I woke up today, to a public comment in a Lemmy community asking a series of tagged accounts why they had downvoted certain posts
I thought that reactions to posts and comments are anonymous and now I don’t really know what to feel about Lemmy any more.
In this case I had downvoted a poster because of its design, but was confronted publicly for being racist because the person assumed that I downvoted the message on the poster
EDIT: changed the title from “How” to “Why” because it broke rule nr 5 about it being a support question
Votes being public is kinda cool, same for mod actions and who made them. Cool way to counter the Resdit type shadow, secret decisions and botted and bought votes.
Reddit even allows you to hide all your action history (no comment history), which is done to make it easier for bots and bought accounts to operate.
As for someone calling you or anyone out for voting certain way, who cares, tell them to go pound sand
It needs to be open for federation to work. It needs to share what votes are by whom from where. If instances don’t have this information they can’t really moderate. They can’t block people or other instances.
Users typically don’t have access to this information, but any admin does. Because of how federation works though, anyone can become an admin pretty easily. Also, you can go somewhere that publishes the data for you who’s done that work already.
I don’t see this as an issue personally. It’s just something to be aware of. I wish it was told to new users so they aren’t surprised, but now that you know you can be prepared. Always assume others can see your votes.
The lesson here is that your assumption about how the system works is wrong.
That means can mean 1 important thing :
- it was not explained clearly enough for you during your onboarding.
Consequently I suggest you recall when you started using Lemmy, how you heard about it, how you then understood how it work and thus potentially update the documentation (or whatever you relied on then) accordingly so that others don’t make the same mistake.
Who cares? Upvote what you like, downvote what you don’t. Who cares if someone has a whinge.
If someone is posting about you downvoting them, then they’re a seriously flawed individual. Some people will take any reason they can to call other people racist. I think it’s a fetish, honestly.
You’re fine.
Much easier to determine vote manipulation when there is no central authority to handle it and the votes, as well as moderation actions, are publicly visible.
I just block anyone who confronts me about why I voted a certain way. “Because I felt like it, fuck off cunt” is my go-to justification.
I like your style
Does that happen?
Happened to a few times to me. Usually tankies criticizing why I downvoted Russian propaganda in unrelated topics.
Downvote, block and move on
I crashed out once and DMd someone who had downvoted a couple of my comments because I overreacted and thought I was being targeted. I’m not a particularly stable individual.
Felt terrible, they were a good sport about it though.
I just blocked my votes from federating. it’s nobody’s business what I upvote.
That just means you’re not voting …
I’m not explaining this to somebody again.
If your votes don’t federate then they have no effect other than you seeing the arrow light up.
Everyone from my instance sees my votes. Which are the people who matter to me. Federate means between instances. A fair portion of our communities are similar, only allowing downvotes from members of trusted instances, which in our case are dbzer0 and quokk.au. I believe we also opted out of Lemvotes as well.
The protocol is ActivityPub not ActivityPriv
And certainly not ActivityCafé
I’m pretty sure the Pub doesn’t stand for Public, but rather Publish.
edit: not saying that it is private, just my opinion on whether the pub is an adjective or a verb
Still Publish, not Privish.
You are right but you can’t exactly publish something and expect it to be private
And what does publishing something do? Does it make it widely available to the public?
Indeed it does. However my intention was to say that Pub in ActivityPub is most likely not an adjective (public), but a verb (publish).
WHAT
This one is gold :)
Isn’t the Fediverse supposed to be open?
You can show your personal support for something by upvoting it or your opposition to something by downvoting it, but if you don’t want to take a stance on something at all, you don’t have to.
It’s an entirely optional mechanic. You can fully utilize Lemmy to view, post, and comment without ever voting if you don’t want to.
As far as I’m aware, the votes don’t really matter, anyway. Lemmy doesn’t seem to use karma the way that Reddit does. i.e. I’ve never seen a post removed because the user didn’t have enough karma, etc.
