because of it being anonymous. Look at right-wing groups that employ masks where they can hide their true intentions behind “just being normal citizens”. It’s the groups like “Moms for Liberty” that are outed for their corruption because they have to use a public face during council meetings and such where you can’t be anonymous.
I’m having trouble seeing how downvotes being public would lead to more harassment. You would have to make sure you’re comfortable with putting your opinion forward just like with commenting. If there’s someone going around downvoting someone relentlessly it will be brought to light for all to see, not hidden like it is now. That would encourage more people to speak up because their detractors would have to do so publicly and without explanation they seem like they’re not bringing anything to the table in the discussion (returning downvotes to their true intention in the process).
I’m having trouble seeing how downvotes being public would lead to more harassment.
It’s not just downvotes. Upvotes could be used as well.
You would have to make sure you’re comfortable with putting your opinion forward just like with commenting.
That works unless your opinion is the minority. What if there’s someone’s gay in say a location that might put them to death for being gay. And now they can’t even upvote/downvote safely because any action they take could be used against them. Swap out gay for any really where people can be punished IRL for something online.
If there’s someone going around downvoting someone relentlessly it will be brought to light for all to see, not hidden like it is now.
To what end? What benefit does that bring other then further harassment/bullying? If I actively know someone is downvoting me because I said Batman sucks and they decided to go through my entire post history to downvote everything, what, if anything should the response be? Do we form up a council to start handing out punishment and review cases?
That would encourage more people to speak up because their detractors would have to do so publicly and without explanation they seem like they’re not bringing anything to the table in the discussion
There’s a huge disconnect already from view count, posts/replies, and votes. If you’re going to require that a vote must come with an explanation… you’re going to see engagement drop to 0. This really sounds like the “if you have nothing to hide” that’s thrown around on why governments/police feel the need to pry into everything. Which you might agree with, but I very much don’t. And frankly, I don’t think it’s going to encourage more people to speak up, simply because people just don’t have the time. It’s easy for a person to just upvote/downvote something without saying something, especially if they have nothing to add.
Throwaways / burner accounts remain a thing that are available for both positive and negative use cases.
In case you’re not aware, all your activity via the ActivityPub protocol is already public - it’s just that the details are hidden by some front ends. It is already possible for anyone motivated to check your post from a federated instance that displays full vote details, or to host their own instance and receive the raw voting information from places they’re federated with.
Yes, you can have communities with higher moderation standards, Beehaw is a great example – but those are local moderation standards, it does not stop the general public from seeing what’s going on as onlookers.
IMO it’s no different than most message boards in the earlier days of the Internet. You are pseudonymous, not anonymous, and when you consistently participate on an account, that identity is going to develop a reputation based on how you participate. Upvotes and downvotes just cut down on the kind of low-effort “this”, “love this post”, “fukkk u omg” replies that would add noise to threads in those days.
Gah, way to take it to extreme. You are not private or anonymous on here, if your actions on this platform put you in danger than do not continue to interact thinking it’s completely safe! These things can already be seen, this discussion is about making it show up in every UI by default instead.
If someone is going through your history and downvoting in a harassing way, just block them. They’re not there for discussion and the problem is solved. Without seeing a repeat offender you’ll never know and the harassment can continue. I see discussions being more open honestly, you actually have to take a second to think about your downvote instead of just gut reacting it.
In my line of work, you need to plan and explore the extremes, else you haven’t planned and covered for everything.
So, going back to my example, say someone is trans/gay, if they can’t safely post/vote then they’re just effectively silenced. And there’s certain parts of the world where that freedom of expression might be very important to them. To safely and freely be themselves w/o worry of punishment. Making it easier to see just makes it easier for them to be discovered. Or when someone is put to death because they spoke out against something… are we going to start posting “We did it Lemmy!”.
Blocking them… means I know for certain it was someone. If I get a few downvotes right now, I can brush it off as random people. But once a name is attached, that’s when it’s going to escalate. And blocking them isn’t going to stop someone. They can just start a new account and continue and for some people, getting blocked is 100% just going to do that. We know this. Video games have been banning people for decades and that literally doesn’t stop them. Right now, votes don’t matter. If we remove that, votes will matter. And again, it’s not going to drive engagement like you think it is, let alone honest engagement. Have you left a response to every vote you’ve ever done explaining in detail why you voted that way in regards to something? If not, you’ve already failed your own ideals.
