- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
I really wanted to post this on [email protected] but I’m not trans myself and I didn’t want to take up their space.
Basically, the devs of Lemmy are looking to make upvotes public to everyone. Right now, I believe voter identities are known to server admins and mods.
I don’t have a strong opinion on this myself, either for or against, as I write this comment, but I’m wondering if there’s something I’m missing, frankly as a cishet dude.
But also… I’ve kinda lost trust in Nutomic making decisions about the software that won’t make things worse for trans people since his comments on the Olympics were made public. Dessalines has (so far) at least tolerated Nutomic’s transphobia despite whatever prior rhetoric. Frankly, I am suspicious that trans people don’t matter to the Lemmy dev team…to be charitable…so I’d really like to hear your thoughts.
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No way. The admins can see them already.
You should not be afraid of the opinions of the people. You should seek to understand and possibly change it if necessary. It is a far better meter stick of how people really think if it’s anonymous, and it also stops users being hounded.
People have to like my posts enough to want to stamp their names publically by voting them? Gonna find out who’s brave enough to be seen upbearing autistic nerd shit.
Works fine on Mastodon and Twitter. Turns out nobody cares. I will proudly like more autistic nerd shit than ever. Anyone who publicly polices this stuff without having botting to point to will look insane.
Works fine on Mastodon and Twitter
Can’t speak for Mastodon, but until recently on Twitter, when they hid all likes, it was the source of a lot of insane drama and “this you?” call out posts
Whatever you say Elon. I see who is afraid of the votes getting made public now in this thread 😂
Gonna find out who’s brave enough to be seen upbearing autistic nerd shit.
Lmao I didn’t think of that. Definitely need to find more people interested in my autistic nerd shit.
I’m going to get roasted for forgetting to upbear the threads i post in
I already feel guilty when I don’t upbear someone I’m talking to and now I will feel even more pressure to do it to keep the tone friendly even if I don’t like their points.
as somebody who upbears everything they see before I even read it (and then removes it if I dislike what the person is saying) whenever I get into mini-debates on here and the other person doesn’t upbear my comment before replying, for about five seconds I perceive that as “fuck you, 72T.” before I then realize that many people are like you and just don’t upbear things that often.
I guess it’s just a holdover from reddit culture where you’ll see a comment thread 50 comments deep where both commenters have 0 votes on each comment because they’re both downvoting each other, and on here, not voting is the closest thing you have to a downvote
Also why is this discussion being had on github and not lemmy? The pros and cons is more of a community concern than a programmatic one.
Stoked to open up all new ways to dunk on people
Frankly they should be totally anonymous. Don’t store them anywhere, or come up with a totally anonymized solution for storing them. Like it was funny when TC69 (Blessings of Allah be upon hir as well as peace) banned everyone who downvoted every trans topic but I don’t like the fact that that power exists.
There isn’t really a way to do this. Because they need to be synced between servers, those servers have to know where the votes are coming from to decide what to show/count properly/provide at least rudimentary defense from spam.
Consider hexbear feds with dbzero, zero feds with world, hex doesn’t fed with world.
If a post lives on dbzero how should hexbear know what votes to display to its users? How should that a particular user already voted be remembered between page visits?
you could try some sort of cryptographic proof of trust but you’re basically reinventing block chain and making running lemmy an environmental disaster.
Perhaps, when a user votes, their account could report two separate events to its home server. One that is just “I voted” and then another which is whether it was an up or down. The “I voted” packet simply prevents you from voting multiple times on one comment - the packet that reports whether it was an up- or down-vote would be encrypted, and when read simply increment a tally stored on the server that it reports to other servers. Servers would tell each other “X comment has Y upvotes and Z downvotes from my users” but those votes would be completely anonymous.
In this system, up and downvotes are stored in an append-only ledger, but the server acts as a trusted agent so it’s not a blockchain and it doesn’t have the environmental disaster that is proof-of-work. The regular process of federation/defederation should be sufficient for preventing bad actors from spinning up servers just to spam other servers’ vote tallies.
yeah an alternative proposal is they’re only public to the local instance admin and it groups its votes, sends them to the instance hosting the content, which adds them as totals annotated with the server.
But they’re still not private. Instance admins can see them, and you can still see which instances are voting on what content which doesn’t really improve much. Especially for small instances (e.g. if I have 10 people on an instance and only one user was active in a date range all votes are theirs).
Given how there are already problematic incentives to large instances I’m not sure we want to add to administrator (and everyone they care to share with) power based on size. Or deincentise users from signing up to small instances.
They shouldn’t be private. Have you seen the way that lemmy.world uses botting to force this site and others to defederate after drowning them out?
Just how far are you people going to take the cargo cult of Reddiquette?
Why are you even imitating mainstream social media rules from the 3rd most racist site in the universe? What broke people here?
I am discussing possible implementations with someone, pointing out that necessarily votes are public to at least someone. Not endorsing it.
If you read my closing paragraph you will see I come down against private votes.
I don’t know if it’s intended but you’re coming across very aggressive and I don’t feel there is cause, even if I disagreed with you.
