Question I'd like to hear everyone's thoughts on possibly making votes public. This has been discussed in a lot of other issues, but here's a dedicated one for discussion. Positives Could help figh...
Probably better to post in the github issue rather than replying here.
Your votes are already public. It’s a matter of (a) do we want to make it slightly easier for the people who aren’t technically inclined to see them too (b) do we want people acting with the awareness that they’re public.
(a) doesn’t have a clear answer to me. The answer to (b), though, is clearly yes.
People say this all the time, but it’s not really the case.
I don’t think privacy is a binary thing that one either has or does not - there are degrees of privacy. Currently what we have is mostly private, requiring either technical skill or admin access to circumvent. This is a pretty high bar which 99% of people would not be able to reach. You’re proposing removing the bar entirely because it is not high enough.
You’re proposing removing the bar entirely because it is not high enough.
Incorrect. I said that I see no obvious answer as to whether to remove the bar – that’s the (a) part. What I’m proposing to do is definitely to educate people about the existence of the bar and the fact that they shouldn’t be voting on porn, or contentious political topics from an account with their real name, or etc etc like that.
More than 1% of the currently active Lemmy users are actively running a server (it’s 1.4%, 649 active instances out of 45k MAU), so I think the number is definitely less than 99% of people who wouldn’t know how to do it in the first place (or find an mbin or Friendica server or etc).
The broader point about it being fairly difficult / fairly rare to have the knowledge, I can agree with, but I wasn’t saying necessarily that we should make it easier for the 98.6% of people to do; just that everyone should be aware that it’s possible so they can make their voting decisions with that knowledge in mind.
You say that, but you simply have to be using something that isn’t Lemmy and that information is there (doubly so if you’re an admin on any of these systems)
I agree with the general point that privacy isn’t a binary thing, but I don’t think the bar is nearly so high, as it simply takes opening the post in the right kbin(/mbin?) instance. This requires neither technical skill nor admin privileges.
piefed is already extremely redditty maintaining behind-the-scenes ‘karma’ and ‘attitude’ for users whether they signed up for it or not. why shouldn’t this info be public instead of in the hands of admins only?
I liked it being relatively obfuscated. Even though I rarely downvote. But the ones I do are the ones I’d like to avoid. Tbh I’m more ambivalent compared to my thoughts on karma.
People who downvote more than upvote tend to be the ones who get in fights a lot and say snarky, inflammatory and negative things.
Summed up my whole sense of humor in half a throwaway sentence ;-)
Seriously though, interesting read, thank you kux… you can really feel the author’s frustration and yet I can’t help but feel that they are interested in a certain kind of idealistic online community. Reddit but with a really restrictive HOA where everyone has the exact same color mailbox.
the author almost certainly has more experience in managing online communities than me (i have none) but it seems counterintuitive to see a dumb take, downvote and bother to leave an argumentative reply rather than just downvote and scroll past. downvotes in this case would defuse potential arguments rather than start them, but i’ll defer to the author and assume that’s not what happens
That was my take on it too. The vague sense that you’re just going to end up with nothing but circle-jerks if you implement all these suggestions. I could also just be whooshing an attempt a levity, something obvious to a seasoned community moderator.
Hopefully my shitty attempts at socratic method rate a bit better then trolling, but I often doubt it :-)
requiring either technical skill or admin access to circumvent.
What if some troll sets up a website that indexes/publishes this data? What technical skill would be required then?
The data is public and ignorance is not bliss. People need to be made aware of this. If this will lead to people being more careful about what they post online or how they interact with a public social media service, then all the better.
How do you know who you’re defederating with? When I set up my instance, the list of federated instances was thousands. How do you know which one is scraping the data?
And the “we should not make it available for the public at large because it will lead to abuse” is also theoretical.
Anyway, I’m already on record saying that I don’t like the voting system and that we should get rid of it altogether. Voting on content used to be about collective curation, not a constant popularity contest.
