this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2023
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I don't understand your argument, wouldnt transparency in voting EXPOSE trolls? Pretty sure they've already caught some shenanigans that wouldn't have been so obvious without this functionality. So many instances (and even subreddits) just hide the downvote button, with the transparency if you dont like it dont downvote maybe install an extension that always hides the downvote button for just you.
So, the problem is that seeing who downvoted you lets a certain type of person track down and stalk people who disagree with them. Not only could your inbox get filled with "Why'd you downvote me bro?"-messages, it could lead to these people following others around to unrelated comment threads and harassing them as "retaliation".
I take it these people haven't found Kbin in any significant numbers yet and so it hasn't been a problem, but I'd be wary for the future.
Let me ask this question instead. What value does it add to know who downvoted you?
You can block people like that. And you will be able to see that they're "retaliating" against you because of the transparent voting system - you'll be able to say to the admins "look, this guy's done nothing over the past six hours except downvote every comment I've ever written" and if you're on an instance that cares about such things he can be taken care of.
I understand that but those things are added discomfort and hassle. If voting was anonymous, they would not be able to identify me and thus I wouldn't have an insult in my inbox to wince at before blocking the user and I wouldn't have my page full of retaliatory downvotes to report to an admin.
These aren't world ending flaws, but they are the trade-off. The negative downside to public voting. But what is the upside? What is the user level benefit I'm getting that makes tolerating the downside worth it?
Well, one upside is that it lets voting be a thing, since ActivityPub is public by nature.
It should be possible to build bots to detect these voting patterns. Reddit had plenty of user-created bots that helped moderators identify toxic or otherwise undesirable users to ban, something like that could be done in the Fediverse too. It's pretty early yet - there isn't even an API for Kbin as far as I'm aware - but once something like that is in place you might not even notice when your stalker gets caught.
I mean I wouldn't call that an upside in this context since the argument starts from the basic assumption that up/downvotes exist.
If votes by nature have to be public due to necessary operations of the ActivityPub protocol the entire argumentation becomes meaningless.
I still maintain that I prefer making accessing this this information harder rather than easier. Yes, a dedicated user can still spin up their own instance and check, but that added bothersome task is going to be enough to deter a lot of people.
It's kind of like a door lock. You can't stop anyone from getting into your house if they really want to, but locking your front door still reduces the risk of having your possessions stolen due to the added friction.
They do, that's why I said having them public is what lets voting be a thing.
There are instances out there that already hide some aspects of voting, beehaw.org doesn't show downvotes in their interface for example. But I expect that someone who's keen on being a troll or stalker will gravitate towards instances that have that information at their fingertips. Hiding the information from the interface of a particular instance doesn't make the actual data go away and a different instance can show it just fine.
That's what I'm trying to get at though. I understand that voting data will ultimately be accessible to anyone who is dedicated enough (they can spin up their own instance). You yourself seem to see why some instances might want to obfuscate this information seeing as you brought up BeeHaw. You yourself state that trolls and stalkers would like all this information at their fingertips. These are valid arguments for making this data more bothersome to access.
What are the positive benefits that motivates an instance to go in the opposite direction and make everything easily accessible and public? Whats the completion of the sentence "I think it's good that everyone can see who up/downvotes them because ___"?
The only two arguments I've gotten so far is that it might help identify bots/vote manipulation and a more general "it's technically publicly accessible by anyone so might as well just show it to everyone".
It's not just technically publicly available, though. Anyone can go to an instance that displays it (which is basically all of them) and take a look right now.
This is a thoroughly unbottled genie, the only way you're going to get it back inside is if every instance was to agree to hide this information and defederate from any stragglers that don't. It's infeasable at this point. IMO hiding the information on a few individual instances is only going to give a false sense of security.
Then they know the information is out there, and they can use it themselves to spot people who are abusing the system.
And regardless of whether you think it's "good", the information is out there.
This is true for Kbin, but I don't believe I have come across a Lemmy instance that shows you who up/downvoted you. Hell, as far as I know most Lemmy instances hide "karma" too. You have to check these things from the Kbin side (unless you spin up your own Lemmy instance). Which is the reason this whole thread started.
While it will be impossible to prevent those actively seek out this information, most people will still flock to the largest instances. A percentage of those will be inclined to want to abuse voting info. If the big instances obfuscate it, maybe some amount of harassment can be avoided. Even the friction of having to switch accounts to check will be enough to prevent some heat-of-the-moment reactions.
I guess that's the trade-off. Having everything easily and openly accessible makes things easy for trolls, stalkers and harassers; obfuscating it might mislead users into thinking they're anonymous.
Thank you for the answer. I'm still not convinced it's not worth trying to hide it, but that's a very fair and valid stance.
That's true. And regardless of how an instance decides to run it's voting policy, it's an important fact to make the users aware of.
Wasn't aware Lemmy was missing this information in their UI. I suppose that should satisfy those who want to avoid it, for now anyway.
I love this idea of "retaliatory downvotes". People take fantasy Internet points so ridiculously seriously!
Trolls know why they're being downvoted; for reasons I don't understand, they seem to enjoy it.
You probably shouldn't be downvoting people having a good-faith discussion, but if you do, the venn diagram of people having a good-faith discussion and unstable enough to harass someone for downvoting them is probably pretty small. Small enough for the block function to mitigate it.
