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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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.
Thamk you for the insight, instance administrator views are valuable and unique.
At the risk of sounding like I’m presenting a bad faith argument, why ban them? I don’t like the whole “free market” analogy but surely it’s one of the liberating features of federated servers, being able to to largely express your votes or content as you see fit within the legal framework of the host nation. Wouldn’t the odd one or two mass downvoters/upvoters/theyvoters ultimately be a statistical abberation or is the fediverse still small enough for this sort of shit to carry weight?
Open criticism of my view welcome, as always!
They’re purposely disruptive to the community, they are not part of the community.
That’s a strong viewpoint and I appreciate where you’re coming from, but how many votedicks does it take to derail a post? I appreciate the fediverse is reasonably small in comparison to othe headline social media sites, but does banning one or two bots or people do enough to save posts from getting bombed?
If it’s early? One.
I agree! I believe seeing who upvoted or downvoted a post aids in identifying rabid downvoters and bots. However, I personally use mobile Lemmy apps and am unable to access that data.
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For what it’s worth, admins/employees on Reddit (or any other website) can also see upvote records.
this is different, oc is talking about “any admin”. Anyone can make a lemmy server and become a server admin from which they might be able to see the voters
I always thought anonymous voting was preferable, or at least non-public. I don’t want “why did you downvote me bro!?”-arguments to occur, and I don’t want to know who approves of my comments or not. I think thinking of votes as an amorphous blob representing general public opinion on Lemmy is preferable to getting into the weeds of who exactly likes your posts and comments.
We could also have “karma” on Lemmy, but while technically tracked the environment is better off without it being public in my opinion. I view voting records similarly.
If botting becomes enough of an issue that regular users need to report vote manipulation bots I’ll be fine with conceding my stance.
As a comment on the other discussion says, there’s a reason ballots are secret.
In reality you should be able to get an anonymized reference number to show your vote was tabulated correctly though.
Right now it comes down to an actual official finding your paper ballot with hand marked tracking and presuming the computer read it correctly on an overall vote total.
Being able to do this anonymously and securely is where the problems lie. Which is also why digital only voting still isn’t a thing anywhere.
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Because they’re supposed to be responsible to and represent the people who voted for them. Irrelevant to this situation.
I agree. As long as anonymous voting doesn’t cause obvious trolling/spam issues, it should be preferred.
One of the reasons I’ve always found Facebook off-putting and never used it (even before learning about the shady practices) are the very visible votes. I tend to overanalyse any reaction and would judge people based on their votes on my posts, even if I consciously tried to avoid it. Similarly, I imagine some other people would do the same and I’d feel like I’m under surveillance.
Any instances that actually show public downvotes? I’ve seen people talk about them but haven’t seen them yet
One situation I’ve repeatedly faced that could be solved by fully public voting is having those debates when someone puts a single downvote on my opponent’s comments.
Silly, yes, but it may look like I am downvoting a person to aggravate. I am not, it’s not me! :D
I would rather vote identities being blocked from scraping. I don’t care about other users or admins. I would rather that level of information be unavailable to outside commercial sources, especially any timings based metadata that could be used to derive dwell time and other psychological metrics.
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.
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?
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
If votes became truly public, what would stop a malicious user from automating crawling the fediverse to get a list of every up and down vote a targeted user has ever made? Admins can currently do this, I assume given enough time and intent? Yuck.
I really hope a solution is found and if Lemmy goes the way of truly public votes, it would probably turn this into a nonparticipatory medium for me, I’d still read posts but not vote or comment.
Edit: also, most casual Lemmy users aren’t aware of public votes and would be upset that it already works this way, and only particularly invested or curious users are even reading this thread.
There’s nothing stopping a malicious user from doing that right now. Be aware that anyone who wants can already see your votes.
On Kbin the votes are 100% public for anyone. I’ve migrated to Lemmy after the frequent server issues with Kbin and I miss that part dearly. It was very easy to gauge whether someone was engaging in a good or bad faith discussion by checking the votes within a discussion. That being said, personally I’m very light on my downvotes, and I can see how someone more trigger-happy would see it as worrying. Personally I see the vote transparency as healthy though.
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
No, it would encourage irresponsibility which already seems a major issue with lemmy.
Overall my opinion is irrelevant, however, I think there is a huge difference in knowing a person votes vs how a person votes. The how should not be public, imo.
“If you have nothing to hide then you have nothing to fear.”
Given the strong presence of the privacy community on Lemmy, I have to say that I’m a bit shocked to hear so many in these discussions chiming in to support voting transparency.
I’m on board with the idea of using ring signatures to validate the legitimacy of a vote and moderating spammers based on metadata.
Or, for something (potentially) easier to implement, aggregating vote tallies at the instance level (votes visible to your instance admin and mods) and federating the votes anonymously by instance, so you might see something like:
- lemmy.world: 9 up, 2 down
- discuss.tchncs.de: 3 up, 4 down
- Etc
Up/down votes are the method of community moderation that sets Reddit apart from many other platforms. If the Lemmy community is trying to capture some of that magic, which is good for both highlighting gems AND burying turds, radical transparency isn’t the path to get there.
