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.

ItsComplicated ,

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.

null ,

Sounds like opinions are pretty mixed. Maybe we should put it to a vote.

But then how do we decide if that vote should be public or not…

half_built_pyramids ,

I will always downvote ai shit. Brigade 100%. I’m fact this reminds me I need to get through all the ai subs and downvote everything again.

half_built_pyramids ,

We need to reveal downvotes so we can identify the ai lovers.

Akasazh ,
@Akasazh@feddit.nl avatar

And then?

half_built_pyramids ,

Also brigade them

Akasazh ,
@Akasazh@feddit.nl avatar

You make a good point for anonymity of the votes

half_built_pyramids ,

Thanks, that’s what I was getting at, but I still also hate ai shit.

ZILtoid1991 ,

I can see that in some circumstances, votes might need to be public due to protocol, otherwise public votes have their own uses, and so are private ones.

unconfirmedsourcesDOTgov ,

“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?

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