this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2023
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Privacy
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Honestly, I am not down for this at all. It's one thing to be able to get that info by hosting your own instance and another thing to be publicly called out like that. From a privacy perspective, I just don't need the average joe seeing what I've been upvoting and downvoting.
I'm not a fan of votes being so public either. It almost seems to guarantee potential harassment as the platform grows. Hiding the "more" button on kbin only kicks the can down the road if this is a natural part of federating instances. The problem just comes back once a single instance makes the information available.
Without a change to the protocol, I think we're stuck with education. Maximize the awareness from users that votes behave differently here, and are entirely public.
People have moved from reddit expecting a 1:1 copy of the features, and for the most part it delivers. The comment system has all of the friendliness of upvoting, but if you click the arrows you're stuck committing to more of a retweet. This could really bite users who reuse their account name everywhere, and those that use their real name online.
People getting started should learn about this as soon as possible and really consider how it will affect them. Do they really want to engage with the NSFW content, or maybe a new username is in order?
It would be horrible if users were to arrive with the wrong impression, have a negative experience and regret showing up at all.
I'm with you on that. It definitely has me reevaluating how I interact with Lemmy.
This is something of a ticking time bomb, I think. I don't think the majority of people coming to Lemmy right now appreciate that their votes are public, and sooner or later somebody is going to write a bot or addon that uses that data to harass or censor users and it's going to be a scandal that scares people away.
Making votes public is a really bad idea because it disincentivizes users to vote how they like, for fear of reprisal. This is quintessential to a democratic system, and to a social media platform.
You want this place to grow, and order for it to grow, users have to interact. They are the engine behind the content aggregation, they should never feel hesitation to vote.
I couldn't have said it better myself. Voting secrecy is very important. There's a reason why your government ballot isn't posted on some public bulletin board in the town square for everyone to see. I see no reason why it should be any different for online community voting.
For me personally, I am somewhat okay with Lemmy's implementation because it isn't so public for the average user and is understandable given the requirements of federation (at least until we figure out a way to anonymize vote counts in aggregate), but kbin's implementation just crosses the line IMHO.
Here's an example of what I think we'll be seeing more of: A user getting called out and named for frequently downvoting: https://kbin.social/m/wholesome/t/80838/To-the-one-guy-who-keeps-downvoting-m-wholesome-threads
Don't think this is the last we'll see of this, and I think it definitely has the potential to impact peoples participation in the long run, with people self-censoring themselves out of fear of being called out for voting wrong.
But vote secrecy is difficult to implement with federated systems like these when the votes need to be federated between instances.
People will always be able to get the "raw" ActivityPub data anyhow to see who voted what, unless there's a major rewrite of how voting works, I believe. I'm not an expert in ActivityPub/Fediverse, though...
I didn't even realize votes are public here. On Reddit I've got that shit hidden because it's extremely personal data. Just through upvote/downvote patterns you can figure out what someone's likely political beliefs are, how religious they are, what their hobbies are, what disgusts them, what arouses them, what they find offensive...
It's genuinely insane that this stuff is public at all. I'm probably gonna stop using Lemmy because that shit being public is just way too dangerous imo, and I don't trust myself enough to not participate if I keep coming back.
If only reddit didn't commit seppeku, then I'd never have even considered something so poorly thought out.
The way I always viewed those up- and downvotes was as a quicker way of commenting with "I like/agree with this" or "I don't like/agree with this" and that would be there for everyone to see too, so why shouldn't that be true for upvotes?
Though it's bad design that you can't see this info on lemmy but you can see the info about lemmy users on kbin. Either have lemmy show that info too or limit the info on kbin to up/downvotes from kbin users only.
Because upvotes also have the effect of elevating the visibility of content. Therefore, very very often, I upvote content specifically to promote it whether or not I "like" it. Sometimes because it feels important, sometimes to support and encourage someone brave enough to share something they created or love even if it doesn't actually interest me at all.
Having my upvotes exposed to the public doesn't give me an opportunity to explain why I chose to upvote that specific thing.
The issue is that before you can voice your agreement or disagreement without publicly announcing it. Now it feels like you're forced to take a stand.
I get that it's a trivial thing when talking about benign topics like video games, but you might not want to publicly declare a position when talking about politics, human rights, sexuality, etc.