There are communities on certain instances that have auto-moderators that take into account upvotes to ban/unban people.
Piefed also by default collapses any comment that has a negative vote. if the comment gets downvoted even further, it can even be shadowbanned by being hidden from anyone on Piefed. although you can change that or opt out, if you prefer to see every shitty take. Piefed also places bright warning icons next to the names of anyone with a bad rep. there’s quite a lot of personal control over what you see if you use Piefed.
Interesting! Not something I’ve encountered, but I suppose that’s what makes the Fediverse special! We can all control how we want to interact with things.
The real question is why do we even need upvotes or down votes at all?
It’s the main metric by which you determine what posts are popular.
And the first layer of moderation.
On other platforms, it’s a mechanism to assign a sort of “social worth” to people and ideas, and to tailor an algorithm to drive engagement.
I think it exists on Lemmy purely to make it feel more like “Reddit but federated.” Without the votes, this is just a normal message board. Lol
If you sort everything by Newest Comments, then the votes don’t matter to anything and it is just a normal message board. 😌
Exactly.
But if Lemmy was just seen as a federated message board, it wouldn’t have nearly the users that it does. It’s popularity rocketed (compared to the rest of the Fediverse) specifically because it takes so much of it’s style from Reddit.
I agree - I was just surprised to be confronted publicly by a user, for down voting a post. Not that I didn’t want to be exposed, but that people actually could look it up
Oh, 100% agree that it’s a bit unhinged to actively call out people because they down-dooted something you posted.
I don’t make it a habit to check, but it has been fun to check and call out in precisely two scenarios.
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One user and I deep into a sub thread on a multiple day old post arguing about ettiquette here. Was weird to get multiple downvotes on those sorts of comments. They were using their “abandoned” alts.
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Another thread where I had repeatedly asked someone to share the source for their claim despite them insisting that I just wasn’t googling right. I offered them to edit literally every comment (multiple thousand) on this account to sing their praises. Downvoted with no response.
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The Fediverse is open, everything you do on here is fully public.
It’s why I prefer it over reddit, where who knows what really happens with all the vote manipulation and brigading.
To answer your question, it is all listed alongside upvotes on the posts if using mbin.
everything you do on here is fully public.
Even DMs?
Depends on the instance, mine is an mbin instance but the upvotes and downvotes are hidden.
I remember coming across a site where you could put in a Fediverse URL and it would tell you who had upvoted and downvoted it, presumably it had an instance in the background that was tracking all that.
Edit: lemvotes.org, linked below by another comment.
Yes, the information is sent to your instance, and then is being censored by your instance. It’s personal choice for the instance and it’s support. But your instance must either be commonly supporting you not seeing it, or dictating you aren’t seeing it.
Kind of like the championship football game played in the U.S. today before the Superbowl, where Fox edited out access to seeing people paying tribute to the man murdered by ice.
Sometimes it’s good to have information, sometimes people think it is not
I would like to see the ratio of up/down, because that’s IMO much more informative, if you allow votes at all. Personally I think votes just triggers some dopamine crap and is totally useless most of the times (exceptions are serious places where responsible people downvote wrong information for example)
I would like to see the ratio of up/down
That’s typically enabled/disabled in the settings of the client.
Fiddled around a bit and found a setting for that, or so it seems, gotta go collect some downvotes to try it out 😁
Thanks!
Edit: lemvotes.org, linked below by another comment.
Aw, shoot. It doesn’t seem to work for PieFed. For example, here’s a link straight to the original instance and thread: https://piefed.social/c/historyart/p/1701717/
Changing that “p” to “post” didn’t seem to work, either.
Isn’t PieFed explicitly written to make votes anonymous again? Or am I thinking of something else?
I’m also on fedia and I can see who upvoted and boosted a comment / thread / post.
Fedia.io is also an mbin instance, you are speaking about the same thing.
Exactly. I enabled displaying the domains of every user, so I noticed that FaceDeer is on the same instance as I am and so wanted to point out this odd difference.
