Lemmy devs are considering making all votes public - have your say

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

No, votes should not be displayed public.

Blocking those who downvote creates further polarisation, echo chambers and an environment more hostile to discussion and honest exchange.

Following those who upvote creates personality cults and nepotism and devalues the content.

Do not make votes public. It will lead to personal attacks.

I think people misunderstand. I too would prefer privacy, but theres a big BUT.

Due to how the federation works, anyone who is tech savvy enough can already see votes. One way is to run an instance.

This change doesn't lower privacy, it aligns expectations with reality. A false sense of privacy, which people obviously show here in the comments, is way more dangerous.

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.

Boy oh boy, it sure is a mystery why democracies have people vote privately

The last thing I need is people knowing I upvoted a nsfw post, so nope thanks.

I rather not. If it does happen, I’ll just rss Lemmy and stop using my account. I like Lemmy the way it is because there’s not much focus on votes and more on actual discussion.

Have you SEEN the drama that happens in this place? I feel like this is just asking for weird nobodies to harass anyone who quietly disagrees with them.

If this passes then I'm outta here.

I was really confused seeing this post, because I always assumed that Lemmy votes were public. Because how else are instances going to sync them? And indeed, the API exposes them completely, this change will just make it easier.

Then I was really confused when I saw so many comments being against it. A lot of "I'll leave if votes become public" in here. That's a lot of people who somehow assumed Lemmy was private. Aren't we all supposed to be Linux nerds in here?

No thank you. I've already had one person go off on me because of some perceived offense: https://lemm.ee/comment/13768482

Not everyone has a github account and can comment or vote there.

But, agree. Don't think any good will come from making votes public. Any pro/con should be measured against who it benefits. If it's mods or devs, there are always alternatives

If it's end-users, consider the edge-cases and the repercussions of malicious actors having access to those individual preferences.

I'm seeing lots of comments here saying that server admins can already see vote data, and therefore it is not private.

But from my point of view, having a handful of people able to extract voting data using their position of trust on the lemmy network is very different from broadcasting voting data to everyone on lemmy. And although you can argue that it is possible to create a new server and federate and blah-blah-blah to view votes; that argument sounds to me like "don't bother locking your front door, because that type of lock can be defeated by a lock-picking tools."

And even aside from all that discussion about who can access what; there is another key point that I think is overlooked: Making voter information public makes it 'normal' thing to monitor and discuss. Currently there is an expectation that people won't look at or discuss that information (even if they hypothetically could get access). But by making it public, the expectation then is that everyone will look at that information. That would create a change in tone and meaning of votes and discussion around votes.

I would hate to have to deal with "why did you downvote me?" comments, but I'm also not sure I would have the self control to abstain from leaving such a comment myself.

I think that making vote identities easily accesible to every user runs the risk of increasing harassment and decreasing discussion quality.

This would probably escalate a lot of arguments that break out in comment sections.

I don't want votes to be public, but they already are, so.

Someone can easily host a website to leak this information and people should know, instead of believing they are private

I’ve already seen admins go through the federated votes on their instance to call out anyone who disagrees with them.

I don’t have a strong opinion either way but I don’t think it will be healthy for discourse to unlock that power for everyone

I would say no. I don't want some dumbass to interogate me about why I downvotes thia and why I upvoted that.

Please No

Lemmy is already a privacy nightmare, in some way. There was a comment showing the screengrab of those peiple who upvoted and downvoted a post. Basically, if you self-host an instance, you'll have access to these. This can easily be weaponized by certain organizations that want to create profiling of lemmy users, e.g NSA and Intelligence agencies.

What a horrible fucking idea. You are want this place to be an even bigger echo chamber than it already is? Yes, let's allow the majority of one opinion brigade people's histories to further ostracized them!

Admins, for smart people, can be fucking idiots.

Absolutely not.

This will like lots of other people say start witch hunts and people will absolutely develop bots and websites which scrape all that information and classify all users based on that. Like those Reddit sites where you can search for a user and see where they are active and all that. But this will be worse.

Seems fine? Voting was, at best, only slightly anonymous anyway because other platforms that get the AP action will happily tell you exactly who did what when even if the Lemmy UI doesn't.

And, honestly, if you don't want your fake and nearly anonymous internet name associated with doing something, eh, maybe that's a sign you shouldn't do it?

Probably for the best if downvotes remain less easy to access, at the very least. There's a myth that people who are suicidal will "find a way even if you take away some of the easier methods", which is explicitly false. If you take away the easy option, you are directly reducing the harm that easy option might have caused. https://gizmodo.com/why-have-people-stopped-committing-suicide-with-gas-5959303

If the admins take away the quick and easy option for seeing who downvoted your passionate comment, the mods are directly reducing the number of people who go on rants about downvotes and targeted vitriol.

It has nothing to do with privacy; this is a public forum that by it's very nature, requires that all activity be easily available to all the sites you federate with. There is not privacy in that.

This is about the type of community that forms around the software. Do we want to encourage, and make easily available, the list of people who disagree with you? Or do we want to to put minor barriers around that to help keep the number of people who do that low?

Hard no. I'll move on like I did a year ago from Reddit, and I was on that site for 14 years.

