Lemmy devs are considering making all votes public

Your votes are already public. It’s a matter of (a) do we want to make it slightly easier for the people who aren’t technically inclined to see them too (b) do we want people acting with the awareness that they’re public.

(a) doesn’t have a clear answer to me. The answer to (b), though, is clearly yes.

Your votes are already public.
People say this all the time, but it's not really the case.
I don't think privacy is a binary thing that one either has or does not - there are degrees of privacy. Currently what we have is mostly private, requiring either technical skill or admin access to circumvent. This is a pretty high bar which 99% of people would not be able to reach. You're proposing removing the bar entirely because it is not high enough.
- requiring either technical skill or admin access to circumvent.
  What if some troll sets up a website that indexes/publishes this data? What technical skill would be required then?
  The data is public and ignorance is not bliss. People need to be made aware of this. If this will lead to people being more careful about what they post online or how they interact with a public social media service, then all the better.
  
  They'd get defederated.
  
  You don't need to be federated to read people's activities...
  Even if there was some type of "authorized fetch" involved, one could bypass it easily by writing a bot on LW to get the data. Then what?
  
  Ok, yeah, theoretically.
  But we're talking about putting voting info into the UI for anyone to see. Not highly motivated and skilled bad actors.
  
  And the "we should not make it available for the public at large because it will lead to abuse" is also theoretical.
  Anyway, I'm already on record saying that I don't like the voting system and that we should get rid of it altogether. Voting on content used to be about collective curation, not a constant popularity contest.
  I'm also on record saying that we need to stop relying on systems that only give us the illusion of privacy and depend on the software developers for culture shaping.
  If making the vote public gets people to be exposed to these fundamental issues of the current design, and leads us to search for better solutions, then I'm all for it.
  
  It's not theoretical to se how people consistently behave when there's less friction for toxic behavior. You should look into it if you're not already aware of the very predictable negative outcomes that stem from removing those frictions.
  
  I mean in the specific case of "giving vote visibility to everyone will cause more harassment based on who-voted-on-what". It's theoretical because this has not been implemented yet.
  
  Except that it plainly obvious that it's a reduction in friction for doing so and therefore will increase the behavior.
  
  We've already seen that kind of harrasment on major platforms including X and those owned by Meta.
  
  This feels a bit of a conversation-shutting argument. Lots of things (good and bad) will happen on a platform that has billions of users. The real question is to about many of those instances happened solely due to the data being (easily) available to the public.
  In any case, I really don't think that the solution to the problem of targeted harassment is by providing quote-unquote-privacy. Today, people want to obfuscate votes. Tomorrow it will be subscription lists and later it will be even posts/comments. By then it will be better to just use a closed network or just go full darknet. I'd rather we spent more time educating the people on how to use actually secure and private communications platform instead of sacrificing Transparency and Accountability for the sake of a vocal minority who will keep trying to turn the "Open Social Web" (which is meant to be open and public) into their exclusive, cocooned service.
  
  That's because it's supposed to be. I was on Reddit for a decade until their management shit the bed, and these kinds of problems weren't a thing there despite the much larger userbase.
  For the record, to me it's less about privacy and more about setting expectations. I'm not anonymous online, I'm pseudonymous, I've had this handle for a long time. I am my online identity, and when I post and vote I don't feel anonymous, even if I'm relatively protected from someone knocking on my door or messaging my boss about a statement.
  If voting "ledgers" aren't presented in the discussion, that's because they aren't intended to be part of the discussion. This reduces the value of influential individuals votes (ooh Bill Gates liked X, Kamala Harris disliked Y etc.) and shifts focus to how the community values of the content. It’s the same reason that we follow communities rather than individuals. We get an internet "hive mind" of sorts without cult of personality.
  
  the illusion of privacy
  i am from the post usenet and pre facebook internet generation (i hope that is vague enough) so using my real name on the internet or signing up for accounts with my real name email acount is strictly verboten by indoctrination, so my opinion may be out of date or invalid somehow, but i can not see how your lemmy account's up or down voting history violates privacy in any meaningful way
  
  It's in the mbin ui already
  
  So the technical-skill-bar is transforming a lemmy link into the equivalent on an mbin instance? That is huge.
  