Can’t see who downvoted, though. I’ve actually considered switching instances over this since that’s the most important thing to “be serious” with, it’d be nice if people were more judicious with their downvotes and having them be an obvious public thing might make people think twice about that. But the whole upvote/downvote thing in general just seems like a broken concept to me a this point and I don’t care all that much about it.
I think downvotes are hidden for every Mbin instance. I don’t know how it is with other software.
Thanks! That’s is very helpful and also concerning
Not sure how I feel about this
Why is that concerning? The whole system was meant to be transparent
Not the OP, but i find it concerning because this enables creating a very detailed profile of a users interests, political alignment, medical issues, sexual orientation etc. Even if they never post anything! We should all know by now that there are bad actors actively using this kind of data in the worst ways imaginable. In the US this can already have life threatening consequences (ICE raids etc…)
This is not a good privacy oriented design and it exposes users in a dangerous way.
EDIT: About lemvotes.org. I like this site because it makes it obvious how dangerous this really is. For example I accidentally upvoted a really disgusting NSFW post misclicking on my phone. This will forever be visible to the world. I’m a documented pervert now. Good job.
Someone can spin up an instance and have votes federated to them anyway, so regardless of whether lemvotes exists or not, people can harvest your information.
i find it concerning because this enables creating a very detailed profile of a users interests, political alignment, medical issues, sexual orientation etc. Even if they never post anything!
So don’t interact. What you read isn’t stored, but if you interact, it should be public.
For example I accidentally upvoted a really disgusting NSFW post misclicking on my phone.
I agree that it’s dumb you don’t have a “my votes” page where you can remove that. But you can go to said post and just remove your vote.
So in a niche community we are now promoting that people don’t interact with said community if they care about their privacy at all?
Not at all. I’m saying you should interact and stand behind your interactions.
For example, you downvoted my post, which is fine. You also replied, which is also fine. Why is it bad that one isn’t on your profile (but it is public) and the other is openly visible in a list on your profile?
Interactions are by default public, otherwise there’s no point to interacting. I’d go one further and say that having the voting information public but not visible by default is by far the worst option.
I constantly misvote by doing a gesture not exactly right on my phone. I wouldn’t judge anyone by their votes.
just upvote and downvote a bunch of random things then your profile has been salted.
Which is why you shouldn’t put all your interests in one account.
Have one account for memes and shitposts, then another for bringing down the patriarchy and kinky stuff. OK, so maybe 3 accounts
Is this an alt to your handsolo kink account
No, this is the alt for my “Princess Lay-uh” kink account.
C3POrno knows every position and toy in the galaxy.
This is just ridiculous.
It’s only ridiculous because you’re used to pouring your entire life into Facebook or Google’s servers.
If you’re disturbed by it being public, I think you should be just as disturbed by it being in the hands of data farmers and merchants.
The fact of the matter is, nothing you do online is private—and on the spectrum of “how private is it,” social media platforms are traditionally designed to put you at the near zero end of it. So separate your concerns if you want any illusion of separation from your actual life.
You made assumptions about my social media use that are wrong. I don’t interract with them because I don’t like the way they are run and the data they gather will for sure be used against me. I interact with the fediverse because it doesn’t start from a point of abuse, but it can very clearly be abused and I would honestly prefer that this particular information would not be available in any way since it is the most frictionless but also the most potentially exposing way you interact with this platform.
At least when pouring my shit into Big Tech I can be reasonably sure that it disappears into the ocean of other data they have, and it’s exceptionally unlikely that someone with the access to do so would actually look into me specifically.
That any unhinged individual on the internet can pull out more information than strictly necessary about my online history is a completely different threat model. I understand that the federated model requires some level of data sharing to keep track of posts but I would kind of have expected that the instance that “owns” the post would be the only instance that needs this info.
On the other hand, I’m sure that absolute privacy like completely hidden post history to some extent will help bad faith actors with troll farms and bots so I don’t fucking know.
