I mod a few communities and I can now see who has upvoted or downvoted any comment or post in the community.
You’d think any mod would like that data being available to find any issue user. But I feel like invasive with this.
I know admins have long been able to see this data.
Also its not like its personally information, just your screen name associated with your own activity, as your posts and comments are. But the passive act of voting is now very public which is a bit icky to me.
How do you all feel about this?
I’m sorry I haven’t been super active on Lemmy and missed much of the conversation around this. I’ll go find any relevant discussions too.
You can read the github comments on this question
Long story short: The overwhelming consensus is that ppl prefer their votes to be private, but to avoid targeted vote manipulation (which is pretty common now unfortunately), votes in lemmy are semi-private: only visible to admins and mods, but not to the majority of users.
Yeah I mod like 10 communities and I feel wrong doing it. Dont think I’ll ever be checking that again.
Entirely up to you.
For larger communities, its a must, since people use no-content accounts or bot accounts to mass up or downvote content.
Would you say 3k subscribers and 1k monthly users is a big amount?
I genuinely dont know what to classify as big
Votes have always been public though? Nothing about the fediverse is private or secure. It’s that way by design. This just makes some features easier to access.
True, but some UI decisions can make good behavior easier, or unhealthy behavior harder. Even if downvotes are technically public already, I think it’s a good idea to at least have a little bit of a barrier up, to make it less tempting to check. Having to manually go to lemvotes provides a decent barrier.
This is the first I’ve heard about it (I’m on piefed myself), but I don’t think it’s a good idea. People will get snippier when they have this info available to them.
Removed by mod
They’re visible on other fedi platforms, making it trivially easy for assholes to go looking for who downvoted them anyway. The illusion of safety is a dereliction of duty to users.
Also, downvotes exist to allow large social sites to give the illusion of moderation and user agency while ignoring their duty to actually manage their spaces. They’re not needed here, and their existence promotes excessively large and unmanageable communities where people shout into voids and engage with hostility rather than discuss topics with people. Their use and inclusion should be seriously reconsidered.
I agree that it’s good to let users know that their votes are public, but I think it would be better to just tell them that (kind of like how Mastodon says “heads up, DMs are not encrypted”) and not by also giving them easy access to that information. Simply because if it’s easier for more people to do, then more people will be tempted to do it.
I definitely agree that downvotes should be reconsidered entirely. It’s basically outsourcing moderation duties to the users, not to mention that people will always incorrectly use it as a “disagree” button.
Thats what I’ve always heard.
And you’re right, I just stumbled into this by mistake, didn’t intend to, wasn’t looking for it, it was just right there.
Being so in your face is basically the equivalent of being there for the first time for someone as tech illiterate as I am.
I’ll keep repeating this to everyone who makes this point. Do you think that’s okay?
I think it’s better for everyone to see this information so no one thinks it’s private.
Not the OP, but yes I personally do.
Is there a way to make votes private in the fediverse? Seems tricky given the voting data needs to be visible to every federated server
There is at the server level. The tools that show votes publicly can be defederated from the instance. dbzer0 did it recently with an instance that was felt to be invasive - not sure why it wasn’t done for all upvote tracking tools.
On the face of things, being open about voting is good. Vote manipulation can be handled by the masses instead of some dystopian head admins.
On the other hand sensitive idiots use the voting data to ban others from communities. Reddit started a rumour that voting habits were being used to ban users off the site for their political views, but on Lemmy it’s more obvious. Bans for “vote manipulation” for down voting a single post in a community have been reported multiple times on YePowerTrippinBastards.
It’s a double edged sword.
If power-hungry mods want to discredit themselves by banning people for a single downvote and then getting bad publicity for it, and then risking the chance that a rival community is set up - draining their numbers, then so be it. I’m all for people showing us who they are in those situations.
My understanding is that all of this vote data is already exchanged on the public Internet, and that it has to be this way for federation to work. It’s a client and interface design feature to show the data or not to show the data. So you should probably assume that icky people on the Internet are already looking at it.
Yeah that’s fair enough. Better everyone sees it than just a few ig?
It was already public to anybody willing to put in the work and extract the data.
Making things easier can have consequences.
So that makes it alright?
I have no problem with it.
People need to be aware, nothing on social media is private.There are a shit ton of serial downvoters, and as a mod, this helps you find them. Not as much on the larger instances, but the small ones. If you just post something and there are 30 users, and there are 8 downvotes, it’s pretty obvious what they’re doing.
I’ve been banned from a few communities cause o reflexively downvote anything that’s AI generated.
That’s valid. But you’re not going to go to a community that accepts AI then, so being banned is probably not a big deal. You don’t want that in your feed either.
Also, people have been wrong about AI, sometimes it’s a photoshopped photo. I’ve had a real photo serial downvoted because people thought it was AI and it wasn’t.
Yeah it’s a mix of “fair enough” , and “are you really monitoring votes close enough to even find me?”. If I went out of my way to downvote everything then I would say the ban is 100% justified. At this point I can see the point of view, but also is it worth the effort, when I will probably block the community anyways?
You’re not a troll, that’s why I think you don’t understand. I post something that’s not controversial and a “who cares?” kind of post. Then, like 10 minutes later, it gets downvoted 12 upvotes in a block. This is a place with like 30 subscribers. I quickly check who’s downvoting so much so quickly, with the obvious intent to hide the post. The users who have no other comments, I’ll ban them. That community is not for them. If the person seems real, I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt. I don’t care about downvotes in general, just the trolling kind.
I know, was a big thing on lemmy.dbzer0.com but. I’d rather get rid of downvotes than have them be so public
I personally prefer them. They’re not perfect, but it’s better than having a facebook kind of experience.
Understandable
I don’t personally understand the purpose of downvotes. They seem to mostly gather on posts that should be removed by a moderator or on jokes that were misunderstood. Seems pointless.
Ive actually anyways liked the idea of having net votes
I think it’s kinda good, we just need to get used to it. I mean lots of platforms have public votes/reactions, even Facebook shows who liked/reacted on posts.
