Every instance of lemmy and every server that speaks the same protocol knows who up/down voted any post. Your votes are public information.
this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2023
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Kinda weird that this isnt sent to the server and only server. Ig it keeps them honest, but if they really wanted to mess with the numbers, bot accounts do exist
Yes this is something that Kbin users can do (by selecting More > Activity on a post) and I believe Lemmy users can do this too but not with the native inrerface.
Lemmy admins can natively do this, but not regular users.
Isn't that weird?
Kbin users can see it, admins can see it, but Lemmy users cannot.
are you saying that it’s weird that lemmy users can’t see the votes, or that kbin users can?
i’d agree that it’s weird that lemmy users can’t see votes, however i can see the argument:
people have said that their votes should be private, and that if votes can’t be private (let’s make that assumption for the moment because that’s the way the core communication of the network works) then at least it shouldn’t be trivial to get access to that information
that’s a valid position to take
the counter is that if the information is public, simply making it slightly more difficult to access only hurts the people who wouldn’t use that information for nefarious purposes anyway… and by hiding the information, you simply make people less aware that the information is actually public!
lemmy users tend to be unaware that votes are public information, whilst kbin users seem to have more of an understanding of that. i’d say that knowledge helps people act accordingly
there’s also the “let’s change the protocol so votes are truly private” discussion, which is also valid but a far bigger effort, and is also against some of the values of the fediverse (that everything is transparent)
Yeah, I agree this unwanted behavior of Lemmy. It's a variation on 'security by obscurity'. It's 'social security' by obscurity. Except that it isn't obscure at all.
I didn't know Kbin users could see the upvotes, but I've just discovered that kbin users only see favorites. Just like on Mastodon.
Check out the Kbin page @banaflip@kbin.social shared in another comment. You can see who upvoted your comment under 'activity'. If you upvote my comment, my comment favorite count increases with one. And you can see you are one of the 'upvoters' under favorites.
If however you downvote my comment, one of the favorites appears to get removed. By you. Even if you didn't upvote before. At least, that's what I think happened when I tried this on another comment.
While it's not a feature of lemmy, you can if you absolutely need to, without being subscribed to a kbin instance.
See for yourself: Go to here to see this very thread on kbin, scroll down and click on the "favourites" tab, it will show you precisely who voted how on your post and when. For comments, see hitagi's reply.
Interesting. But that's more like the Mastodon favorite I guess. And considering the heavy Mastodon/Kbin similarities, that's not surprising of course.
There's also a downvote and upvote section, but those are all empty.
I'll deliberately try to downvote your comment to see what happens.
Edit: indeed, there's no downvote. Just one less upvote. How does this work?
Edit2: I've undone my downvote and now two favorites show again. But what's weird is that my downvote simply removed the upvote of the (first?) upvoter of your comment. Is this really what Kbin does? You cannot start removing upvotes of random other users can you?
Please continue your investigations and report back.
Well, that's about it. But isn't this strange?
- Upvotes/downvotes are actually favorites on Kbin
- If a Lemmy user downvotes a Kbin comment, one favorite gets removed
At least, that's what appears to be happening. You can check for yourself with the link provided to the Kbin instance above.
I'm not aware that I have the ability to do that and I don't see an option to unless I query the database.
Every instance of lemmy and every server that speaks the same protocol knows who up/down voted any post. Your votes are public information.
Right but there's casually available information and some that requires a little more effort
Kbin doesn't federate downvotes, so it only knows half of that, and can't display what it doesn't know.
So, are Kbin votes not public?
Kbin let's you see it all, on a thread-by-thread/comment-by-comment basis. For example I'll (for a moment) downvote your comment. If I check it's activity, this is what I see. https://imgur.com/a/uTgEuUt
Favourites is upvotes, reduces are downvotes, boosts are the twitter/mastodon 'retweet' equivalent. Doesn't matter what instance the comment is on, kbin, lemmy, we can see them for posts and comments. Solely on the thread. I can't go to your profile and see a history of what and who you downvote, but if you downvoted/upvoted me right now for example, I can 100% tell who you are and which you did.
Hmm, the imgur link doesn't seem to be loading for me but I get what you're saying I think. That's pretty cool, I'll have to check out Kbin some more.
I'm still mashing that like button and subscribing!
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