I really wanted to post this on !traaaaaaannnnnnnnnns@hexbear.net but I’m not trans myself and I didn’t want to take up their space.
Basically, the devs of Lemmy are looking to make upvotes public to everyone. Right now, I believe voter identities are known to server admins and mods.
I don’t have a strong opinion on this myself, either for or against, as I write this comment, but I’m wondering if there’s something I’m missing, frankly as a cishet dude.
But also… I’ve kinda lost trust in Nutomic making decisions about the software that won’t make things worse for trans people since his comments on the Olympics were made public. Dessalines has (so far) at least tolerated Nutomic’s transphobia despite whatever prior rhetoric. Frankly, I am suspicious that trans people don’t matter to the Lemmy dev team…to be charitable…so I’d really like to hear your thoughts.
Perhaps, when a user votes, their account could report two separate events to its home server. One that is just “I voted” and then another which is whether it was an up or down. The “I voted” packet simply prevents you from voting multiple times on one comment - the packet that reports whether it was an up- or down-vote would be encrypted, and when read simply increment a tally stored on the server that it reports to other servers. Servers would tell each other “X comment has Y upvotes and Z downvotes from my users” but those votes would be completely anonymous.
In this system, up and downvotes are stored in an append-only ledger, but the server acts as a trusted agent so it’s not a blockchain and it doesn’t have the environmental disaster that is proof-of-work. The regular process of federation/defederation should be sufficient for preventing bad actors from spinning up servers just to spam other servers’ vote tallies.
yeah an alternative proposal is they’re only public to the local instance admin and it groups its votes, sends them to the instance hosting the content, which adds them as totals annotated with the server.
But they’re still not private. Instance admins can see them, and you can still see which instances are voting on what content which doesn’t really improve much. Especially for small instances (e.g. if I have 10 people on an instance and only one user was active in a date range all votes are theirs).
Given how there are already problematic incentives to large instances I’m not sure we want to add to administrator (and everyone they care to share with) power based on size. Or deincentise users from signing up to small instances.
They shouldn’t be private. Have you seen the way that lemmy.world uses botting to force this site and others to defederate after drowning them out?
Just how far are you people going to take the cargo cult of Reddiquette?
Why are you even imitating mainstream social media rules from the 3rd most racist site in the universe? What broke people here?
I am discussing possible implementations with someone, pointing out that necessarily votes are public to at least someone. Not endorsing it.
If you read my closing paragraph you will see I come down against private votes.
I don’t know if it’s intended but you’re coming across very aggressive and I don’t feel there is cause, even if I disagreed with you.
I’m used to pinging everyone above me, consider it a general addition to the chat in the entire thread. Seeing people actually hashing out completely anonymous voting, making this flimsy platform even more vulnerable to manipualtion by petty psychos like myself, makes me even more pessimistic about people’s ability to learn from experiences with open source social media projects that imitate features which only work for corpos
The weird thing about this whole debate is it’s already public, just only to an elite of people with basic technical skill and some cash to burn + all their friends.
I’m half tempted to spin up a server and just post the votes of everyone who federates to prove the stupid point.
Hiding a user’s votes is not what turned Reddit into what it is. Showing a user’s votes, however, enables a lot of the worst behavior on sites like X, and I don’t want to see that stuff start happening on Lemmy. Frankly the best solution is what Hexbear already did - remove downvotes entirely.
Removed by mod
If you could direct me to the scientific study that compared social media sites with and without hidden likes/upvotes, then I would be happy to read it. Otherwise we’re both going off of vibes so fuck you.
First of all, because the Lemmy dev sucks at coding, and you guys are on ActivityPub, I can see all likes publicly anyways. What you’re doing is like pretending Mastodon private posts are actually private. It’s just an inconvenience.
You’re the only one making vibes based claims about why Elon was right to hide likes.
This is typical ActivityPub jibber jabber. You had one bad experience with another user abusing a feature, so nobody else gets to have it. Guess what? People use blocking maliciously. I’m using the reply feature right now maliciously.
I’m stating the obvious about how much easier platform manipulation is for instance admins - who have a conflict of interest about this - and itinerant technoskulkers like me to be the only ones who can tell when something is fishy with the likes.
The “stop bullying” argument for destroying ActivityPub is always so fucking funny to me. You people removed quote tweets. I can’t quote myself on basic Mastodon or search my own posts because people like you get taken seriously. But fortunately basic Mastodon sucks for many other reasons. It’s no skin off my back. Just validates my instincts about these projects when people try to pass off their personal issues as a reason to make platforms worse.
What do you mean by “you people?”