I am literally here, now, commenting on this because I am reading the article to this on reddit and ..... I can't believe they are going to start punishing upvotes! That is the final stray for Reddit. Its dead. Gone the way of Digg. I am literally here now to start moving over to Lemmy.
I just realized - and must keep in mind, with a federated platform like lemmy, all of your upvotes and downvotes are broadcasted across the network. ANYONE could track your upvotes and downvotes in THIS system.
If an instance becomes oppressive, nothing is stopping you from going to a new one. You can’t do that with Reddit. Let’s say my instance Lemmy.ca becomes awful, I can make a new account on another and still comment on this community. That’s the beauty of the Fediverse.
If I post to a public website in a plaintext protocol and my ISP also intercepts+logs that transmission, is it spying since the post was public anyhow?
So keep that in mind when interacting with the fediverse
These are public forums, it's almost the point for things to be public. You could argue that votes shouldn't be part of it, but ultimately due to the decentralized nature they must be communicated to all servers
I mean any organization that's a risk to use my data maliciously is one that can afford buying it, so I actually prefer this to my data being equally easy to access but reddit gets paid for it.
My comment isn't too say that Reddit is good, but rather that we might be able to do things on Lemmy a bit better for user safety/privacy. Aggregating upvotes to an origin seems good to me
But then they would be easier to spoof and thereby enact vote manipulation.
PieFed was doing some experiments along those lines. Personally I don't like the idea of fully anonymous voting and would rather go the other way and make them fully public - that would give people pause before doing things like downvoting every single reply to a post or every post in a community, or following people around and downvoting everything that they do.
Voting ideally would be a 2-way proposition where someone can offer their opinion, and the recipient should have the ability to choose whether to receive it or not - i.e. be able to block someone who is abusive, or whole entire instances where that is exceedingly common (cough Hexbear cough, and their very common alts on Lemmy.ml).
Banning for mentioning Luigi is just absurd. Up voting has been a thing for a while , they just extended what it violated. Before this, up voting excessively or so soon after account creation flags you as a bot
Here is an example of an instance admin abusing the privilege of being able to see who voted for what content. OTOH, this incident was noted, and people started abandoning whole entire communities there and moving them elsewhere.
THIS is the freedom that the Fediverse offers: not that you can do whatever you want, but that you don't have to remain beholden to anyone else (like spez), and instead can move elsewhere at any time, while still accessing the entirety of the Fediverse (unlike Reddit which gates it behind their API limiters, for the sake of profit).