Piefed alleviates some of these issues.
Can you elaborate on this?
To be fair OP isn’t the only one that finds it concerning. Kbin/Mbin had tons of complaints about its public voting until the Mbin devs decided to cave and hide downvotes. Piefed also tried to implement private voting before, but gave up because of their halfhearted approach not working out.
I personally like public votes. It’s great to see who upvoted me, especially if it’s someone I recognize. While I miss being able to see downvotes, because sometimes I do feel like asking for feedback from downvoters on where I could do better.
That said, there’s an issue of consent there imo. So I do understand the complaints. While a receiving instance is technically free to do with the federated vote what they want, the user never really consented to that. It’s like if an instance made private messages public. Theoretically it’s allowed to, but that doesn’t mean people would be happy about it.
To be 1000% clear, the voting agents on piefed worked just fine. They scrapped it because of forum politics. A few terminally online admins got real mad they couldn’t stalk user votes and threatened to defederate, even though they could easily just ban the voting agents if they wanted. They made up a completely absurd and roundabout premise that they needed to be able to preemptively ban people based on votes in case they might make a “harmful comment” in the future. The fact that this was the primary concern indicates that the functionality worked as intended.
Hopefully someone integrates the same functionality into an app. Honestly I’d take a swing at it if I had a bit more time.
This is the post I remembered.
This is what I meant with it failed because their halfhearted approach didn’t work out:
- Maintaining a list of trusted instances is a pain in the ass.
They could have just used private voting with every instance, but they just had to segregate them by trust because the good (according to authoritative selection) instances should still be able to see what you voted for, and that was too much work to keep up, so they just scrapped the entire system instead of implementing blanket private voting…
Right, the reason they tried to do the trusted instance nonsense is because of the threat of defederation after some major Lemmy admins threw a tantrum about it. They were cagey about admitting this openly but will basically admit that is the case if pressed.
Back when they decided to scrap the idea (over back channel discussions with almost zero user input, I might add) I spent some time arguing about the decision, and Blaze basically came out and said that “You are welcome to fork the code and restore the functionality, but nobody would federate with you.” I am paraphrasing, and don’t care to go back and find the comment, but I’m sure someone else can if they are motivated.
I had expected reactions to be encrypted, as it’s not a build in feature of Lemmy itself. If it was, I feel like it should have been visible, just like the modlog. There must have been a reason why the Lemmy devs don’t show a list of who up votes or down votes
Assume that everything you say and do online is public, unless explicitly stated (and proven) otherwise. The advantage of Lemmy (and Reddit in principle) is that your account is anonymous, it is not linked to your person. So you have some freedom to be who you want to be without repurcussions in your daily life.
Yes but it is frighteningly easy to identify users from post history if someone really cares to do it. You either have to never comment about anything personal, including providing your expertise since that can be somewhat unique, or mix in enough bullshit in a way that’s not trivial to separate from the real stuff.
If it would be encrypted, it would open up for vote manipulation. There are plans that mods will see who upvotes in their communities. Create multiple accounts on different instances if you need more privacy, separate personalities for different topics.
Create multiple accounts on different instances
Isn’t that manipulation too?
Only if you are using it to vote multiple times, or vote on your own posts/comments.
If someone has a problem with your alt they can ban it. If votes would be encrypted they would have to defederate the full instance where they come from.
Create separate accounts for privacy not for vote manipulation
Please wholly ignore people butthurt about downvotes. We all do. Voting does not warrant any explanation.
I love it. It’s awesome. Also the Lemmy modlog. I love how open everything is!
Feel this! ⬇️😆
I think you missed the point of this - I don’t mind down votes.
I am just surprised that (some) users will actively use third party software to identify who made them, and then confront them publicly
I don’t think it really matters, just don’t dox yourself and you should be fine.
Also you can have multiple accounts on different instances and stuff if you want.