  It's not quite that simple. As far as I'm aware, it's difficult to fetch from another instance "after the fact" what all the votes are for a particular user or comment; you have to be signed up to receive updates on it, and then after the fact you can go hunting around in your own instance's DB and see what all the votes were (or your UI can do it, if it's supported).
  But, yes, there are instance softwares that will do it, and no one's defederating from every one of those instances (nor I think should they). Someone posted a link to an mbin instance breaking down the votes for this post. Votes are not private.
  
  I ran curl "https://mbin.grits.dev/u/mozz/outbox?page=1" -H 'accept: application/activity+json' and I could see your outbox. Apparently mbin does not put Like/Dislike activities in there, only your comments/posts/notes.
  In a world where ActivityPub is only used in server-to-server, this would be fine. If we ever get to a (IMNSHO, better) scenario where we have more clients talking AP directly, then this will not work, and mbin will have to add those as well.
  All of this to say:
  the debate about "what Lemmy devs are doing" vs "what mbin is doing" vs "what PieFed is doing" should be seen as tremendous conflict with the idea that "The good thing about the Fediverse is that we can all talk with each other, regardless of where we are".
  There is no sane way to square this peg into a round hole. Privacy and "Social Media" are inherently incompatible. The advice about not putting anything online that you are not willing to ever be made public is evergreen, and anyone that does not follow it will eventually have to learn it the hard way.
  
  Apparently mbin does not put Like/Dislike activities in there
  Yes. That's what I said. I'm actually not 100% sure about it; for all I know there's some way to get it, but AFAIK all the existing softwares don't publish votes "after the fact", only at the time to current subscribers. But then, of course, it's kind of a moot point because you can just grab it from any mbin instance's DB through the UI without needing to do anything special or any particular knowledge.
  In a world where ActivityPub is only used in server-to-server, this would be fine. If we ever get to a (IMNSHO, better) scenario where we have more clients talking AP directly, then this will not work, and mbin will have to add those as well.
  Not really. You can have your client talking to all the servers and grabbing votes for whatever you're subscribed to, and losing votes for anything you're not subscribed to. It works basically exactly that way for one-user instances already.
  There is no sane way to square this peg into a round hole. Privacy and "Social Media" are inherently incompatible. The advice about not putting anything online that you are not willing to ever be made public is evergreen, and anyone that does not follow it will eventually have to learn it the hard way.
  Tru dat. 100% agreed. It seems like there are all these people in this thread arguing that their votes need to be private. Their votes are not private, and will never be private, for as long as ActivityPub is what they're using. I can see some value, maybe, to making it slightly difficult to extract the information instead of just giving it for free to everyone, but holding onto the idea of your votes being private is a gateway to unhappiness and only unhappiness.
  
  You can have your client talking to all the servers and grabbing votes for whatever you’re subscribed to, and losing votes for anything you’re not subscribed to. It works basically exactly that way for one-user instances already.
  It works like that for servers because servers are assumed to have high uptime, so (in theory) push-based communication should be enough. However, we see that this is not true even for servers (e.g, medium-sized instances getting out of sync with LW because they can not keep up with all the data being sent to them) and this will be specially true in the case of a network with tens/hundreds of thousands of separate clients. No server will be willing to push activities to all those inboxes, so we will need to have some pull-based form of communication as well.
  
  Oh, yeah, at that point it'll be a scalability clusterfuck. No idea what the solution is. Maybe something with persistent caches run by third parties or something? That actually would be fine, since all the actions are signed with the private key of the actor, I think.
  ActivityPub is not to me a real great designed protocol but it's whatever. Usually the key part for social networks is the "social" part of it; the protocol or the web site can be pure shite and if people like interacting with the other people there then it's fine. But yes, you are correct that beyond a certain point of scalability there are some dragons lurking that don't have obvious weak spots.
  
  How do you know who you're defederating with? When I set up my instance, the list of federated instances was thousands. How do you know which one is scraping the data?
  
  How is the data public? I’m asking in the most technical sense?
  This informs an issue I’ve had lately with a group of three people or bots following along my comment chain (All my comments, for a while, were dropping consistently to -2 score in all contexts).
  It’s my understanding that votes are not public. Am I wrong?
  
  Every comment/post/vote made in a community is sent as an activity to the community's subscribers.
  