Again, please stop saying this removes protections for trans/gay. That information is already public and you’re making it seem like they are currently safe versus what this change would do to them. The blocking scenario is what happens now, you just wouldn’t know they made a new account unless you’re actually able to see it. IDK why you brought video games into this, more often it’s for cheats as trolls and harassment get left unchecked on a lot of platforms. If votes don’t matter now why not change it to a form where they do matter?
If I disagree with something I’ll usually comment or upvote someone who has the same sentiment. I try my best not to petty downvote anything and I don’t understand why you’re stating you have to declare why you upvote, it’s something you find as a contribution, already defined for an intended purpose. This doesn’t take away any meaningful engagement besides mass voting in your scenario, people will still comment who have something to say. I think we just see two different sides of the aisle lol, ty for the discussion btw.
Again, please stop saying this removes protections for trans/gay.
What do you mean, again? You mean, for the first time? Because either you forgot you never said it or you’re trying to gaslight. I can’t read your mind. You don’t control me, nor anyone else. And do you want me to stop bringing it up because it’s hurting your argument? Should I throw in there too, there’s countries were you can be put to death for being Atheist? Or speaking out against the government. Why is it important for you to out these people or not consider them, because it very much seems like it’s one or the other. Why are you very much against increasing user security/privacy?
That information is already public
It’s sort of public, with steps. It should be, not public.
The blocking scenario is what happens now, you just wouldn’t know they made a new account unless you’re actually able to see it…
Are you new to the internet? That’s not how any of this would work. And I brought games in as an example, hoping to give an example you’d understand, clearly it didn’t.
If votes don’t matter now why not change it to a form where they do matter
Why should they matter? Why do you very clearly want to see what and how everyone votes? Are we going to implement social scores? If you’re upvote count isn’t high enough and your ration isn’t good enough,… hold on wasn’t there a Black Mirror episode with this exact premise?
So, if someone downvotes something, you expect them to defend it… but a simple upvote is perfectly acceptable. Just no, that’s never going to happen. Congrats you re-invented Facebook. Only upvotes and no counter feedback.
I’m genuinely lost as to why you’re not in favor if increasing security for users. I mean, I’ve given some simple examples but there’s honestly way more reasons why we don’t need everyone able to track everyone, to be able to stalk/harass everyone. And “banning” someone will do nothing since anyone who knows that’s a possibility, will just have a shadow account to monitor you.
The problem is its already pretty public, just for mods and admins, and non-lemmy instances.
While I agree its not ideal to have everything be public, given it functionally already is, this just makes it easier for users to see. Right now its a minor hurdle, but still a hurdle - but your votes are not really private/anonymous to start with.
I personally think it should be locked down and votes should be kept under a very tight lock and key.
I posted this already as a response, so I’ll sort of post it here. If we start mapping users to their IRL selves, and agencies can start capturing what someone votes on, you have a few problems. 1) Marketing agencies selling your data again. 2) Governments can start using someones posts against them. You’re might not, but there are several that will. And Lemmy is a global platform.
I absolutely agree that its a problem. The problem is there is nothing stopping companies/governments from doing that now, and I don’t know if its feasible to make them actually private on Lemmy.
Right now, they aren’t private, you just need a few extra steps to see it all.
Agreed. I’ve never liked that it’s already as public as it is. I remember when Lemmy was taking off and there was a discussion and to me it seemed like people were in favor of Lemmy stepping up user security, but seems that never happened. If user security isn’t critical, than the Fediverse is a complete failure and should NOT be used by anyone for any reason.
If you are particularly concerned that you’re going to be identified IRL based on your participation online, you should be changing your identity frequently rather than using the same account for a year+.
Data is not suddenly public just because some people have access to it. Data is public when it’s available for anyone to look at. Privacy is almost always going to be a trust issue on some level, and very few things are possible to do truly anonymously. Some data will always be available to someone in a position where it’s possible to abuse. Instance admins can see your IP address. Should that be available for everyone to see?
Y’know, that’s fair. I think I misspoke, and meant to say that the admins of your instance can see your IP but not the admins of another (assuming you’re not self hosting on your home PC without a VPN), but I’m not 100% sure that’s true because I’ve never looked at the protocol.
If every interaction is already public on the backend/API level, then simply not showing the info to users is just a transparency issue.
