I woke up today, to a public comment in a Lemmy community asking a series of tagged accounts why they had downvoted certain posts
I thought that reactions to posts and comments are anonymous and now I don’t really know what to feel about Lemmy any more.
In this case I had downvoted a poster because of its design, but was confronted publicly for being racist because the person assumed that I downvoted the message on the poster
EDIT: changed the title from “How” to “Why” because it broke rule nr 5 about it being a support question
Votes being public is kinda cool, same for mod actions and who made them. Cool way to counter the Resdit type shadow, secret decisions and botted and bought votes.
Reddit even allows you to hide all your action history (no comment history), which is done to make it easier for bots and bought accounts to operate.
As for someone calling you or anyone out for voting certain way, who cares, tell them to go pound sand
Who cares? Upvote what you like, downvote what you don’t. Who cares if someone has a whinge.
It needs to be open for federation to work. It needs to share what votes are by whom from where. If instances don’t have this information they can’t really moderate. They can’t block people or other instances.
Users typically don’t have access to this information, but any admin does. Because of how federation works though, anyone can become an admin pretty easily. Also, you can go somewhere that publishes the data for you who’s done that work already.
I don’t see this as an issue personally. It’s just something to be aware of. I wish it was told to new users so they aren’t surprised, but now that you know you can be prepared. Always assume others can see your votes.
I just block anyone who confronts me about why I voted a certain way. “Because I felt like it, fuck off cunt” is my go-to justification.
I just blocked my votes from federating. it’s nobody’s business what I upvote.
If your votes don’t federate then they have no effect other than you seeing the arrow light up.
Everyone from my instance sees my votes. Which are the people who matter to me. Federate means between instances. A fair portion of our communities are similar, only allowing downvotes from members of trusted instances, which in our case are dbzer0 and quokk.au. I believe we also opted out of Lemvotes as well.
That just means you’re not voting …
I’m not explaining this to somebody again.
Does that happen?
I crashed out once and DMd someone who had downvoted a couple of my comments because I overreacted and thought I was being targeted. I’m not a particularly stable individual.
Felt terrible, they were a good sport about it though.
Happened to a few times to me. Usually tankies criticizing why I downvoted Russian propaganda in unrelated topics.
Downvote, block and move on
If someone is posting about you downvoting them, then they’re a seriously flawed individual. Some people will take any reason they can to call other people racist. I think it’s a fetish, honestly.
You’re fine.
The Fediverse is open, everything you do on here is fully public.
It’s why I prefer it over reddit, where who knows what really happens with all the vote manipulation and brigading.
To answer your question, it is all listed alongside upvotes on the posts if using mbin.
Depends on the instance, mine is an mbin instance but the upvotes and downvotes are hidden.
I remember coming across a site where you could put in a Fediverse URL and it would tell you who had upvoted and downvoted it, presumably it had an instance in the background that was tracking all that.
Edit: lemvotes.org, linked below by another comment.
Yes, the information is sent to your instance, and then is being censored by your instance. It’s personal choice for the instance and it’s support. But your instance must either be commonly supporting you not seeing it, or dictating you aren’t seeing it.
Kind of like the championship football game played in the U.S. today before the Superbowl, where Fox edited out access to seeing people paying tribute to the man murdered by ice.
Sometimes it’s good to have information, sometimes people think it is not
Wait what
I would like to see the ratio of up/down, because that’s IMO much more informative, if you allow votes at all. Personally I think votes just triggers some dopamine crap and is totally useless most of the times (exceptions are serious places where responsible people downvote wrong information for example)
I would like to see the ratio of up/down
That’s typically enabled/disabled in the settings of the client.
Fiddled around a bit and found a setting for that, or so it seems, gotta go collect some downvotes to try it out 😁
Thanks!
Edit: lemvotes.org, linked below by another comment.
Aw, shoot. It doesn’t seem to work for PieFed. For example, here’s a link straight to the original instance and thread: https://piefed.social/c/historyart/p/1701717/
Changing that “p” to “post” didn’t seem to work, either.
Isn’t PieFed explicitly written to make votes anonymous again? Or am I thinking of something else?
Thanks!
I’m also on fedia and I can see who upvoted and boosted a comment / thread / post.
Can’t see who downvoted, though. I’ve actually considered switching instances over this since that’s the most important thing to “be serious” with, it’d be nice if people were more judicious with their downvotes and having them be an obvious public thing might make people think twice about that. But the whole upvote/downvote thing in general just seems like a broken concept to me a this point and I don’t care all that much about it.
I am on an instance without downvotes and I really don’t miss it. I think it took me about a week for the muscle memory of downloading stupid comments to fade.
If something is truly outrageous, I take it as a sign to just block the author. And if something is against the rules, I’ll report it.
I think downvotes are hidden for every Mbin instance. I don’t know how it is with other software.
Fedia.io is also an mbin instance, you are speaking about the same thing.
Exactly. I enabled displaying the domains of every user, so I noticed that FaceDeer is on the same instance as I am and so wanted to point out this odd difference.
everything you do on here is fully public.
Even DMs?
