this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2023
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The best way to fuck a democratic process up is making votes public. No one should feel like there's a "deterrent" to voting. All that does is create incentive to reward/punish people for how they vote.
Voting is what fuels the content aggregation, too. It is a very bad idea to deter people from voting how they please because it strangles the algorithm of the data it needs to sort the content. You want people voting, a lot. That's what makes the whole thing work.
Edit: which is to say nothing of how bad it will get when people make tools that help automate retaliation for downvotes. You can potentially state an opinion in a comment and set up a bot to auto block every downvoter, then share that list publicly. You may think that sounds like a great system for weeding out hate but I promise you it's going to be far messier than that, and more importantly, this kind of retaliatory shit hurts the aggregation even more.
Votes on lemmy are inherently public, due to how federation works.
The US is based on Federalism and we don’t make our votes public
Votes are public on Lemmy, in the sense that if you have admin access to an instance that is federated you will be able to find who upvoted which posts/comments in the database.
That should really be changed so that you can only see the cumulative votes from any given instance and only a user's specific instance will have records of their individual upvotes and downvotes.
That would make pushing posts to the top via botting way too easy, and far harder to detect. Federation is intentionally set up so that instances do not trust each other.
IIRC ~~Kbin recently removed the ability~~ to show who faved/unfavved a post for Lemmy instances.
Edit: guess they did not 🤦
I swear there was discussion about hiding faves coming from lemmy... guess they decided not to. At least you can still follow people and see who else is following them... 🤦
It's pretty easy to spin up a temporary instance in a VM.
Since upvoting is most of what I do, I think it's great that people can see it was me who upvoted them.
I don't mind the accountability of a downvote at all. If I didn't craft a specific reply, it lets people know who to ask if they genuinely don't understand why their content was problematic.
Shhh dont give them ideas
You misread. What I wrote:
Voting and weaponizing downvotes are two very different things.
To be clear, I used the phrase "weaponizing downvotes" to paraphrase the intent behind the written policy I quoted in full. Here it is again:
Do not engage in content manipulation such as posting spam content, vote manipulation through using several user accounts or consistently down-voting a user. Vote for the content, not for the person.
Seems like you have a problem with the policy then, because it is requiring you to self-regulate your own voting, and to specifically NOT vote as you please, but in a way that is best for the community as a whole.
I’ve had a user disagree with me and then go through my entire post history and downvote every single one of my comments. I don’t get why someone would do that but I can see why Lemmy.world would put it against their terms of service.
I get that all the time. It amused me greatly until the day I found out I can turn off the Fantasy Internet Points entirely. Now I have no idea if my votes are up or down or sideways.
And I don't care.
Why is it necessary to count votes cast an unlimited time after posting. The best policy is to register votes in the UI for the user but silently ignore votes after max duration. So they can feel like they stuck it to you while not having an unreasonable effect. You could even detect and silently discard downvotes that matched that pattern or rate limit the downvotes against one party silently.
“Not my previous updoots😭”
It happened to me, and it was the She-Ra fans who did it. They were angry that I called them monarchists.
Then a downvote is justified, same user or not.
I think that if you access Lemmy via api, you can see who downvoted you specifically. I’d prefer it’d be turned off as I think people feel better about participation when they don’t have to go on the record to other users officially.
Just for clarity: it's not viewable through the API. As others have said, you need to spin up an instance. In contrast to the API, this means it's not free (due to server hosting and domain name costs), and it's not necessarily easy (for the non-techies).
Multiple accounts. It's somewhat unfortunate, but in a public ecosystem like the fediverse, it's pretty much a requirement to compartmentalize separate aspects of your personality. Particularly if you dare to hold different opinions on different things that don't align with majority social groups of people.
Honestly, not writing this from some dedicated "introspection" account, already makes me slightly uncomfortable 😐
Or maybe I've met too many people who care too much about what I think 🤷
I don't think so. I think the more likely scenario is this would lead to people weaponizing other's downvote history, and then very quickly people would stop downvoting completely. You'd have less downvotes overall, which is not always a good thing. At that point they should just remove the ability to downvote altogether, they'll be accomplishing the same thing.
Is it possible on Lemmy interface ? I thought that data required to have a look at the database
Not through the Lemmy webUI, but if you spin up an instance and subscribe to communities, the posts and comments will start getting federated to your database.
That's what I had in mind, thanks