The more I’m thinking about this, the more I believe it’s a cultural/expectations thing. On websites like Tumblr, all of your reblogs and likes are public info, but it’s very up front about that. Social media like Facebook, IG, and sites like Discord, it’s the same; you can look through the list of everyone who reacted.
As far as I know right now, IP and such details are your instance only.
Votes, however, are visible across any instance. I agree its a transparency issue. Right now I think a of of folks believe their votes to be anonymous (or only visible to their instance admins at most), but that’s not true at all.
That’s really good to know, and not how I thought the system worked previously. I thought instances were responsible for all vote aggregation and simply reported totals to each other at regular intervals, plus submitting comments/edits from users which are more obviously public
Yup, all visible. The only exceptions are fully private instances (or mostly private, with limited federation) and local only communities.
kbin/mbin also make all these votes public, so you could even just be on an mbin server and see all the votes. So right now its like… jumping over an 8" high hurdle. Or doing the limbo under a pole at 5’. You have to do something, just not much. I wouldn’t call it completely non-trivial to do, but it isn’t rocket surgery either.
I am fan of Swiss Appenzeln Innerrhoden voting system. In public and with hands up. It’s supporting the civic courage values. It’s easy to ostracize people for no reason when you’re anonymous
I think it’s a bad idea. It’s just going to start harassment and witch hunts when someone gets a downvote they don’t like. Stalking is going to be a thing, people are going to aggregate all the votes you’ve done to make assumptions about you to then bully you. Once public, sources outside Lemmy will start gathering and cross referencing data about you.
In the US, when you vote, the vote is private to protect the person. Making votes public will only empower those that would abuse it. It very well could end Lemmy due to massive bulling, harassment, and the decline of activity.
i already have had multiple weirdos harass me on lemmy for not being leftist enough. i’ve blocked dozens now, and really kills the experience to have some crazy people go around and brigading your comments because you disagree with their political viewpoint slightly.
way too many people take the internet comments/points WAY too seriously…
I agree. I already tend to get tossed into a category because I don’t agree with a majority of the user base. If people can get categorized more by how they vote, and lemmy users are already pretty savvy, I can see a scenario where people get tagged.
Exactly. We need counter views. One of the problems with any type of social media has been echo chambers and the lack of healthy debate/conversation. People have forgotten how to have a civil debate/conversation with someone else. And people tend to act like, if you don’t 100% agree with me, than not only can we not be friends, but you’re actively an enemy. That shouldn’t be the case. We do not need everyone to agree on everything, it should be acceptable to have a different opinion.
With everything public, we’re going to have no healthy conversation since people will use previous votes (up or down) against someone. One of the issues is, an up/down vote by itself doesn’t give much insight into anything. It’s not like the vote itself is quantified. We already see people try this with digging into post history to make assumptions of someone and bring it up as “evidence”.
Man it doesn’t even need to devolve into a debate. You get berated just for having an opinion on something more and more. That’s the problem with the voting system anyways. People that don’t share an opinion with you shouldn’t even have an option to down vote. Just don’t vote at all. Up votes are for shared opinions. But even then the biggest gripe I had with reddit was the system has the up voted “popular” comments as the most viewed as well, leaving the opinions of people unseen without looking for them.
People are impressionable. If they see everyone agreeing with a comment they feel they need to skew their opinion towards the common dissent or risk being alienated. We’re communal creatures. And social media screwed with our heads with the need to fit in.
I thought the whole argument was the internet was an echo chamber because of it being anonymous. Look at right-wing groups that employ masks where they can hide their true intentions behind “just being normal citizens”. It’s the groups like “Moms for Liberty” that are outed for their corruption because they have to use a public face during council meetings and such where you can’t be anonymous.
I’m having trouble seeing how downvotes being public would lead to more harassment. You would have to make sure you’re comfortable with putting your opinion forward just like with commenting. If there’s someone going around downvoting someone relentlessly it will be brought to light for all to see, not hidden like it is now. That would encourage more people to speak up because their detractors would have to do so publicly and without explanation they seem like they’re not bringing anything to the table in the discussion (returning downvotes to their true intention in the process).
edit’ format, grammar
It’s not just downvotes. Upvotes could be used as well.
That works unless your opinion is the minority. What if there’s someone’s gay in say a location that might put them to death for being gay. And now they can’t even upvote/downvote safely because any action they take could be used against them. Swap out gay for any really where people can be punished IRL for something online.