Yes.
I don’t know of any clients that publicly show it, but the information is sent out as a json that can be read by anyone setup to receive them.
Thanks for the clarification but is it for non-local DMs only or even local DMs and if so why?
ActivityPub is public by design and admins can easily read DMs. Not sure about it Joe public can read any dm.
Admins of most services where data aren’t encrypted can read data that is not public so I’d assume that by default.
Now my question specifically is about “Joe public”.
Much easier to determine vote manipulation when there is no central authority to handle it and the votes, as well as moderation actions, are publicly visible.
The protocol is ActivityPub not ActivityPriv
I’m pretty sure the Pub doesn’t stand for Public, but rather Publish.
edit: not saying that it is private, just my opinion on whether the pub is an adjective or a verb
Still Publish, not Privish.
You are right but you can’t exactly publish something and expect it to be private
And what does publishing something do? Does it make it widely available to the public?
Indeed it does. However my intention was to say that Pub in ActivityPub is most likely not an adjective (public), but a verb (publish).
WHAT
And certainly not ActivityCafé
This one is gold :)
Isn’t the Fediverse supposed to be open?
You can show your personal support for something by upvoting it or your opposition to something by downvoting it, but if you don’t want to take a stance on something at all, you don’t have to.
It’s an entirely optional mechanic. You can fully utilize Lemmy to view, post, and comment without ever voting if you don’t want to.
As far as I’m aware, the votes don’t really matter, anyway. Lemmy doesn’t seem to use karma the way that Reddit does. i.e. I’ve never seen a post removed because the user didn’t have enough karma, etc.
I agree - I was just surprised to be confronted publicly by a user, for down voting a post. Not that I didn’t want to be exposed, but that people actually could look it up
Oh, 100% agree that it’s a bit unhinged to actively call out people because they down-dooted something you posted.
I don’t make it a habit to check, but it has been fun to check and call out in precisely two scenarios.
-
One user and I deep into a sub thread on a multiple day old post arguing about ettiquette here. Was weird to get multiple downvotes on those sorts of comments. They were using their “abandoned” alts.
-
Another thread where I had repeatedly asked someone to share the source for their claim despite them insisting that I just wasn’t googling right. I offered them to edit literally every comment (multiple thousand) on this account to sing their praises. Downvoted with no response.
-
There are communities on certain instances that have auto-moderators that take into account upvotes to ban/unban people.
Piefed also by default collapses any comment that has a negative vote. if the comment gets downvoted even further, it can even be shadowbanned by being hidden from anyone on Piefed. although you can change that or opt out, if you prefer to see every shitty take. Piefed also places bright warning icons next to the names of anyone with a bad rep. there’s quite a lot of personal control over what you see if you use Piefed.
Interesting! Not something I’ve encountered, but I suppose that’s what makes the Fediverse special! We can all control how we want to interact with things.
The real question is why do we even need upvotes or down votes at all?
It’s the main metric by which you determine what posts are popular.
And the first layer of moderation.
On other platforms, it’s a mechanism to assign a sort of “social worth” to people and ideas, and to tailor an algorithm to drive engagement.
I think it exists on Lemmy purely to make it feel more like “Reddit but federated.” Without the votes, this is just a normal message board. Lol
If you sort everything by Newest Comments, then the votes don’t matter to anything and it is just a normal message board. 😌
Exactly.
But if Lemmy was just seen as a federated message board, it wouldn’t have nearly the users that it does. It’s popularity rocketed (compared to the rest of the Fediverse) specifically because it takes so much of it’s style from Reddit.
So my instance doesn’t have down votes, but it’s still kind of like the inverted pyramid of a newspaper article. When I read the comments, I get all the most highly upvoted or new ones first, and by the time I get to the bottom of the comment thread with old comments with just one up-vote per post, I can feel the quality falling off, and I know it’s time to go back to scrolling the feed.
The lesson here is that your assumption about how the system works is wrong.
That means can mean 1 important thing :
- it was not explained clearly enough for you during your onboarding.
Consequently I suggest you recall when you started using Lemmy, how you heard about it, how you then understood how it work and thus potentially update the documentation (or whatever you relied on then) accordingly so that others don’t make the same mistake.
I was sceptic of the open concept at first. But now I find it appealing, because comment and post history are also public. If people wanted, they could probably extract my living place, job, sexual preferences and political opinions from my comment history of 1,000 comments. So why hide the up- and down votes?
This is the point though. Its it’s hidden by the platform, I feel like exposing it in public is against the sentiment
If voting was public through Lemmy and its clients, it would be more open and not only partly anonymous
I had assumed that if voting activity was meant to be public, there would have been a feed like the mod logs, for each users activity
That’s true, but I think this is more of a development thing than an actual aim of Lemmy. Due to the nature of federation, everything must be open. As the Software is strongly inspired by Reddit, transparent votes is something that is technically exposed via the API but not yet implemented in the UI. But I think any app developer could integrate this into their app if they liked. It seems like Mbin chose a different path way.
In general, there is no congruent sentiment in Lemmy development, but I agree there should be one or it should be discussed with the community. Have you looked if there is an already ongoing discussion on git?
