this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2023
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Hmm, yeah, I don't like this at all. I can see some benefits but I really don't want to have to worry about what I'm voting on. If I downvote some lunatic I don't want them being able to harass me about it. And it feels way too social-media-y for me. This could be a dealbreaker for a lot of people if there isn't at least a way to opt out.
The fediverse is always ahead on things like moderation, so I don't forsee downvote harassers becoming a thing here. Eventually, you'll be able to easily block/report/ban them.
I'm not even sure allowing an opt out would be technically feasible without some big work. Your votes have to be sent to other servers to keep counts consistent and you can't control whether that server shows or hides votes. So any option you set on your own instance won't have an effect outside your instance.
Apart from the issue of harassers, I don't see a good reason for hiding votes. Showing votes might help prevent brigades or similar vote harassment (e.g. user always downvotes another user they don't like).
I'm still figuring out how this works. Does Lemmy also make your votes public? It doesn't seem to me like it does (though I may be wrong) and that's part of the fediverse too, no?
I don't see anywhere in the lemmy UI where you can see votes, but I'm sure there's ways to get the votes through the API.
So maybe the solution is don't worry about votes being technically public but hide them from the UI, but I don't think even that solution is required.
Well, I'm sure Reddit tracked who voted on what behind the scenes too, sites have to or else you can just vote multiple times on multiple devices/apps/browsers. I'm not worried about that really, since it's unavoidable. Making them public is my issue.
I think the point is for the votes to be federated, the instance has to know who has actually voted. The issue being that information is then on the instance the post is hosting, and due to how posts propagate, there's nothing stopping another instance putting who voted on what front and center, and just pulling that data from the host instance.
Ah, I see the point there. That a new instance with a different UI could put them up.
I'm certainly no tech expert, but if it's about the API, then how did third-party Reddit apps work with it? The votes definitely synced between different versions of Reddit, could a third-party Reddit app have been made that showed votes publicly? If not, what was the system behind that, and could it work here? Again, no idea, there may be a very good reason why what I'm thinking wouldn't work, but I dunno what it would be.
I'm far from an expert on this sort of thing, but I would wager that the only voting data available through Reddit's API is the current number of up and downvotes, the overall vote score, and whether the account requesting the information has up or down voted, for any given post / comment.
It can do that because the data is centralised, and every account exists in one place, whereas federation has to say "[email protected] upvoted this comment, and so did [email protected]", because there's nowhere to store that data centrally, other than the post itself.