In fact, I’d argue that the secret ballot has already been thoroughly discussed and tested throughout history and there are plenty of legitimate examples of why it would be better if they were more secret than they are today.
Many people have brought up the idea of brigading, but would this truly get better if votes are public? Is it hard to imagine noticing that an account you generally trust has voted and matching their vote, even subconsciously?
For those who feel that they aren’t able to post on Lemmy because downvotes make you feel sad, my feeling is that if you make posts in a community and they consistently get down voted to oblivion, you’re in the wrong place. The people in that community don’t value your contributions, and you should find another place to share them. This is the system working as intended and the mods should be thankful that such a system has been implemented.
The last point I’ll make is about the potential for a chilling effect - making users less likely to interact with a post in any way due to a fear of retaliation. Look - if you’re looking for a platform where all of your activity is public, those are out there. Why should we make Lemmy look just like every other platform?
Agreed. 10/10.
And you don’t even need real crypto here to start. The home instance can just send vote actions as fixed unique tokens. The way the trust framework currently works, this is literally a drop-in replacement and introduces no new spam/brigade vulns which don’t already exist from a rogue instance. It would be imperfect, and may still make it possible to correlate and infer vote patterns for a sufficiently motivated adve, but it would raise the bar for protecting user telemetry by a huge factor with very minimal effort. I’m honestly a bit surprised it hasn’t been done already.
Always in favor of taking power from mods that they can abuse and simply do not need.
The 1 “You think you can come into MY instance, and downvote ME?” post I read was 1 too many.
Sill waiting for someone to show me how to see what someone up votes and down votes on Lemmy through a pre-existing Mbin or Mastodon instance. That’s really been the only convincing argument to make them public that I’ve heard. (That convinces me, I mean.) But nobody has shown it is possible through fedia.io for example. I tried but couldn’t see it, but it’s possible I was looking in the wrong place.It’s on mbin’s post/comment under more > activity. Not under a user’s profile.
Here is a video of me doing it on my phone with fedia.io: https://files.catbox.moe/nb5rx1.mp4 For some reason it wouldn’t show me reduces (downvotes), though.
Ahhhh, okay. I was expecting it to be under a user but it is attached to the post. That makes targeted harassment marginally more difficult but regardless, I definitely can see that it’s trivial to see the upvotes (favorites) and downvotes (reduces).
Whether or not this is “good” or “bad” I’m still undecided on, but you’ve officially convinced me that it is trivial to see exactly who voted (and how) on a post (or comment). You do not need to “set up an instance” like many people say.
Fair enough. I do think you can view it under a users profile in some Mastodon clients- but only upvotes, not downvotes.
Everyone’s fleshed out a lot of the discussions so I’ll just bullet point my opinion to try to better explain the discourse I’m seeing on here
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I view “Lemmy” like it’s a Community Center with group discussions, Community gatherings, and/or lectures with public comments. If you’re in the crowd “Booing” (downvoting) without standing up and making your position clear, you’re not adding anything to the discussion.
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Downvote/Upvote is not like “Booth Voting” at all. You have ONE vote in a democracy, that’s the core principle. You don’t vote Yes for a candidate then vote No for another. You don’t see a ticker above the booth tallying everyone’s vote that was before you (voter manipulation, why hidden scores became a thing).
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I think this would go over a lot better if mods had the choice of how to present the votes. Opt in or out of showing voters, opt in or out of showing scores or eliminating downvotes or even upvotes if you want. Give the power to the community and create useful tools for mods to try out.
Multiple votes is not why we have secret ballots IRL. Votes during referenda where you don’t vote for one candidate are also secret.
The purpose of secrecy is to protect from repercussions (ie worker vs boss, person vs family, tenant vs landlord…)
I’m not being pedantic. It matters here, because your votes can have repercussion if they’re easy to see at all times. I don’t want to be harassed because I downvoted an obsessive tankie.
That’s just not the same at all. How many times do you get to vote on the referenda? I’m really interested to know where this mindset comes from that a social media upvote/downvote is anything like a real political “vote”. It’s completely different except the name, is that where the confusion is coming from? Is this an age/demographic thing?
You can vote no or yes on a referendum. The Upvote is for comments that contribute, the downvote is for off-topic not that you disagree with the policy! By continuing this logic you’re exposing you want to continue “Voting” on whether you agree with a topic in “privacy”. That’s not how public discourse works, which this is. You guys are acting like everyone is a guest speaker and you’re the X-factor judge deciding if they should continue or get off the stage.
Anyone looking at the actual voting system on here would not say it’s democratic or fair/balanced. There are no protections or even logic to construct a system like that because we’re not voting on policies! This is a town square, not your local council. You’re wanting to walk into the square and vote on the flowers or people walking by, that’s not how public interaction should work!
In every single thread the downvote is abused as a “I disagree” or as a reactionary “I don’t like this person”. It does absolutely nothing for the conversation, it’s solely for others to feel better if the numbers match their own personality or to dissuade the person who’s being downvoted from voicing their opinion.
This whole event is rather sad and disheartening like a depressing xkcd
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