I care more about PieFed, but I don’t know how they look on the topic though.
I just think it should be more obviously transparent, rather than the UI pretending it has no attribution.
I recall some proposal about adding the info to the UI and objections due to privacy concerns, which is just pretending something is private.
It’s to guard against bot accounts. I’d much rather have that instead of the clearly manipulated comment sections on Reddit. The pro-israel posting and down voting went away almost overnight when we got broader access and a few mods got called out about it. Go look at a comment section about it that hits all on Reddit, there’s clearly artificial voting going on.
It’s still not that hard to mess around but I’ll take what I can get, and I guess it does keep the racists away, even if it’s sometimes a false positive like in your case.
I agree that it is good with transparency, but then this should also be freely available on the Lemmy platform, and even the clients, in the same way as modlogs list what is going on.
I knew that admins could somehow go into the database and check who has done what, but I assumed that this was only the admin, and maybe even that the info was encrypted. It’s alright with me that it’s not, but then why not display it on each post and comment, with a list of interactions to it.
In this case, it’s this post:
https://quokk.au/comment/3048088Although, the comment where people were being called out, may have been removed (not sure if it’s because I have blocked the user, or they have blocked me)
I fully agree it should be transparent instead of a kind of trick you learn eventually. Won’t happen anytime soon though, the Lemmy devs are against the notion. They actually block lemvotes on their instance which is a bit ironic because they insta ban people for down voting a lot from what I understand.
Community moderators can also directly see who upvotes or downvotes posts and comments on their community.
It’s not just through lemvotes.
How?
it comes up as an option when you click on the “…” of a post
It’s pretty helpful sometimes when you can see who is brigading and where the majority of downvotes come from. Allows communities to better police themselves.
I woke up today, to a public comment in a Lemmy community asking a series of tagged accounts why they had downvoted certain posts
Which community/instance did this? I’d like to block it.
Wow, what a shitshow.
not surprising that it’s Deceptichum
(trying something: https://lemmyverse.link/quokk.au/comment/3048088 )
edit: not convinced, I still don’t know how to properly share a link of a post or comment in a way that all instances open it on their own
also:
hey @whyNotSquirrel@sh.itjust.works I see you downvoted my comment, care to share your opinion??
fuck you!
forgot to switch accounts?
Humor is lost on you.
Ah, that’s a common mistake, you have to file it under “humour” or it won’t be properly processed.
Dean Browning moment
No, fuucckk yoouuuuu!!!
You can’t, at least not yet. The only cross instance linkable is with communities. (i.e. !asklemmy@lemmy.world)
Seems to work fine in Voyager, opens in my home instance. But presumably that’s a feature of Voyager.
I’m not at all surprised who the OP here was.
I mostly solve this by upvoting what I like and ignoring the downvote option, reserving it for advertisement bots and spam.
I think that having the voting record hidden in the client UI makes more harm than good to be honest and would’ve preferred if the devs changed their mind on tricking end users that voting is anonymous.The federated design of fediverse means that upvotes and downvotes must sync between instances and as such they’re not hidden or anonymous in any real sense. Anyone with a fediverse instance can see the votes.
lemvotes.org democratise this by allowing everyone, not just techies with their own instance, to see the votes.
One should know that lemvotes.org isn’t a perfect source of truth though, when I lefthand scroll I sometimes fat finger a downvote that I remove again. The latest downvote in my record is one of those.
https://lemvotes.org/ state I downvoted a post:
https://feddit.uk/ sees 75 upvotes:
https://sopuli.xyz/ sees 75 upvotes and I clearly have not voted:
How dare you not upvote my post.
I blame it on rarely upvoting posts at all! Or maybe it was someone elses fault, must be someone else to blame. I think. Is it your fault? You made me not do it? You must’ve made me not do it. You’re to blame. I’m certain.
solve this by upvoting what I like
This doesn’t solve the privacy issue. It still enables bad actors to create a very detailed profile of who you are, just by looking at the content you upvoted. Your interests, political alignment, medical/mental health issues, sexual orientation… just to name a few.
If you don’t sign in or don’t interact, then you don’t have anything to worry about. Reddit doesn’t make votes public but it definitely is selling your voting data as well as IP and location data to third parties.
Lemmy just publishes the data it needs to make activity pub work. If you don’t do anything that generates an AP action then there is no data on you that somebody can compile. I agree that it probably isn’t a good idea to hide the fact that AP actions like upvotes or downvotes are public, but that’s how the protocol works
Yeah, if you wanna lurk and not comment because you want to stay private then I recommend not voting at all.
If a person is already engaging in communities with comments like you and I are right now then I think the added details from our upvotes only strengthen what they already know from our comments.I think most of my upvotes are in comment chains like this, when I think that they add value and are on topic.
I had assumed that this was somehow encrypted. Especially as it is not a build in feature of Lemmy itself, to show who has reacted in certain ways
And that assumption is why I think the choice of the devs to hide it was wrong. They essentially tricked you.
Having votes transparent makes manipulation much harder and people much nicer.