  All votes are public, they're literally broadcast to the Fediverse writ large. You vote on something on your server, your server then tells the server owning the thing you voted on and that server then tells anyone who is interested (subscribers on other servers). That way everyone knows that this comment was voted on, but that information is indelibly tied to you - an entity on the Fediverse.
  Lemmy devs just chose not to a) show that information in a UI (plenty of other software out there does) and b) not inform people that was the case. Which leads to the whole point of the thread, hiding this from users merely gives a false sense of security.
  
  Your idea of a nice world and mine are very different.
  
  Yeah, I do my best to avoid cliched references, but this is 100% a "blue pill/red pill" dilemma. The majority of people seem to prefer to live a comfortable lie than face the harsh truth.
  
  Your world does not correspond to reality given that mbin already shows individual votes.
  Head over to your comment on fedia.io and see who voted on your own comment.
  Do you want to only vote on instances that defederate all mbin instances, and commit to keep doing so in the future?
  
  Just because people can go out of their way to find this information, doesn't mean we should remove all restrictions. That's a real twisted way of thinking.
  What we have in place is already egregious imo, and a major flaw with the system in place.
  
  That isn't really going out of your way, it is the base mode of how the fediverse works. Looking at something on a different instance.
  Plenty of people just use mbin and see this, without any action at all.
  The point is that as it stands right now, there are already basically no restrictions. The only thing perhaps missing is the knowledge that you can simply copy paste a link into fedia or another mbin instance to view upvotes.
  You can open an issue on mbin about it, to restore a semblance of restriction. But currently as it stands, all restrictions are about as fallen as they could be.
  You can ofc argue that we shouldn't open another equivalent hole in lemmys webui and api, so that you can in the future remove the ability from mbin.
  I would in turn argue that this system has always been egregious, and that in the same sense as banning encryption you never hit those you want to hit using incomplete restrictions. Regular users are led to believe their votes are private, while the worst dataminers or trolls will always have their instances to query all of that info.
  And how could you inform people that their votes are public without at the same time telling them how to get access to that info?
  If mbin removes the info, you will get another fediverse software showing it. You will get fediverse activity pub log info pages, specific vote info pages, it will never end.
  Has reddit ever managed to kill the 200ᵗʰ removeddit clone?
  Please instead put your effort into changing the way lemmy federates, the only way to fix this is to make vote details private, between only a select few instances. An mbin dev in the other thread mentioned PeerTube as an example implementation where you could remove vote details like that.
- You're proposing removing the bar entirely because it is not high enough.
  Incorrect. I said that I see no obvious answer as to whether to remove the bar -- that's the (a) part. What I'm proposing to do is definitely to educate people about the existence of the bar and the fact that they shouldn't be voting on porn, or contentious political topics from an account with their real name, or etc etc like that.
  More than 1% of the currently active Lemmy users are actively running a server (it's 1.4%, 649 active instances out of 45k MAU), so I think the number is definitely less than 99% of people who wouldn't know how to do it in the first place (or find an mbin or Friendica server or etc).
  The broader point about it being fairly difficult / fairly rare to have the knowledge, I can agree with, but I wasn't saying necessarily that we should make it easier for the 98.6% of people to do; just that everyone should be aware that it's possible so they can make their voting decisions with that knowledge in mind.
- You say that, but you simply have to be using something that isn't Lemmy and that information is there (doubly so if you're an admin on any of these systems)
- People say this all the time, but it's not really the case.
  Except that it is, people with the skills already bridged that gap for everyone.
  https://kbin.earth/m/fediverse@lemmy.world/t/267356/Lemmy-devs-are-considering-making-all-votes-public-have-your/favourites
  
  Hmmm I see a bunch of my friends have not upvoted my post. I will contact them to ask why not and ensure that they do.
  
  Yeah, just like rglullis actually dragged downvoters into the public on a few occasions, to pressure them to explain their downvotes.
  
