There have been multiple accounts created with the sole purpose of posting advertisement posts or replies containing unsolicited advertising.

Accounts which solely post advertisements, or persistently post them may be terminated.

Lemmy votes ARE public, should they be anonymous?

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.

j4k3 ,
@j4k3@lemmy.world avatar

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.

Microw ,

Thats probably a complete nonstarter in a federated network. The metadata needs to be sent via Activitypub, ergo it has to be public.

Damage ,

I think you’re looking for a different type of community then, like an image board.

souperk ,
@souperk@reddthat.com avatar

For anyone interested, there are a few papers on cryptographically secure voting, where both voter anonymity and election integrity are preserved.

Most designs consider three separate entities, where if you accumulate the information between those entities you would be able to identify a voter and his vote, but each entity on itself does not hold enough information.

wazoobonkerbrain ,

That’s interesting. I have read multiple comments to the effect that it would not be possible for lemmy to implement anonymous voting because the underlying ActivityPub protocol does not support it. So it sounds like solutions do exist, although I suppose the effort required to modify ActivityPub is too much, more likely the feature will be included in some successor to the fediverse.

Vlyn ,

The problem isn’t keeping votes anonymous, that’s easy. The problem is bots/spam. You could just create a new instance and then upvote a post from another instance a thousand times. If the votes are anonymous for the other instance it’s tough to say if they are genuine users or just bots.

That’s the main issue here, when votes are anonymous you could easily just spam votes with no way to trace it back. If it’s a rogue instance then fine, you can ban the whole instance. But imagine if lemmy.world starts using fake votes in the background towards other instances.

southsamurai ,
@southsamurai@sh.itjust.works avatar

Eh, I don’t personally care.

But it could lead to nastiness as lemmy expands. If enough people go to the trouble of looking it up, you get some of them being assholes because people are prone to being assholes. That leads to drama. Drama leads to nastiness and worse things sometimes.

If that’s going to be part of how lemmy works, so be it, I’m way too old to skip using a block list for assholes. But it might bite federated services in the ass, so it probably should be on the list to get implemented.

Asudox ,
@Asudox@lemmy.world avatar

If that were to happen, the receiving end wouldn’t know who sent which vote, thus making spamming extremely easy.

r00ty Admin ,
r00ty avatar

I did think of a few ways round it (in kbin/mbin) a year or so ago. But, it wouldn't work unless everyone using ActivityPub recognized it. It's also really a small problem in reality. It's likes and dislikes.

TheEntity ,

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.

Th4tGuyII ,
@Th4tGuyII@fedia.io avatar

To be fair, there's a point to be made that someone who's overly trigger-happy on dislike should be shamed for it.
Just like you would be if you kept being snide to everyone in real life.

I agree that transparency would do much more good than harm, plus compared to the info that people already put in their profiles/comments, it's not likely to make them anymore identifiable.

TheEntity ,

I’d even argue public votes can deescalate some situations, for example where both sides of a relatively heated discussion can see they vote each other up. They don’t necessarily agree but they appreciate the other side’s points.

As for the transparency, it’s not possible to list all the votes of a user, one rather needs to list votes on a given post. To profile a given user the attacker would need to cross-reference the data from all posts and comments which is computationally infeasible, both client-side and server-side.

Th4tGuyII ,
@Th4tGuyII@fedia.io avatar

Votes should absolutely be public. They were on KBin, and it made people more civil for it because you could be shamed if you were dislike trolling or liking all of your own posts/comments to make them look better (which is something you actively have to do on here, unlike Reddit).

Given this place is pseudo-anonymous anyways, and people comment far more personal and identifiable info here anyways (which tbf you should be careful about), I think public votes would do much more good than harm.

asukaakari ,

The question of whether Lemmy votes should be anonymous is an important one, balancing transparency with privacy. Public voting can encourage accountability, but anonymity might lead to more honest and unbiased voting behavior. If you're interested in exploring the pros and cons of this issue further, chatgpt 日本語 can provide a detailed discussion and help you form a well-rounded opinion on the matter.

reksas ,

One way to anonymize voting, if desired, could be just make a mess out of who voted what in the logs. I vote something, some other random user’s name is logged. Or maybe that could be used to deter scrapers and make the incorrect logging reverseable somehow that requires actual human interaction that cant be automated.

rottingleaf ,

The users right now may fall into a false sense of privacy when voting because the votes are hidden from Lemmy users.

Why would you even want anonymous votes but not anonymous comments?

The former is as good\bad as the latter.

I know they were already technically public. I think they should be shown.

Damage ,

If I vote something I’m expressing my opinion just like I would with comment, and those are not anonymous.
I get that people are worried about griefers and psychos, but anonymity is just a (poor) cure for the symptoms, not for the disease; users who don’t behave should be banned, and if their instance turns out to be a detriment to the community, they should be defederated.

The anonymity we should ensure is the one of the person behind the username, to avoid doxxing and cyber-bullying.

FeelzGoodMan420 ,

No I’m worried about powertripping mods… That’s the issue.

snek ,
@snek@lemmy.world avatar

Why is this so universal?

Buelldozer ,
@Buelldozer@lemmy.today avatar

Because too many mods are power tripping assholes and I say that as someone whose been a mod in various corners of the Internet since at least 2000.

The best mods, and admins, are nearly invisible and as close to drama free as possible.

Tywele ,

I think votes shouldn’t be anonymous. Transparency is important to weed out trolls and bots. And public votes should be made easier accessible to every user not only admins/mods.

Coelacanth ,
@Coelacanth@feddit.nu avatar

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.

ChaoticNeutralCzech ,

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.

snek ,
@snek@lemmy.world avatar

There is enough drama as it is. This will just open the door to shadowbanning and stalking and other horrors we have escaped by leaving reddit. It’s enough that it’s party available on kbin.

Tudsamfa ,

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.

mihnt ,

They should just stay mostly hidden as they are now. I was harassed 3 times while using kbin for my voting habits. When I brought it up to ernest, him and mostly everyone else defended it, even though at the time I was actively being annoyed by someone.

It’ll make less people vote in the long run and will scare people off.

Nothing worse than hopping on something I do for leisure to realize that thread I voted on a week ago has now come back to bite me in the ass because the OP decided to go on a crusade and harass everyone that downvoted them.

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • [email protected]
  • random
  • lifeLocal
  • goranko
  • All magazines
    •