And I don’t think you can tell that much by just upvotes and downvotes. I often times downvote stuff I’ve seen re-posted too much in different instances. I don’t want to see the same thing dozens of times ofc, doesn’t mean I necessarily have an issue with the content.
Lastly I bet most people don’t use that website anyway. I don’t. What good does it do me to see who downvotes me? If we disagree on something… that’s allowed.
I solve that issue by having down votes disabled, I don’t have the capability to down vote or see negative scores. It honestly made my experience on the platform better as well, because it helps hide the hive mind mentality that the platform as a whole seems to have at times.
I would like if vote counts weren’t shown until after you voted, so it doesn’t influence your opinion
You can vote and change your vote. It would be a useless feature.
People are less likely to change their vote afterwards than they are influenced before voting. It’s not meaningless. An opinion would form without first.
The “Reddit” way is to allow votes to be hidden for some length of time (often a few hours, but I think up to 1 day).
It’s to guard against bot accounts. I’d much rather have that instead of the clearly manipulated comment sections on Reddit. The pro-israel posting and down voting went away almost overnight when we got broader access and a few mods got called out about it. Go look at a comment section about it that hits all on Reddit, there’s clearly artificial voting going on.
It’s still not that hard to mess around but I’ll take what I can get, and I guess it does keep the racists away, even if it’s sometimes a false positive like in your case.
I agree that it is good with transparency, but then this should also be freely available on the Lemmy platform, and even the clients, in the same way as modlogs list what is going on.
I knew that admins could somehow go into the database and check who has done what, but I assumed that this was only the admin, and maybe even that the info was encrypted. It’s alright with me that it’s not, but then why not display it on each post and comment, with a list of interactions to it.
In this case, it’s this post:
https://quokk.au/comment/3048088Although, the comment where people were being called out, may have been removed (not sure if it’s because I have blocked the user, or they have blocked me)
I fully agree it should be transparent instead of a kind of trick you learn eventually. Won’t happen anytime soon though, the Lemmy devs are against the notion. They actually block lemvotes on their instance which is a bit ironic because they insta ban people for down voting a lot from what I understand.
Community moderators can also directly see who upvotes or downvotes posts and comments on their community.
It’s not just through lemvotes.
How?
it comes up as an option when you click on the “…” of a post
I was sceptic of the open concept at first. But now I find it appealing, because comment and post history are also public. If people wanted, they could probably extract my living place, job, sexual preferences and political opinions from my comment history of 1,000 comments. So why hide the up- and down votes?
This is the point though. Its it’s hidden by the platform, I feel like exposing it in public is against the sentiment
If voting was public through Lemmy and its clients, it would be more open and not only partly anonymous
I had assumed that if voting activity was meant to be public, there would have been a feed like the mod logs, for each users activity
That’s true, but I think this is more of a development thing than an actual aim of Lemmy. Due to the nature of federation, everything must be open. As the Software is strongly inspired by Reddit, transparent votes is something that is technically exposed via the API but not yet implemented in the UI. But I think any app developer could integrate this into their app if they liked. It seems like Mbin chose a different path way.
In general, there is no congruent sentiment in Lemmy development, but I agree there should be one or it should be discussed with the community. Have you looked if there is an already ongoing discussion on git?
I care more about PieFed, but I don’t know how they look on the topic though.
I just think it should be more obviously transparent, rather than the UI pretending it has no attribution.
I recall some proposal about adding the info to the UI and objections due to privacy concerns, which is just pretending something is private.
If you want to maintain some sort of privacy when voting on any platform in the Fediverse:
Create an alt account, do not make any posts/comments with it, only use it for voting.Otherwise we would need an instance that generates a bunch of voting accounts. Then, when you vote on something, the instance randomly assigns that vote to one of their voting accounts and sends out that vote information to other instances. Then only the Admins of your home instance would be able to view your voting history.
also don’t do this because fuck that
I’ve already run into a few people that have burners that upvote themselves and downvote any disagreements. Pretty cringe shit.
Lol, that is super lame.