To what end? What benefit does that bring other then further harassment/bullying? If I actively know someone is downvoting me because I said Batman sucks and they decided to go through my entire post history to downvote everything, what, if anything should the response be? Do we form up a council to start handing out punishment and review cases?
There’s a huge disconnect already from view count, posts/replies, and votes. If you’re going to require that a vote must come with an explanation… you’re going to see engagement drop to 0. This really sounds like the “if you have nothing to hide” that’s thrown around on why governments/police feel the need to pry into everything. Which you might agree with, but I very much don’t. And frankly, I don’t think it’s going to encourage more people to speak up, simply because people just don’t have the time. It’s easy for a person to just upvote/downvote something without saying something, especially if they have nothing to add.
Throwaways / burner accounts remain a thing that are available for both positive and negative use cases.
In case you’re not aware, all your activity via the ActivityPub protocol is already public - it’s just that the details are hidden by some front ends. It is already possible for anyone motivated to check your post from a federated instance that displays full vote details, or to host their own instance and receive the raw voting information from places they’re federated with.
Yes, you can have communities with higher moderation standards, Beehaw is a great example – but those are local moderation standards, it does not stop the general public from seeing what’s going on as onlookers.
IMO it’s no different than most message boards in the earlier days of the Internet. You are pseudonymous, not anonymous, and when you consistently participate on an account, that identity is going to develop a reputation based on how you participate. Upvotes and downvotes just cut down on the kind of low-effort “this”, “love this post”, “fukkk u omg” replies that would add noise to threads in those days.
Gah, way to take it to extreme. You are not private or anonymous on here, if your actions on this platform put you in danger than do not continue to interact thinking it’s completely safe! These things can already be seen, this discussion is about making it show up in every UI by default instead.
If someone is going through your history and downvoting in a harassing way, just block them. They’re not there for discussion and the problem is solved. Without seeing a repeat offender you’ll never know and the harassment can continue. I see discussions being more open honestly, you actually have to take a second to think about your downvote instead of just gut reacting it.
In my line of work, you need to plan and explore the extremes, else you haven’t planned and covered for everything.
So, going back to my example, say someone is trans/gay, if they can’t safely post/vote then they’re just effectively silenced. And there’s certain parts of the world where that freedom of expression might be very important to them. To safely and freely be themselves w/o worry of punishment. Making it easier to see just makes it easier for them to be discovered. Or when someone is put to death because they spoke out against something… are we going to start posting “We did it Lemmy!”.
Blocking them… means I know for certain it was someone. If I get a few downvotes right now, I can brush it off as random people. But once a name is attached, that’s when it’s going to escalate. And blocking them isn’t going to stop someone. They can just start a new account and continue and for some people, getting blocked is 100% just going to do that. We know this. Video games have been banning people for decades and that literally doesn’t stop them. Right now, votes don’t matter. If we remove that, votes will matter. And again, it’s not going to drive engagement like you think it is, let alone honest engagement. Have you left a response to every vote you’ve ever done explaining in detail why you voted that way in regards to something? If not, you’ve already failed your own ideals.
Again, please stop saying this removes protections for trans/gay. That information is already public and you’re making it seem like they are currently safe versus what this change would do to them. The blocking scenario is what happens now, you just wouldn’t know they made a new account unless you’re actually able to see it. IDK why you brought video games into this, more often it’s for cheats as trolls and harassment get left unchecked on a lot of platforms. If votes don’t matter now why not change it to a form where they do matter?
If I disagree with something I’ll usually comment or upvote someone who has the same sentiment. I try my best not to petty downvote anything and I don’t understand why you’re stating you have to declare why you upvote, it’s something you find as a contribution, already defined for an intended purpose. This doesn’t take away any meaningful engagement besides mass voting in your scenario, people will still comment who have something to say. I think we just see two different sides of the aisle lol, ty for the discussion btw.
What do you mean, again? You mean, for the first time? Because either you forgot you never said it or you’re trying to gaslight. I can’t read your mind. You don’t control me, nor anyone else. And do you want me to stop bringing it up because it’s hurting your argument? Should I throw in there too, there’s countries were you can be put to death for being Atheist? Or speaking out against the government. Why is it important for you to out these people or not consider them, because it very much seems like it’s one or the other. Why are you very much against increasing user security/privacy?
It’s sort of public, with steps. It should be, not public.
