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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“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?
Is it hard to imagine noticing that an account you generally trust has voted and matching their vote, even subconsciously?
Not only is it not hard to imagine its easy to imagine the benefits of using this information automatically. I could imagine a client side script which re-ordered content based on who I trusted who had up or down voted it.
So I have users A B C D E F who are known to me who have voted on a given post. D and E are idiots I disregard their votes. F literally hates everything I love so I count his votes inversely. A and B are fantastic I count them x10 I tend to agree with C so I count his x2.
Not only can I potentially re-score threads and comments based on whom I trust I can if I really trust someone’s opinion apply their weights as well, and the weights of the folks upstream.
I want to have the ability to turn on my echo chamber, when I want it, and also to be able to turn it off, when I want to step outside of it for awhile. This doesn’t have to be a toggle - it could be having an alt on a different instance.
I don’t want this choice made for me by people who think they know better how to run my own life than me. They can write an appeal that I will consider, but ultimately I want to make my own choice.
Having votes be publicly viewable allows us all the freedom to do as we choose with that information - including to ignore them entirely. What I would probably do with it is make large block lists of people on lemmy.ml, since it turns out that user blocks of an instance don’t block all that much. Fwiw, for everyone I’ve blocked in the past, I look through the post history to see if they merely are being disagreeable on a particular matter but overall are capable of contributing something substantive to a conversation, or are nothing more than a troll, setting out to vomit their emotions upon everyone worldwide across the Fediverse.
I’ve been a mod before, on Reddit, and am under no illusions anymore that everyone is worth listening to - a downvote from someone rational I will give serious thought about, but an idiot is an idiot, even if a community mod hasn’t banned them (yet?).
It’s like autocorrect: feel free to make suggestions, but it would be nice if I could have control when I want it, including/especially not wasting my time.
Yes, I too salivate at the idea that I could simply disappear all of the ideas I disagree with, but that is exactly how to turn a community into an echo chamber.
So I have users A B C D E F who are known to me who have voted on a given post. D and E are idiots I disregard their votes. F literally hates everything I love so I count his votes inversely. A and B are fantastic I count them x10 I tend to agree with C so I count his x2.
What you are suggesting here is, as I’m understanding it, a way to only get feedback from people you agree with and to never experience a critical discussion of ideas based on their merits.
Now, I’m not here to suggest that Lemmy is some kind of shining beacon of drama-free intellectualism, where every idea is discussed without bias or agenda, but I DO think it is valuable to hear from people whose lived experiences led them to a different conclusion than the one I’ve reached. Obviously there needs to be a mechanism to remove trolls from the discussion, but I fear a world where we only see content that we agree with, because then we will truly be removed from reality, and that’s not why I’m here.
There are a lot of people not worth attending to. If you do spend your time listening to these folks you don’t hear new ideas you hear the same bad ones over and over. It would be lovely that having noticed that someone is a persistent holocaust denier he could be added to a list that would disappear not only their contributions but their votes as well for thousands of users.
Sort by Top and I’m sure the crusaders of New will have everything sorted out by then. If you find these ideas being upvoted, you’re in the wrong community and you may be in a lemmygrad community. You’re on the wrong side of the train tracks and need to seek higher ground.
We don’t need to create literal echo chambers of people talking past each other because we block out any information that makes us uncomfortable. That’s not how we foster constructive dialog and
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.
introduces no new spam/brigade vulns which don’t already exist from a rogue instance
It does though. Now a rogue instance would have to have “believable” profiles for the accounts that vote, because an instance of just “lurkers” who seem to suspiciously vote is a pretty big signal of vote manipulation. If you only see a random identifier (or not even that, just a tally of votes) it’d be impossible to tell if it’s truly the instance’s users just passionate about something or actual vote manipulation.
In other words it would at least make the problem way worse.
The rogue instance would still need fake users though. It would be very easy to see if you are getting votes from 300 unique tokens, but the instance only has 100 users.
Also the method I am proposing would simply be transparent in terms of user management, so if you are running core Lemmy, the only way to generate voting tokens would be to generate users.
I guess that’s true. Then you could just ask the instance admins to check their users’ voting patterns / deanonymize them / whatever, and if they don’t comply defederate them.
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.
On Lemmy the concern isn’t even mod abuse - it’s just how much user telemetry is pushed around in plaintext which makes me uncomfortable. I’m sure there are already instances which do nothing but listen to AP traffic actively building activity and interest profiles on Lemmy users. Say what you will, but at least on reddit they have to buy that shit. And if such a rogue admin is even a little bit enterprising, there are a bunch of potential IP deanonymization attacks possible by serving up content targeted to specific users during specific times of day. And probably a bunch of other shady shit I haven’t thought of.
Honestly it’s more than a bit suspicious to me that AP and Lemmy has put seemingly zero effort into mitigating this sort of thing.
I like your funny words, magic man!
The version code hasn’t even hit 0.2 yet. Lemmy was founded by people who got banned from Reddit for being too toxic & extremist leftists, so went off to make their own replacement. They do what they like, and bc Rust is a difficult language to work with, not that many are willing to help.
