I think you should stop worrying about pointless internet points that donβt matter to anyone.
this post was submitted on 10 Nov 2023
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Vote brigading matters. If you're subscribed to a 'controversial' community and every post gets downvoted to oblivion, you and other subscribers who sort by 'hot/top' won't see the post unless they go directly to the community.
This slowly kills the community, even if its users are active on Lemmy.
This happens period in hive mind communities/instances.
Which is why I only sort by new
Still, very easy to miss a post from a small community when you've got many other larger subscriptions.
But everyone doesn't sort by new. So something like this matters.
I'm not. I only care about it at times if I'm not sure if my edgy joke lands right.
The problem is, here I want to stay anonymous. If I share an unique meme from c/risa on some other network e.g. discord, or even phone number-attached TG\FB\IG\whatever, reverse image search and then going to the upvotes makes it easy to narrow it down to who I am here. Easier, than watching packet sizes of said images via ISP or breaking into my phone\PC, and it can be done without any paperwork.
I'm yet to say something worth a notice on this or other accounts, I haven't shared secret schemes of warplanes like they do on WarThunder forums, but I'm very dissatisfied with how my state's doing, and there are laws making my critique a criminal offence. Yeah, right, they are this fragile. It won't stop me, but it concerns me that we, as Lemmings, think it's not that public, but kbiners see upvotes, instance admins see both, and a federated instance by your local CIA-thing can vaccuum it into their database once federated.
Compared to Reddit, Lemmy is better. But while Reddit needs to accept a request from authorities before giving up this aspect of one person's internet life, Lemmy requires a pretty simple data-mining server, and it'd suck in everyone's history.
I think it's inescapable with all this federating stuff. But it is a thing to keep in mind.
The problem is, here I want to stay anonymous
All social media by nature isn't. You can only try to not make it associable with your IRL identity
IMO public vote data is a small price to pay for not being targeted by ads and followed all over the internet, considering the alternatives are non-federated ad platforms that watch how long you spend scrolling, looking at specific items etc, altering your feed & suggestions to make them more money...
there are laws making my critique a criminal offence. Yeah, right, they are this fragile [...] and a federated instance by your local CIA-thing can vaccuum it into their database once federated
Just be mindful of what you post - sign up at an instance located overseas, don't interact with communities for your geographic region, don't post pictures. Won't stop a subpoena, but layer Tor on top and the origin is unknown. Won't stop data mining, but if there's no geographic hints in your post history they are SOL IMO
I think the instance admins might have access to this via their database.
Do you mean my home instance or where I participate from it?
I think you can see it from any instance that's federated with you. I am an instance admin for an instance where I am the only user, and I can see who is upvoting and downvoting you, who has a different home instance and is posting on a third instance.
Theoretically, you could create your own instance just to view this information.
Though, I am not a huge fan of making this information publicly visible because I think it will discourage people from voting if they know everyone can see how they voted. If you wanted to just check it for yourself, I don't think there's anything wrong with that.
I don't vote much on any posts or comments for exactly this reason. I wish it wasn't this way.
I agree, but I really don't see any other possible way to do this other than either having one entity in charge of voting information (all this power in one place leads to just having reddit again) or to just not store it (would make it trivial to manipulate votes). I think this is unfortunate just a limitation of federated software. All the information must be public. Even the contents of direct messages are visible in the database. I think can see every direct message between everyone on any instance federated with mine, though I haven't actually checked.
If you can see DMs between 2 e.g. sh.itjust.works users that's very worrying, but if you can only see messages where one participant is registered on your instance, that's just natural.
Other than that, I think vote information should only be visible to
- the instance's admins where the user is registered
- the community's mods (and in turn the admins of it's instance) where the reaction has taken place,
and not to any and all instance admin who is federating with your instance.
I strongly disagree with a communityβs mods being able to see user vote information. As a mod, I canβt even see the names of subscribers, and I like it that way. I donβt want responsibility for userβs privacy, or Iβd host my own instance and put the community there.
I agree that it is a limitation of the nature of federated software. All the same, it makes me nervous to interact. I would feel much better if it wasn't every instance owner, but just the owner of the one your account came from, or perhaps the one you were interacting with. I'm not anonymous enough to feel comfortable.
For now, you should consider making some alts.
Youβd probably be better off on an instance that has removed downvotes then. Being scared to upvote/downvote just because someone might want to look at an SQL database to find out it was you is insane. The percentage of people even bothering to do something like that is so miniscule.
Soon there will be 10 AI agents for every human mind. Weβre rapidly approaching the point where they can watch every telescreen all the time.
I think we should make every interaction publicly available, until we find a way to actually make it private. As you've said, anyone who wants and have the means will see the information anyway.
It shouldn't be terribly hard to create software that federates with other servers, but only for the purpose of displaying stuff like this.
That would be extremely easy. Other instances could probably defederate to to not have their data crawled, but I'm not 100% certain they would know which instance to defederate from.
If it was open source, lots of folks could run a node. The data could published on another site that would make it hard to figure out where it was coming from.
Any instance that federates your comment/post will have this data.
Thanks. Someone even snatched usernames of those who upvoted\downvoted a comment below. It means, mining that data is an entry-level programming even an intern in some office can do.
Every admin of every instance, with a little finagling, can see them. At least that was the case a few months ago.
For upvotes, just use Kbin.
For this thread: https://kbin.social/m/asklemmy@lemmy.ml/t/615424/Who-have-logs-of-how-users-vote/favourites
For downvotes, you need your own instance
You can see down votes on Kbin. The reduces are down votes.
kbin only shows downvotes from kbin users, not from lemmy users.
OP is on Lemmy, it does not work (I tried in the past)
There's already examples of social networks that have upvotes and downvotes public. Besides kbin.social, which isn't the most popular, there are some that have existed for a long time outside of the English speaking world, like meneane.net
Admins and instance owners will be seeing that information, and given how badly some of them behave without any remorse, I don't see any reason why that privilege shouldn't just be made accessible for all. Otherwise you have no way to judge downvotes, which just essentially makes them useless except for current thread sorting.
See who makes it, and you can generally get a sense if they are making a downvote honestly, just circlejerking it, or a high likelihood of an alt because a dead zombie account that hasn't made a comment in forever suddenly decides to downvote in a deeply nested debate. In my experience, there is a high correlation of people who want anonymous downvotes and people who don't want to be called out for their shit, even when they are admins who are constantly peeking to see who's downvoting them.
It's clearly not the doomsday that the naysayers say allowing it will be.
I would also like to know this as I have noticed patterns in my comments where suddenly all my comments drop by one point, as if someone is mass-downvoting me.