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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if I leave it there. It’s because it’s not foul enough to warrant a ban but I don’t want to press a little green check box explicitly endorsing its existence. I have been here the whole time :/ Yal couped me
Wait a minute, so any admin can see which posts do I upvote/downvote?
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.
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No, it would encourage irresponsibility which already seems a major issue with lemmy.
Yes, and this would be fairly easy to make them at least pseudonymous without even needing to modify activitypub itself.
That said, I still don’t support anything which lowers the friction of vote stalking like exposing votes in even more places. Technically people can look up my address from my license plate number if they really care to, but that doesn’t mean I want to list it in bold letters on my windshield.
I still don’t support anything which lowers the friction of vote stalking
I don’t follow, what are people going to do from being able to see votes that they can’t do by seeing your posts?
For starters datamining my voting patterns for building a deeper interest profile. It should be pretty obvious how this works in terms of user fingerprinting, and the ultimate monetization of Lemmy data. It would be super naive to think that Lemmy will be the one web space immune to this kind of thing. I guarantee you meta already has an army of silent instances doing this.
Worst case scenario, legit state actors use it to target deanonymization attacks at dissidents. I would not be shocked if the …usual suspects… Are engaged in this kind of thing.
datamining my voting patterns for building a deeper interest profile.
They can already datamine your posts.
But not my votes.
If I understand correctly they already can. It’s not user-facing, but votes are federated if I understand correctly.
Yes, that is why I am arguing in favor of an additional layer of pseudonymous voting.
Incorporating that in a way that doesn’t allow for vote manipulation by just lying to a server that different “anonymous” users have up or down voted a post sounds incredibly difficult, and not worth it for the narrow use case of “prevent my votes from being data mined even though all my comments can.”
I typically operate under the assumption that basically anything I decide to post on a public forum is not private.
Call me crazy, but I care less about the instance admins being able to see my vote history than regular users. For me the latter will produce a chilling effect on how I operate with the site moreso than the former, even if admins have more power that can be abused. I was already aware of the votes not actually being public and the idea admins could see that info seemed to be a given, but I still think there’s a difference between having a motivated malicious user go out of their way to look (making an instance, looking on a different platform, etc) vs making it simple for lay users to see that info within the platform itself (which I what I think is under discussion, currently).
And honestly, if a solution could be determined to help make votes anonymous but still allow admins/mods to deal with bots/trolls, then I’d be all for it.
For me the latter will produce a chilling effect on how I operate with the site
Why?
Because if lay users can see how I vote within the app, then I might start being harassed by people for daring to downvote them or daring to upvote someone. And may stay tracking my voting habits.
In which case, I’d probably stop voting.
Having a barrier to that info is better than no barrier even if it’s not impossible, imo.
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.
All it will take is for folks to look and see you voted in something and they won’t see the context or will misunderstand your intentions and they’ll ban you. This shit happened back on Reddit too and it sucked. They’d blanket ban people who interacted in a community without looking at what you actually did.
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
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?