I’m used to pinging everyone above me, consider it a general addition to the chat in the entire thread. Seeing people actually hashing out completely anonymous voting, making this flimsy platform even more vulnerable to manipualtion by petty psychos like myself, makes me even more pessimistic about people’s ability to learn from experiences with open source social media projects that imitate features which only work for corpos
The weird thing about this whole debate is it’s already public, just only to an elite of people with basic technical skill and some cash to burn + all their friends.
I’m half tempted to spin up a server and just post the votes of everyone who federates to prove the stupid point.
mainstream social media rules from the 3rd most racist site in the universe
Hiding a user’s votes is not what turned Reddit into what it is. Showing a user’s votes, however, enables a lot of the worst behavior on sites like X, and I don’t want to see that stuff start happening on Lemmy. Frankly the best solution is what Hexbear already did - remove downvotes entirely.
removed by mod
If you could direct me to the scientific study that compared social media sites with and without hidden likes/upvotes, then I would be happy to read it. Otherwise we’re both going off of vibes so fuck you.
When each user joins, a random voting user is created. When a user votes, their vote request is denied and a random voting user from the pool upbears the post. This way, nobody can see who votes for whom and it is cross compatible with all other instances, even ones that publish votes. The only issue is it creates a very large amount of junk users. This has already been implemented, sans the random pool on piefed.
How does the server remember that the user has voted? Say I upvote this, random_user:1337_h4ck3r does the vote. For my UI to show me I’ve voted a record must be stored about my votes.
Good question, I’d need to dig around a bit to agree that.
If you want to publicly support a statement, that’s what comments are for. Upvotes are for privately agreeing with statements or marking them as read.
An average user absolutely benefits from being able to see who voted on a post or comment and what their vote was. A person noticing that someone is actively down voting their content in a deliberate way empowers the user to have it dealt with. Mods might not queue into that kind of targeted harassment.
All these comments comparing a vote on Lemmy to a vote within a democratic election are incredibly juvenile frankly. Its reductionist when saying Electoralism is equivalent to a Lemmy Vote and egotistical when saying a Lemmy Vote is equivalent to a ballot cast in a democratic election.
Your vote isn’t private in either case regardless. At most you need to know someone’s birthday, first name, and last name to find someone’s voting record in America (might depend state by state). Someone willing to set up a Lemmy instance to see your votes is also capable of then setting up bots to specifically target you with down votes, which is the more egregious of the two actions.
Given the ease in which someone could create a bot network for the purpose of targeting someone or a group of people with a downvote campaign, I think it’s only just to allow regular users the power to see votes and act on that information. Why should this information be gate kept to only the technically capable?
Keeping votes “hidden” maintains a kind of voyeuristic experience for those with the power or technical knowledge and resources while maintaining this illusion of privacy for the masses.
Make them visible to all.
Well I guess it’s ok then if America does it
America doesn’t “do it”, its a flaw of its democratic institution not a feature. For someone to invoke the privacy of their electoral vote with out acknowledging that, at least here, its not even private just exposes the writer as unserious.
To equate a vote on the bear form to voting for a representative is deeply unserious. Here there is only vote or don’t vote, it’s not even a question of downvoting and its implications.
The reality is the votes are already not private on the greater platform. By not showing the votes to users the platform is giving a smoke screen for vote harassment.
Electoral votes are private in essentially all elections. The existence of an exception doesn’t change the fact that most people have an expectation of privacy while voting. This clearly extends to internet forums or else we wouldn’t be having this conversation.
The reality is the votes are already not private on the greater platform.
It is also possible to tally your total upvotes but the developers made a conscious decision for the site not to display this information. This is a lesson learned from reddit where you can observe toxic behavior from people trying to increase their karma score. It doesn’t matter that you could technically do this on lemmy, you don’t see the behavior because the design doesn’t encourage it by default.
Why does reddit and until now lemmy not show voting history? It’s a lesson learned from digg where showing vote history results in tit for tat voting blocks where essentially no posts could rise organically on their own merits. The fact that moderators can see vote history already allows action against vote harassment without the possibility for voting blocks to emerge. Again it doesn’t matter if some nerd can technically find a way to view the votes, without it being part of the default design the voting blocks won’t naturally emerge as they did on digg.
So I guess removing public likes and retweets on Twitter was a good move and not in service of protecting users from exposing themselfs as Nazis then.
Digg is almost what, 20+ years old? That’s almost three generations of platforms ago, we exist in a federated environment where each instance has it’s own ecosystem and can selectively block entire swaths of the platform on ideological grounds or for petty reasons. Hell, users can block whole instances now. Were well beyond tit for tat spit spats over vote history at this point.
Electoral votes are private in essentially all elections.
Yes.
The existence of an exception doesn’t change the fact that most people have an expectation of privacy while voting.
Yes.
This clearly extends to internet forums or else we wouldn’t be having this conversation.
These are not even in the same universe. The only reason people expect that they are private is because they’re private on reddit. They’re private on reddit because reddit needs too be able to juice or squash front page content using their fuzzy vote counters.