Are you new to the internet? That’s not how any of this would work. And I brought games in as an example, hoping to give an example you’d understand, clearly it didn’t.
Why should they matter? Why do you very clearly want to see what and how everyone votes? Are we going to implement social scores? If you’re upvote count isn’t high enough and your ration isn’t good enough,… hold on wasn’t there a Black Mirror episode with this exact premise?
So, if someone downvotes something, you expect them to defend it… but a simple upvote is perfectly acceptable. Just no, that’s never going to happen. Congrats you re-invented Facebook. Only upvotes and no counter feedback.
I’m genuinely lost as to why you’re not in favor if increasing security for users. I mean, I’ve given some simple examples but there’s honestly way more reasons why we don’t need everyone able to track everyone, to be able to stalk/harass everyone. And “banning” someone will do nothing since anyone who knows that’s a possibility, will just have a shadow account to monitor you.
The problem is its already pretty public, just for mods and admins, and non-lemmy instances.
While I agree its not ideal to have everything be public, given it functionally already is, this just makes it easier for users to see. Right now its a minor hurdle, but still a hurdle - but your votes are not really private/anonymous to start with.
I personally think it should be locked down and votes should be kept under a very tight lock and key.
I posted this already as a response, so I’ll sort of post it here. If we start mapping users to their IRL selves, and agencies can start capturing what someone votes on, you have a few problems. 1) Marketing agencies selling your data again. 2) Governments can start using someones posts against them. You’re might not, but there are several that will. And Lemmy is a global platform.
I absolutely agree that its a problem. The problem is there is nothing stopping companies/governments from doing that now, and I don’t know if its feasible to make them actually private on Lemmy.
Right now, they aren’t private, you just need a few extra steps to see it all.
Agreed. I’ve never liked that it’s already as public as it is. I remember when Lemmy was taking off and there was a discussion and to me it seemed like people were in favor of Lemmy stepping up user security, but seems that never happened. If user security isn’t critical, than the Fediverse is a complete failure and should NOT be used by anyone for any reason.
If you are particularly concerned that you’re going to be identified IRL based on your participation online, you should be changing your identity frequently rather than using the same account for a year+.
Data is not suddenly public just because some people have access to it. Data is public when it’s available for anyone to look at. Privacy is almost always going to be a trust issue on some level, and very few things are possible to do truly anonymously. Some data will always be available to someone in a position where it’s possible to abuse. Instance admins can see your IP address. Should that be available for everyone to see?
Anyone can stand up an instance though. So its available for anyone to look at right now.
I don’t think it should be made easier, but I don’t think its fair to suggest its currently private in any way, shape, or form today.
Because it is decidedly not.
Y’know, that’s fair. I think I misspoke, and meant to say that the admins of your instance can see your IP but not the admins of another (assuming you’re not self hosting on your home PC without a VPN), but I’m not 100% sure that’s true because I’ve never looked at the protocol.
If every interaction is already public on the backend/API level, then simply not showing the info to users is just a transparency issue.
The more I’m thinking about this, the more I believe it’s a cultural/expectations thing. On websites like Tumblr, all of your reblogs and likes are public info, but it’s very up front about that. Social media like Facebook, IG, and sites like Discord, it’s the same; you can look through the list of everyone who reacted.
As far as I know right now, IP and such details are your instance only.
Votes, however, are visible across any instance. I agree its a transparency issue. Right now I think a of of folks believe their votes to be anonymous (or only visible to their instance admins at most), but that’s not true at all.
That’s really good to know, and not how I thought the system worked previously. I thought instances were responsible for all vote aggregation and simply reported totals to each other at regular intervals, plus submitting comments/edits from users which are more obviously public
Yup, all visible. The only exceptions are fully private instances (or mostly private, with limited federation) and local only communities.
kbin/mbin also make all these votes public, so you could even just be on an mbin server and see all the votes. So right now its like… jumping over an 8" high hurdle. Or doing the limbo under a pole at 5’. You have to do something, just not much. I wouldn’t call it completely non-trivial to do, but it isn’t rocket surgery either.
I am fan of Swiss Appenzeln Innerrhoden voting system. In public and with hands up. It’s supporting the civic courage values. It’s easy to ostracize people for no reason when you’re anonymous
LLMs are smarter than the average foe already and governments spend millions on online propaganda. We NEED a witch hunt and lots of fire