Just from a political/nation-state viewpoint, it would needlessly expose information to make it easier for countries and political parties to keep some kind of "social score" and decide when to do something to you. China already does this kind of stuff.

We need to make it easier for everyone/anyone to do this? Think about all of the super-divisive issues at hand. People can already get a sense of your views from your responses, and that should be it.

What will this accomplish other than facilitate brigading?

I say no. Privacy.

Comments say they're already basically public. I don't know anything about that, but it's probably better to merely have a camera in your toilet than have a camera in your toilet that livestreams 24/7.

But I don't have an especially informed sense of how to run a platform so maybe there's a bunch of crap I'm not thinking about.

No, as it would create a lot of excuses for targeted harrassment and just increase toxicity

I don't see the benefits but I see drama this would cause.

So the annoying neckbeard i downvoted for being an annoying neckbeard is gonna DM me?

Aren't they already practically public, given the federation?

It should actually be made more private.

VOTES ARE ALREADY PUBLIC.

If you are using Lemmy because you want privacy, you've already missed the boat, everything is wide assed open for datamining and advertising fingerprinting.

I'd hoped for an open system with open APIs and open implementations that allow everyone equal access to the system and bring equal accountability.

If people just want Reddit style fiefdoms with no real public accountability possible, then make a blackjack and hookers fork.

I'm really not interested in a system that bakes in more authoritarian secrecy and control, which could very well be an unexpected outcome of backlash to how this has been presented.

Many people in this thread seem to not realize that votes are essentially public already - this is only about whether the Lemmy UI should make it a bit easier to see the votes. They can already be seen quite easily if you know how.

However, there is an easy solution to this problem. This is clearly a controversial decision, so don't make a choice for everyone. Make it an option. Any admin can decide for themselves whether their instance should allow users to see votes.

That also means that users can decide to go to instances where the votes are hidden or public.

This approach leaves the choice to the individual, rather than forcing the choice on everyone.

On multiple occasions a moderator has reached out to me and informed me an account existed purely to go through my comments and downvote me. I assume this is a common occurance and we could combat it better if we could see the votes.

likes and votes should be anonymous and user names should only be displayed for comments.

Votes are already public? If they weren't, federation of votes wouldn't be possible.

Idk if I trust that some powermod won't send me to hell if I vote against something they strongly believe in, akwardtheturtle style

Considering making votes public, not considering making mod actions inform the user they occur.

I can see where their priorities are.

Making votes something mods can see is one thing but public is whole other can of worms.

Edit: Spleling

This would be a catastrophic mistake. Please don't.

Yes, and there's no genuine argument otherwise.

If you want Lemmy to grow and not be completely overrun with bots posting propaganda and signal boosting extremism, showing votes is the only way forward. It's the only mechanism by which independent parties can discover and expose things like "every post and comment by this account is upvoted by these 20 other accounts that have never posted and whose names follow the same formula".

The privacy you're mourning never existed in the first place and it can't exist on any platform. For Lemmy, it's required for federation. On sites like Reddit, you have privacy from other users, but not from the company or anyone they sell that data to.

Since true privacy isn't an option, it would be far better to be open about that lack of privacy. This thread is already riddled with people who thought their votes were private, rather than just inconvient to look up. That's far more dangerous and deceptive.

This needs to happen, regardless of the ill-informed tantrums it may cause. If you want to upvote pornography without it being used against you, create accounts that are strictly for pornography and properly compartmentalize your accounts.

I understand that this information is already basically public but there is a thin barrier to the average nitwit user accessing such information and going in a rampage screwing with people who have downvoted them. I'll say this, if they make it more public I think I will just simply stop voting. I will continue to use Lemmy but only as a passive user.

Nah. Votes are already visible to people using other applications than Lemmy, so let people use those if they want to see how people voted. It's fine as-is.

What's the benefit?

Like, what's the actual user experience gain from seeing someone else's votes? Is it just so the average joe can profile users, like for identifying bots or whatever? That's not rhetorical, I'm genuinely curious, as I don't see what I'd gain from this as a Lemmy user.

Bit as I see it, I really have no desire to do this. Maybe if I was a a pseudo mod on a spammy community I guess? But comments are already a decent indicator.

Gathered some thoughts here

Potential positives:

• Any admin can already review voting activity, but some people don't realize that. This change would make it less surprising
• it would make it easier for non-admin users to study voting activity and find abuse
• it would make it consistent with other platforms that we federate with, which can already see votes

Potential downsides:

• People will report voting activity that they don't like, even if it's not malicious.
  • Admins will need to set up rules on what activity they will act on (and also take action against people that spam bad reports).
  • It would also help to have automated tools to review voting activity since it's hard to do that manually.
• It's another option for abuse, similar to bringing up past comment history

Both could be dealt with but it would make moderation somewhat harder

Likely bad:

• Mods and admins can ban people for upvoting content in communities they aren't in charge of. This might work on a small scale, but I'd caution against it because it often misses nuance:
  • it's very easy to accidentally vote on something while scrolling (unless there is a consistent pattern)
  • even if the community is seen as "bad", the post might be good (ex. it could be calling out the community)

Bad

• it lowers the barrier for other types of abuse, such as tracking vote activity for advertising, approximating when a user is asleep, etc