this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2024
815 points (97.9% liked)

Fediverse

28625 readers
378 users here now

A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).

If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to [email protected]!

Rules

Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration), Search Lemmy

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Probably better to post in the github issue rather than replying here.

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/4967

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 113 points 3 months ago (27 children)

I think people misunderstand. I too would prefer privacy, but theres a big BUT.

Due to how the federation works, anyone who is tech savvy enough can already see votes. One way is to run an instance.

This change doesn't lower privacy, it aligns expectations with reality. A false sense of privacy, which people obviously show here in the comments, is way more dangerous.

[–] IlovePizza 21 points 3 months ago (17 children)

I read about that. In my opinion is that what should change, if possible. There are good reasons why votes a secret in democracies.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 months ago (5 children)

Then again, private votes would be private for mods and admins too. So no more moderating vote brigading or downvote abuse or anything like that.

[–] IlovePizza 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Good point. Would it be useful to somewhat anonymize them by giving every user a unique code? So admins would see these codes but not easily know what users they represent.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I'm afraid this may enable a malicious instance to use this mechanism to manipulate votes while making it much harder to detect. I think transparent voting is much preferable.

[–] Iceblade02 4 points 3 months ago (1 children)

If we look at any of the big social media platforms with public votes, that has not prevented voting abuse through bots and the like. Rather it has served to fuel online harrassment campaigns and value of influential individuals votes (ooh Bill Gates liked X, Kamala Harris disliked Y etc.)

Aggregating votes rather than having individually visible votes serves the purpose of shifting focus to how the community values of the content. It's the same reason that we follow communities rather than people.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Vote aggregates would be insanely easy to maliciously manipulate. Also, the underlying protocol has no support for vote aggregates so this isn't even an option in the first place.

[–] Iceblade02 2 points 3 months ago

Votes already are presented to the end user in an aggregated fashion, as opposed to how it is on kbin/mbin. In any case, even in the current implementation manipulation is relatively easy, as an admin can just spin up extra accounts. The fediverse relies on trust.

load more comments (3 replies)
load more comments (14 replies)
load more comments (23 replies)