this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2024
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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.
I read about that. In my opinion is that what should change, if possible. There are good reasons why votes a secret in democracies.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.