Flip it around. Anonymous downvotes would let anyone spin up a lemmy instance, fill it with sockpuppet accounts, and downvote everything by hundreds or thousands of downvotes, and it would be impossible for users to know the difference.
You're right, it wouldn't be questions about why the downvote so much as just straight insults probably. I'm too hesitatant to use that sort of language so I didn't represent the type of message properly.
So the primary argument for why public downvotes are beneficial is that it helps prevent spam-infuencing posts and comments? Is this then not more of a problem with bot detection? And just how easy is it really to "just spin up an instance and fill it with sock puppet accounts"?
I don't know that I'd call it the primary argument, just an argument. And containerization makes hosting your own lemmy instance trivial.
Personally, if it makes people a little more judicious about applying a downvote, maybe that's a good thing.
What would you say is the primary argument?
I don't know by what metric I'd even use to quantify that. Why do you need one?
To form an opinion I like to hear arguments from both sides. I can come up with my own arguments as to why public downvotes might be bad (anonymous voting is a cornerstone of democracy, hidden votes makes engagement easier for socially shy individuals, aforementioned harassment), but I have a harder time finding its positives.
This isn't meant to be combative; I have tried thinking about ways I would use this information (apart from reporting bot spam) and none of them would add anything positive to my experience using the platform. If anything it could lead me to be unhealthily obsessed with checking activity for who upvotes and downvotes me. My experience doesn't equate to everyone though, so I'm curious to hear another perspective. I might very well be missing something big.
My question was more along the lines of "why do you need to label any given reason as a 'primary' argument". You've already been given counter-points.
I think that if you're concerned about this, you should seek out an instance that both does not federate downvotes and does not display the downvote button. Then you will be unable to downvote, and you won't see any downvotes from other instances.
But I think downvotes are an important part of how the sorting for a platform such as this operates and it helps deal with spam, off-topic posts and shitposting in serious communities etc.
I'm not against downvotes, I just don't see the benefit to publicly accessible data on who voted for what.
Have you stopped to think about how that works in practice? If I downvote something on kbin (where I am now) and it federates to feddit.nu, how does that work without also knowing my username? As I think I already saw someone point out to you, stripping out that information would make it very easy to send unlimited downvotes to any given instance, because it would just be a counter of downvotes without a user associated with it.
The only reason downvotes were "anonymous" on reddit was because it was closed source and didn't federate that information to other services. The downvote was still linked to your account, just obscured; Reddit admins could certainly see what you downvoted. This tactic won't work on any platform that uses ActivityPub, or something similar, without getting rid of downvotes entirely. It's probably best you get accustomed to this; treat it as you would a comment that says "I think people should see less of this" or something equivalent.
Well yes of course, I have never assumed otherwise, and this was never about that.
The truly dedicated can't be stopped, but most people aren't going to spin up their own instance to check who downvoted them. So you end up reducing the potential amount of harassment.
I still don't feel like I understand the benefits from easy access to voting info. The downside is that it makes life easy for trolls, stalkers and people of that nature. What's the upside?
All it takes is one person to spin up one instance.
You never actually showed how it made life easier for trolls and stalkers.
I'm just looking to understand the benefits of completely transparent public voting so I can weigh them against the downsides. That's how I like to form - or change - opinions.
Saying that trying to hide voting data is meaningless because it's impossible to hide completely anyway does not answer why public votes are good, it just tries to invalidate the question.
I'm looking for the completion of the sentence "I like that everyone is able to see who up/downvotes them because __"
Let's say I browse a news or politics related community on /New. Someone publishes an incendiary post that nevertheless skirts the rules such that it isn't within the grounds to report. I downvote it because it's not the type of content I want on that community. That person spends a single mouseclick to find me and sends me a hostile DM and/or goes and retaliation-downvotes everything on my profile. It's not a difficult situation to imagine.
You can't hand wave away the technical limitations like that. If you want downvotes, and you appear to want them, and you want to be on a federated system, and it appears you do, then the federation will require linking downvotes to users.
Downvotes aren't an outwardly anonymous way to show disagreement like they were used on Reddit. They're like a comment of disagreement. If someone harasses you for downvotes, report them. And block them. Just as you would if they did so for a comment you left.
I like that voting is public because it makes voting (up or down) a public statement. If I look at a person's voting history and see upvotes on racist comments and downvotes of well thought out comments I can know with some certainty that I can disregard the opinions of that person. Further, it might make people more thoughtful about what they vote on.
Well yes. They can still be made more or less easily accessible.
That's what I was looking for, thank you. I can definitely understand that perspective.
I definitely hope I'm wrong and this won't be an issue as Kbin grows its user base.
Only on a server by server basis. The data is being transmitted and received. If a server decides to hide that info, that doesn't necessarily mean that other ActivityPub compatible services will also hide it, let alone services running the same software.
You just need to get used to the idea that a vote is as much a pubic statement as a comment, and act accordingly.
Now? A bit troublesome. Soon enough, as the tooling improves? Trivial.
You don't even need to spin up a Lemmy instance specifically. There's some very small script-driven ActivityPub servers already showing up that can be used for this kind of activity with ease if you've got a minor amount of technical chops. Give it a few months and someone will have turnkeyed an ActivityPub harassment engine.