  Ach, well, a known method to create a nice discussion
- I agree with the general point that privacy isn't a binary thing, but I don't think the bar is nearly so high, as it simply takes opening the post in the right kbin(/mbin?) instance. This requires neither technical skill nor admin privileges.
- piefed is already extremely redditty maintaining behind-the-scenes 'karma' and 'attitude' for users whether they signed up for it or not. why shouldn't this info be public instead of in the hands of admins only?
  https://join.piefed.social/2024/06/22/piefed-features-for-growing-healthy-communities/
  
  Oof, I'd rather just stick to Lemmy and let people see my votes rather than deal with karma.
  
  that's kind of the point, other instances are already aggregating and rating your votes given and received, why shouldn't lemmy show this to you?
  
  I liked it being relatively obfuscated. Even though I rarely downvote. But the ones I do are the ones I'd like to avoid. Tbh I'm more ambivalent compared to my thoughts on karma.
  
  People who downvote more than upvote tend to be the ones who get in fights a lot and say snarky, inflammatory and negative things.
  Summed up my whole sense of humor in half a throwaway sentence ;-)
  Seriously though, interesting read, thank you kux… you can really feel the author’s frustration and yet I can’t help but feel that they are interested in a certain kind of idealistic online community. Reddit but with a really restrictive HOA where everyone has the exact same color mailbox.
  
  the author almost certainly has more experience in managing online communities than me (i have none) but it seems counterintuitive to see a dumb take, downvote and bother to leave an argumentative reply rather than just downvote and scroll past. downvotes in this case would defuse potential arguments rather than start them, but i'll defer to the author and assume that's not what happens
  
  That was my take on it too. The vague sense that you’re just going to end up with nothing but circle-jerks if you implement all these suggestions. I could also just be whooshing an attempt a levity, something obvious to a seasoned community moderator.
  Hopefully my shitty attempts at socratic method rate a bit better then trolling, but I often doubt it :-)
- Admin access means nothing if you can set up your own instance in an afternoon, federate with everything, then get all the votes copied to your database. I have done this just to prove it could be done, btw.
- Technical people can struggle when a choice isn't a zero or a one.
- Currently what we have is mostly private, requiring either technical skill or admin access to circumvent. This is a pretty high bar which 99% of people would not be able to reach.
  I'm down to work on an analyzer tool that would make it easier for everyone to see the votes
(b) will just lead to fewer up and down votes, i.e. less engagement. That in turn could lead to slowly bleeding out.
I would like a c) where my instances collects all the votes on the post, and then transmits an anonymized aggregate.
- That would require a major change to the ActivityPub standard, which is not easy or trivial. This is at worst infeasible to impossible, at best something that is 5+ years away.
  
  This is not true, the piefed admin implemented pseudonymous voting agents in around 48 hours
  
  Piefed's experimental mechanism isn't truly anonymous. For instance I'm pretty sure you're the downvote from PieFed on my comment.
  You can still figure out who is behind votes by examining the proxy voting actors and their voting patterns. But it's probably close enough.
  If you wanted to share only an aggregate with other instances, that would require activitypub changes.
  
  I didn't downvote you, but I also use the term pseudonymous for a reason
  
  But if you use that term, don't say what I said isn't true.
  Interesting that you said you didn't downvote me and then the downvote from PieFed I saw just before is gone hehe
  
  Someone is having a chuckle
My votes on piefed are not public. This dev took the obvious idea of a dedicated voting agent and implemented it in about 48 hours.

I agree with you. I remember arguing about this a year ago when people first discovered votes were public on Kbin. I don't want to obsess over who up- or downvoted me and I don't want anyone else doing that either. Discussions are healthier when voting is anonymous (or at least obscured as is currently the case).

If bots become such an overwhelming problem that all regular users need access to voting records to better report all the bots I'll maybe revisit my stance. But right now the gains seem dubious.

Yep. Same for me.

Mod-admins are already doing this, even if you vote and don't comment on something.

Isn't the obvious thing to just have it be an option that admins can enable or disable? Maybe have a third option for only showing upvotes? Then it's up to each instance to decide, and users can decide to go to instances with the option their prefer.

It's already public, it's just lemmy users who don't see them.

If they're a serial downvoter, then it's easier for you to track them and block them as well. Double edged sword i think

I thought blocks were one way - you can't see anything from the person you blocked, but they can still see your stuff?
- Hmm, i haven't have experience with that, but even then you achieve your peace of mind and whatever they do means nothing.
I downvoted SO much more on Reddit than I do here. The comment quality here is leagues better.
That's why I'd like it.
- So to catch a single "serial downvoter" you'd open up all your voting to vote stalkers? If it's a single person, honestly why does it matter?
  
