Suggestion: If votes aren't private on Lemmy, own it and show what users up/down voted.
Suggestion: If votes aren't private on Lemmy, own it and show what users up/down voted.
I think the only thing worse than something not being private, is if the fact that it's not private is not common knowledge leading to tons of people thinking it's private.
Lemmy doesn't even show a list of what you the logged in user voted on. But it's trivial to use an external tool to see who voted on what regardless of whose account it is. I think obsecuring information like this does more harm than good, since a lot of people won't actively go out and research what kind of data in their Lemmy account is publicly accessible beyond the data they can see from the website itself.
It's been discussed before that there isn't an easy way to hide who voted for what on a federated platform while still having all the instances correctly count votes for everyone. Therefore, if actually making votes anonymous seems not to be viable, why not just make it public for everyone like Mastodon does? I don't think we should make them inbox items like on Mastodon, or at least not the same inbox as the rest of the notifications so votes don't drown them out. I think a dropdown on the content itself showing who voted on it and in which direction is probably enough. Also a tab on the user page showing a list of everything the user voted on, at least on the logged in user's own page (I mainly want this so I can keep track of what I voted on).
Honestly I think you are right. If it were obvious votes were public people would act differently, and while that's not desirable from a content perspective, it is from a user perspective.
People don't know unless it is in their face. Put it where everyone can see it. More drama, more engagement? Whatever.
I voted your comment up btw
I'm on that honour system now
You, sir, deserve and upvotr
Honestly I think you are right. If it were obvious votes were public people would act differently
Why? Lemmy is a pseudonymous platform. Who cares what content individual users up or downvote. The votes being public is the only way to deal with brigading across instances.
But it’s trivial to use an external tool to see who voted on what regardless of whose account it is.
It’s also trivial for us to defederate from such tools, which our instance and others have done in the case of lemvotes.
You’re not wrong but you are part of the problem that lets malicious accounts game the algorithms.
Why are you against something that would target bad actors?
The comments below started me on a trail that led me to a relevant comment from a Lemmy dev:
I want to remind everyone that since users overwhelmingly don't want their votes snooped on (for good reason), we will never add anything like this inside lemmy, lemmy-ui, or jerboa.
Wouldn’t it make more sense to either implement real vote privacy or just open the viewing window up for everyone equally?
Vote privacy can be tricky in an environment where every vote gets sent to thousands of instances and needs to be verified as legit via the ActivityPub protocol.
Piefed does a good job of this I think. If vote privacy is enabled, they create a second account that is used only for votes. Other instances see the votes and can validate them against the vote account but it's not tied to the actual user (except in their home server database).
A benefit of this is that the vote account for the user is always the same, so you can still track vote manipulation, and ban the vote account if needed.
I liked the visibility of votes on kbin, convenient to see if one was getting up or down votes from a variety of users and not just the same people over and over.
But it’s trivial to use an external tool to see who voted on what regardless of whose account it is
Is there a tool made for this out there? As far as I'm aware, the simplest way for the average user to do that is to run their own instance and then manually query its database directly, which is far from trivial.
This came out a day or two ago, which removes that hurdle: https://lemvotes.org/
Just paste the permalink in. Works on posts, comments, and users.
It was only a matter of time.
There is. (YMMV, it doesn't always work)
Eh, that seems like a shit ton of clutter for no real benefit.
As it is, if someone wants the info, it's easy to get, but doesn't add more junk to the UI
There are several big name accounts on the fediverse that are very likely committing vote manipulation. If you mention it in the thread you will be brigaded. I see it everyday from the same accounts. Those same threads will have highly upvoted AI slop that most times doesn’t even relate to the thread. Not even a Markov chain, just completely unrelated. The same people that upvoted the original post all upvote the same AI slop. Comments that are related to the topic have much lower engagement.
I was going to spin up my own instance to track these people and later put out a report but I am currently way too busy to do that. Maybe in a couple weeks I can get started. If anyone else is as annoyed as me about this feel free to get started tracking these people and share the data with everyone please.
who do you think those are?
It’s not proper to drop names until we have evidence. I could be wrong about a few. However, It unlikely that we are wrong about them all.
I think most people already suspect some of the same accounts and can offer up names but I don’t think they should either. It’s probably best to gather evidence against them without them knowing we are looking at them.