Then after Huffman’s debacle, we started to see Kbin, Mbin, Piefed, Sublinks, and perhaps more - but none even as advanced as Lemmy yet.
But more to the point, that’s just the nature of an open network. Wouldn’t Wikipedia suffer from the same issues? Though less of an issue than a social media framework I would wager.
I’m guessing we saw the same one, and that’s literally the only instance I’ve completely blocked.
Was it midwest.social by any chance?
No, vegantheoryclub.org actually
The infallible Admiral Patrick perma-banned me from UnpopularOpinion for downvoting his posts. What a great guy - and by great guy, I mean twat.
That’s funny because I saw some initial comments made which then started this discussion. And what you’re suggesting was the intent. The issue as they (one of Lemmy’s developers) said was essentially frustration that their echo chamber had been pierced.
Any instances that actually show public downvotes? I’ve seen people talk about them but haven’t seen them yet
Yes, they should ideally. But it’s hard to properly implement them in a way that will guarantee anonymity and be sybil-resistant at the same time.
How do mods see them? As far as I am aware, you have to be an instance admin. But it’s not difficult or time consuming to spin one up and I doubt the average user of Lemmy is technically incapable; most of the Fediverse users in general seem to be IT people and developers.
someone commented on github (I think it was Desallines) that the vote viewing feature has been available since 0.19.4 . Lemmy world is still on 0.19.3 .
Being able to see the moderation history linked directly to a post was added then - but I don’t see vote viewing nor recall hearing about it, which would have been a huge deal.
Nothing4You commented Aug 14, 2024 •
mods can already see votes in communities they moderate since 0.19.4, so this would be reducing what is visible today:
and
Dessalines commented 5 days ago
I’d like to clarify that mods should only be able to see votes for the communities they mod only.
Admins can see all votes.
I dunno, we’re on 0.19.3 so I don’t see it but I guess it’s there.
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/4967#issuecomment-2289596923
Ah, mods only, and then only for their own communities - well, still, that’s something (though I’d prefer prefer it opened up for everyone). Thanks for the link.
Yeah, I moderate a few communities and have no idea how to see vote identities.
I suspect you need access to the database.
Looking at the source, “comment_like” seems to be where they’re stored.
Barring setting up an instance or viewing through mbin, I don’t think mods can see them. Only admins.
This is all I see as lead mod of 3d printing. I also checked and desktop is the same both in desktop mobile view and on my laptop.
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The point of privacy is pretty shaky in this context, tbh. Anybody using the fediverse is ensured pseudonymity already, the privacy issue should be whether your account(s) can be linked to your real life identity against your will.
In that regard I can only see positives to making voting public. Foremost it could create some accountability to the system, and maybe minimise the lazier drive-by, doom scroll votes?
I completely agree with the idea of more accountability. We are real people in acting public right here, we should be constantly aware that our actions have consequences. If you don’t want your pseudonym associated with a vote, don’t do it. It’s kinda like the opposite of 4chan, where instand of anonymous controversial content on top, here we have human-curated content being pushed up.
The problem with every system is it will eventually be broken down by someone smarter and used to manipulate the user-base that grew to trust its safety to market something. Be it ideas or products, the only true safety net we have is a choice in the decision. The second a choice is forced, is the second groups split away. Each user at least deserves the safety of choice if we expect them to trust in any larger system. Decisions being made by a smaller group of individuals for the larger whole, doesn’t exactly have the best history if we look at the world around us. Don’t get me wrong… Trust would be great, but we have to trust that going from one extreme to another will inevitably create a another new problem.
Couldn’t agree more, and if we passed around imaginary gold on Lemmy, I’d give you a dubloon for this.
I’m so, so glad to see I am not the only one that thinks this way.
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And now I definitely want to see whoever downvoted your post outed as cowards 👍👍
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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.
Even for delusional tech bro bullshit, the idea that public voting on an anonymous forum will do anything other than create drama is pretty fucking detached from reality.
Please be vocal about this because I’ve seen two people say they didn’t see this behavior. ❤️
yep, tyranny of the majority is still tyranny. It’s worth defending the 3% who disagree with the majority opinion cause, more often than not, sometimes the majority is wrong…
Defending the secret vote is the key to a functioning democracy, without it you just get cliques and in-groups who bully the outsiders. No one wins in that scenario, as critical thinking and critique are actively discouraged.
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.
No I’m worried about powertripping mods… That’s the issue.
Why is this so universal?
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.
I am Palestinian and I just got banned from world news ml for saying that some Israeli hostages experienced rape/sexual assault/abuse without “credible evidence”. Somehow the mod equated this with me not giving a fuck about Palestinian prisoners of war.
No my man… I was raped myself as a teen. So to me, all rapes are equal no matter who does it to whom.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sure, if and when we get the ability to ignore federated votes
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…
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.
We need to reveal downvotes so we can identify the ai lovers.
And then?
Also brigade them
You make a good point for anonymity of the votes
Thanks, that’s what I was getting at, but I still also hate ai shit.