  Actually what's the case with vote stalker? I haven't seen them anywhere and i don't know what's so bad till have to hold off a feature just because of them.
  
  Would be the people that would go through your vote history and then grief you based on it. Kinda like people that sift through people's comment history to grief them, just now it wouldn't allow any "anonymous" interaction with posts.
  
  Ahh, i see.
  
  It doesn't REALLY matter. More of a thing where it would be fun to catch him since he's really obsessed with me. But meh, in the end, doesn't matter. And I blocked him, so...

What might be interesting would be to have it displayed, but grouped by instance. That way we could see some data and potentially uncover troll instances or attempts to brigade the conversation without opening ourselves up to personal attacks.

I don’t want some nutjob with too much time stalking me because I upvoted something about climate change or downvoted some bigoted shit.

They can read your comment history why would you care about them being able to see what you upvoted?

Voting on Reddit-like platforms is soft moderation by a community, and if you disincentive that,

How does that disincentive it? It actually makes it better

I specifically don't comment on people that give off the vibe they might be one of those kind of nutjobs, precisely because it gives them a notification with my username attached if I do. I'm on this site to kill some time with low effort, I want to minimise the risk of attracting the attention of some weirdo.
I downvote in those scenarios and then report if appropriate. If enough other users feel the same way the comment goes down to the bottom of the thread and fewer users see it. Especially if it's something that a mod eventually removes, as it reduces the reach until a mod can get to it.
If I risk retaliation for doing that, I (and others) will just stop, meaning those comments stay up front & centre and we lose that soft moderation plus that engagement in general. Going into the comments will just end up being a worse experience
- I get your point but if you want to just lurk and read don't vote either

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

I'm dealing with one right now! lol It's crazy.

You don't even have serial downvoters. You have a few comments without many downvotes. You just consistently post the worst possible political pisstakes repeatedly and constantly and nobody likes them when they run across it every time.
- You just consistently post the worst possible political pisstakes repeatedly
  Strange that you would say that. I haven't posted any political articles to this community. This is the fediverse community.
  nobody likes them when they run across it every time.
  Really? So an article about a ninety year old woman, who finally graduates college, posted to my own sub, with 3 subscribers, and got 9 votes within a minute of posting is political? That doesn't seem like a political "pisstake."
  Or 13 downvotes in my own educational sub about a college that gives out 3-year degrees. It has 2 subscribers in that sub. That doesn't seem like a political "pisstake."
  Or 14 downvotes about a program serving underprivileged children and helping them go to college. and the downvotes were within 2 minutes of posting. To a sub that has 2 subscribers. That doesn't seem like a political "pisstake."
  And since all my postings to a political sub are about third parties, from legit news orgs, seems kind of a stretch to call them "political pisstakes."
  But wait, I haven't posted any of those articles to this community. So strange how you would know so much about what I post.
  Of course, posting history is public. But I haven't checked your post history, because I don't care. Strange that you would check mine. And then not mention all of the non-political posts.
  You know, what's really weird too? I posted some articles to the c/science committee. And even some posters there commented on how strange it was that my posts were being downvoted so much and so fast, when the articles weren't political at all.
  Luckily the science people are cool, and the upvotes quickly outnumbered the downvotes.
  But yeah, they were definitely curious about why so many downvotes so quickly on neutral science reporting.
  But meh, probably just a coincidence.
  I think maybe you are right. Because for sure there wouldn't be an incel loser, who is so butthurt about my not voting for his candidate, that he'd follow me around. And downvote articles and take screenshots of how much I post, or set up alternate accounts just to engage with me after I blocked him.
  That's way too strange. There is no way a loser would be so pathetic to do that. All because he doesn't like the Green Party.
  So now that I've thought about it, I agree with you.
  It would be just too crazy that an incel loser like that would follow me around. I mean, sure he can't get a girlfriend, but hey, I'm sure he's not THAT mad at the world. :)
  
  Touch sum fucken grass dude
  
  Or how about I use a forum that doesn't have incels that get off on downvoting people. There is that.
  
  That's a lot of words man
  
  Well it does take about 20 seconds to read, I so can understand your frustration.