Edit: obligatory explanation (thanks mods for squaring me away)…

What you see via the UI isn’t “all that exists”. Unlike Reddit, where everything is a black box, there are a lot more eyeballs who can see “under the hood”. Any instance admin, proper or rogue, gets a ton of information that users won’t normally see. The attached example demonstrates that while users will only see upvote/downvote tallies, admins can see who actually performed those actions.

Edit: To clarify, not just YOUR instance admin gets this info. This is ANY instance admin across the Fediverse.

  • @[email protected]
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    322 years ago

    Beyond upvote/downvote data is there anything else that is seen beyond whether someone had an arbitrary influence on a post?

  • @[email protected]
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    2 years ago

    I’m already questioning the whole system behind it, not just votes.

    Say you have critical information that you want to delete but other instances can just ignore this deletion request, than I could technically write a plugin that uses an extra instance, to always display all deleted comments to me, despite me being a regular user.

    For other sites you’d need a crawler, catching this information and all this in a rapid fashion to be usable, with a lot of programming extra work.

    At this point we can as well remove the option to delete or edit a comment as everyone can host their own, which wouldn’t be possible with proprietary tools.

    If someone can simply see votes the same way, we can as well add a mouse hover function that will display the username of whoever upvoted.

  • @[email protected]
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    322 years ago

    For as much as I love Lemmy, its obvious that it is an early software. Mark my words, that’s not the last privacy threat it will experience.

  • Sir_Kevin
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    162 years ago

    Back in my day everyone knew that once you put something on the internet it’s there forever to be seen by all. Has everyone already forgotten this? This is nothing new and in fact the way it’s always been! Now get off my lawn!

  • May
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    22 years ago

    Yea is good to know. I knew that early bc someone said that someone else accosted them after they reduced/downvoted one of their posts

  • Zerlyna
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    112 years ago

    Good to know but I always assume everything is public on the internet.

  • TeoTwawki
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    42 years ago

    A government would only need to get its hands on one instance to havest downvote based dissent data.

    Tbh I’d rather we had an up-only based vote system though. Downvotes had a lot to do with the reddit culture that I don’t want taking over Lemmy.