Reddit having public updogs would have given the whole game away. I remember when reddit didn’t have a fuzzy vote counter and they quietly rolled it out. People we’re not happy about it because it meant more opacity on the platform. It made it harder to know if people we’re breggading posts and subs. People questioned the votes constantly.
The cognitive dissonance between the responses to this recommendation and the same people lambasting Twitter for removing this is wild
- I think that removing public likes from X was a good idea.
You think that using X is a good idea then, if you’re positively reacting to patch notes for it. I find you viscerally disgusting. Stay on your shit site full of racists so you can enjoy being a public clown if you must. But it makes you opinion completely worthless to me and indicates you don’t know how to spend your time.
Is it wild? Hexbear and Twitter are two very different platforms for very different demographics and different forms of communication. I don’t think it’s cognitive dissonance to say different approaches are better.
Meaningless jabber
The potential for drama is
Now when people get into a spat they will be able to compile a list of everyone who sides with their enemy or agrees with them
Personally, admin can already see votes if we need to purge reactionaries which is plenty of transparency as far as I’m concerned. Although imagining a big struggle session on here with public upvotes is very funny, I’ll admit
Me destroying someone’s tl;dr novela of a post with “[bad take] upvoter.”
the reality is people will just vote less and that’s fine.
RIP “food for thought” upvotes
if my upvote is perceived as a public co-sign, it’s gonna be a lot less common
Personally I don’t see an issue with that. Back in the old days most posts didn’t have likes.
Yup and that’s why I don’t upvote/down vote anything…I never developed the habit on old forums. Honestly wish we could go back to the old internet before likes. Too many people addicted to getting dopamine hits of digital approval.
Now when people get into a spat they will be able to compile a list of everyone who sides with their enemy or agrees with them
Awesome, dude. That sounds like totally normal and non-toxic behaviour. Terminally online people looking for new ways to be terminally online.
Exactly why changes to the design of the site shouldn’t encourage toxicity
I’ve upvoted every single bad post on this site and I fear being hunted Wild Wild West style via saw blades magnetically called to my location, so I have mixed opinion on this.
Then again, perhaps I’ll find out the massive amount of girls upvoting my posts. That’d be cool.
3 separate girls have DMed me saying that they’re not upvoting my posts for fear of reprisal after this gets implemented here. So thanks, mods. That was one of 2 sources of self-worth I had.
I’m going to be real with you. I’ve been able to see all votes on lemmy publicly for years. You should just make them public, because I’ve been scraping you and collecting statistics on how much you use bots.
Just make them public or I’m the only one who can do this. Your choice. Being helpful for fun here.
wait until you realize there is a secret method to get your total karma score.
spoiler
it’s arithmetic
Just because it is possible for some loser to do something doesn’t mean it’s a good idea for it to be a built in feature.
I smell desperation
This is it, the silver legion finally shows its face again
Is that from Fallout or something [Yandexes]. Oh. Oh no. No no this is more like secret admirer behavior. As long as you keep pumping the Fedidb stats I’m okay with it for now.
There was this weird troll who called themselves the silver legion and claimed they would destroy hexbear or something, we all found it hilarious at the time
I’m not going to destroy Hexbear. This came from the same place as creating an RSS feed that aggregates all comments on Lemmy websites. I just don’t feel like sharing solutions after I offer them the first time and get rebuked.
Actually it’s very unlikely I am the only one who figured this out. Everyone knows activitypub is buggy and full of amateur devs. It’s more likely I’m the only guy sportsmanlike and megalomaniacal enough to admit this.
Lmao if you think you’re the only megalomaniac on the fediverse I got news for you
Uh nobody would say that in the middle of one of vantablack’s sprees
megalomaniacal
Nerds find one exploit on a website and think they’re God
Megadork
Okay then can you guess the insanely obvious pathway I used to make your votes public?
Don’t be cringe. You found a funny bug, just enjoy it.
oh the method is described in the github issue lmao.
😂 This doesn’t take technical expertise
Bro quit while you ahead.
I literally want everyone else to share my vision. I will never “quit while I am ahead”!
Can you guess the insanely obvious pathway I shove my dildo in to make myself cum?
URETHRA!!! URETHRRA!!! URETHREA!!! OOOOOUGG URETHRAAA!!!
As admins we can by default. Everyone should have this feature imo
Honestly I’d always heard that Lemmy votes were public from the very beginning. This is the first I’ve heard that they’re “supposed to be” private.
They are. Just because you didn’t implement federation properly doesn’t mean it’s unavailable.
Sounds like a big potential for harassment. The drama sounds fun, and so do the bits, but we already know that marginalized groups struggle with harassment on lemmy. I’d want to hear from people who are more knowledgable of how harassment works on lemmy or have experienced it to learn what their concerns are.
I think this would reduce it, at least in trans positive spaces. We could hunt down transphobes and ban them easier, which defederates their votes.
I agree. One of the issues in those spaces is the disproportionate effort it takes between being shit and cleaning up the shit. The more transparency you have, the easier it will be to moderate.
since his comments on the Olympics were made public
My thoughts? My opinion don’t matter for shit but frankly idgaf either way. I dont care who sees what.
