this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2023
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You Should Know

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YSK - for all the things that can make your life easier!

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Why YSK: your upvotes (favorites) and downvotes( reduces) are public information.

If you are browsing through https://kbin.social/ or whatever just click on "more" then activity.

There you'll see info like boosts, reduces (downvotes), and favorites (upvotes?)

Works with all instances for lemmy or kbin material

top 41 comments
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[–] Ivyy_LemmyW 8 points 2 years ago (3 children)

Is it the same for Lemmy?

Or for Kbin users when they visit Lemmy?

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 years ago (1 children)

what ever it is, I dont like it. Nutters will find all ur history and chase you all over the fediworse for stupid reasons. We need some anonymity pls

[–] Ivyy_LemmyW 4 points 2 years ago

I think the same, but it won't be fixed since that's how activitypub works: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3291

Kbin dev said it won't fix this as it wouldn't be easy (one user proposed to hide votes for Kbin when posts and comments come from Lemmy): https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core/issues/3

The problem here is how Kbin handles the information obtained from Lemmy, I guess one way to solve this could be to block interoperability between Lemmy and Kbin.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago

You can see the information through kbin but not through lemmy that I know of. So for your comment it is https://kbin.social/m/[email protected]/t/82174/YSK-You-can-view-upvote-and-downvote-information-through-kbin/comment/347422/favourites

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago (5 children)

That's true, I don't think it should be allowed.

image

[–] fubo 10 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Anyone can stand up their own instance, subscribe to remote communities, and start receiving all the data necessary to show those communities. That includes posts, comments, and votes too.

Every instance operator is in control of a database containing all the activity for communities that instance's users are subscribed to. They can do whatever they like with that data. That's a consequence of how federation works.

The protocol as it stands today is also generally vulnerable to any malicious instance. A malicious Lemmy server could emit spam, send out bogus votes, or alter its users' comments after the fact (ahem, spez) and disseminate the modified versions. The main tool that other instances have to deal with a malicious instance is ... yup, defederating.

Ultimately, other federated services in Internet history have adopted different ways to deal with this problem:

  • IRC doesn't have a single federation; it has many federations ("IRC networks"), and server operators form peering relationships with one another based on mutual trust and agreement to uphold various rules. A given chat channel only exists on a single IRC network; you can't reach Libera.chat's #linux from a DALnet server. And occasionally a federation completely blows up — see e.g. the 2021 collapse of the Freenode network due to admin abuse.
  • Usenet pretty much floundered on spam mitigation because well-behaved servers didn't eject the malicious and ill-maintained ones.
  • Email has dozens or hundreds of different ways of dealing with bad instances (i.e. mail servers that emit spam), including published blocklists of known offenders' IP addresses. But even then, major mail servers depend on all manner of filters (including ML classifiers these days!) on top of straight IP blocking.
[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

the information must be public for activitypub to work properly. not exposing it through the UI just means people are less likely to be aware that the information is not private

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

I think it is fine, since likes on twitter have been public. People just need to change their habits on upvoting and downvoting that they got used to when they were on reddit. So need to adjust to how people would go and downvote whatever comment they disliked and move on. Now that stuff is public, so maybe it can help against brigading?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 years ago (2 children)

I'm more concerned about the more toxic people having access to the names and profiles of people who downvote them. Reddit had a lot of crazies, and it seems like a good tool for targeted harassment. Not to mention, what's stopping them from having alt accounts on different instances and continuing even after they've been blocked or even banned on one account?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago

That is valid. It's part of why I wanted to make people know about how upvoting and downvoting works so they can be more mindful about how they use it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Report harassment to admins. This isn't Reddit. On commercial social media, harassment is just "high engagement", and so there's incentives to not immediately remove harasser. That's not true here.

Trust admins to take out the trash. If they don't, find a new instance with an admin who will and don't look back.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

Harassment can go further than just on this site, admins can't do anything outside the media they control.

Public votes are a bad thing, some people are crazy or just assholes.
This will serve as a dis-incentive to participation and engagement.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

I disagree, but I'm telling you here instead of downvoting you. See how that works?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Why not? If you are not willing to show colour, the simply don’t vote.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Because we can have better privacy without discouraging engagement.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I see the visibility as a great positive.

How is my privacy affected if my votes are visible?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

It affects those who don't want their votes visible and for random stranger to track their activities. That's why this is better as an opt in for those who want them and have them be invisible for those who don't want to share it. Think of how you can set your Youtube playlists like favourites to private or unlisted.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (2 children)

I think he/she meant visibility of favourites and not the voting.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Upvotes are favourite, and downvotes are "reduces".

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

Voting and marking as favourite is one and the same here.

[–] _MoveSwiftly 5 points 2 years ago

Could you please add a "Why YSK:"? It's rule #2. :)

[–] dystop 4 points 2 years ago (3 children)

I can see this information on Lemmy without jumping through hoops... Is this meant for kbin users?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago

Do you mean being able to see users who upvoted or downvoted you? I'm not aware of where that option is available through lemmy.

https://kbin.social/m/[email protected]/t/82174/YSK-You-can-view-upvote-and-downvote-information-through-kbin/comment/347745/favourites

I'm sure how to access that through lemmy. When expanding I only see extra options like message, report, block, save, and view source.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

It's meant for everyone federated through ActivityPub.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago
[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago (2 children)

What's the difference between a favorite and a boost?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

I think favorites are just recording upvotes right now and boosts work like retweeting. If anyone is following you they would get your boost.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

A boost is like a Twitter "retweet", it reposts the content to the booster's personal timeline for people who follow them to see. For example, right now, two people have boosted your question. If you go to "more --> activity" you can see who boosted you, go to their profiles and find your comment "What's the difference between a favorite and a boost?" on their respective profiles under boosts.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Also, at least in kbin.social, it allows the user to save the post/comment (i don't know how to bookmark otherwise).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

Upvotes are actually your favourites - https://kbin.social/fav
It's a bodge from when kbin and Lemmy started federating with each other and had to merge their systems. Before that boosts were the kbin upvotes, but they aren't used on Lemmy.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Another important difference is the "reputation score" for each user profile.

  • Favourites (up arrow) on posts and comments do not contribute in any way to reputation.
  • Reduce (down arrow) does reduce your reputation by 1 point
  • Boost (bottom of comments) increases your reputation by 1 point.

I understand the reasoning why the devs separated favourites and boosts but your average user (especially reddit refugees) do not understand this. I think that reputation should also include favourites in the calculation.

I personally use reputation as an indicator that I'm contrbuting in a postive way to a community not really as a winning "fake internet points" thing.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

That is most likely unintentional though. Boosts are like retweets, they get posted for your followers and are publicly visible. The reputation system of old was based on either boosting - the post is good so you want to show it to more users - and reducing, hiding and burrowing it. So it wasn't like reddit, it was twitter with downvotes.

I'm fairly sure it will get changed eventually. How exactly, I'm not sure - lemmy doesn't have any reputation at all so it might even get removed entirely.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

That's true, it is visible. But this information is public, and anyone who has their own instance also has access to it. The interface is consistent with Mastodon and other platforms where you can view likes and boosts. There are several ways to improve this - completely hide this information in the threads section, hide the activity of users from remote instances, or exclude Lemmy's instances from the activity... but still... It's just covering up one's eyes.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

I think it was a good idea to let us see it. As long as the information is public, anyone should be able to view it.

[–] zeppo 1 points 2 years ago

this feels like the physics definition of 'information'

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

It's also useful to see who went on a downvote party, as just happened on that dodgyassturtle post.

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