I’m also on record saying that we need to stop relying on systems that only give us the illusion of privacy and depend on the software developers for culture shaping.
If making the vote public gets people to be exposed to these fundamental issues of the current design, and leads us to search for better solutions, then I’m all for it.
This feels a bit of a conversation-shutting argument. Lots of things (good and bad) will happen on a platform that has billions of users. The real question is to about many of those instances happened solely due to the data being (easily) available to the public.
In any case, I really don’t think that the solution to the problem of targeted harassment is by providing quote-unquote-privacy. Today, people want to obfuscate votes. Tomorrow it will be subscription lists and later it will be even posts/comments. By then it will be better to just use a closed network or just go full darknet. I’d rather we spent more time educating the people on how to use actually secure and private communications platform instead of sacrificing Transparency and Accountability for the sake of a vocal minority who will keep trying to turn the “Open Social Web” (which is meant to be open and public) into their exclusive, cocooned service.
Admin access means nothing if you can set up your own instance in an afternoon, federate with everything, then get all the votes copied to your database. I have done this just to prove it could be done, btw.
Currently what we have is mostly private, requiring either technical skill or admin access to circumvent. This is a pretty high bar which 99% of people would not be able to reach.
I’m down to work on an analyzer tool that would make it easier for everyone to see the votes
That would require a major change to the ActivityPub standard, which is not easy or trivial. This is at worst infeasible to impossible, at best something that is 5+ years away.
Your votes are already public. It’s a matter of (a) do we want to make it slightly easier for the people who aren’t technically inclined to see them too (b) do we want people acting with the awareness that they’re public.
(a) doesn’t have a clear answer to me. The answer to (b), though, is clearly yes.
People say this all the time, but it’s not really the case.
I don’t think privacy is a binary thing that one either has or does not - there are degrees of privacy. Currently what we have is mostly private, requiring either technical skill or admin access to circumvent. This is a pretty high bar which 99% of people would not be able to reach. You’re proposing removing the bar entirely because it is not high enough.
Incorrect. I said that I see no obvious answer as to whether to remove the bar – that’s the (a) part. What I’m proposing to do is definitely to educate people about the existence of the bar and the fact that they shouldn’t be voting on porn, or contentious political topics from an account with their real name, or etc etc like that.
More than 1% of the currently active Lemmy users are actively running a server (it’s 1.4%, 649 active instances out of 45k MAU), so I think the number is definitely less than 99% of people who wouldn’t know how to do it in the first place (or find an mbin or Friendica server or etc).
The broader point about it being fairly difficult / fairly rare to have the knowledge, I can agree with, but I wasn’t saying necessarily that we should make it easier for the 98.6% of people to do; just that everyone should be aware that it’s possible so they can make their voting decisions with that knowledge in mind.
You say that, but you simply have to be using something that isn’t Lemmy and that information is there (doubly so if you’re an admin on any of these systems)
Except that it is, people with the skills already bridged that gap for everyone.
https://kbin.earth/m/fediverse@lemmy.world/t/267356/Lemmy-devs-are-considering-making-all-votes-public-have-your/favourites
Hmmm I see a bunch of my friends have not upvoted my post. I will contact them to ask why not and ensure that they do.
Yeah, just like rglullis actually dragged downvoters into the public on a few occasions, to pressure them to explain their downvotes.
Ach, well, a known method to create a nice discussion
I agree with the general point that privacy isn’t a binary thing, but I don’t think the bar is nearly so high, as it simply takes opening the post in the right kbin(/mbin?) instance. This requires neither technical skill nor admin privileges.
piefed is already extremely redditty maintaining behind-the-scenes ‘karma’ and ‘attitude’ for users whether they signed up for it or not. why shouldn’t this info be public instead of in the hands of admins only?
https://join.piefed.social/2024/06/22/piefed-features-for-growing-healthy-communities/
Oof, I’d rather just stick to Lemmy and let people see my votes rather than deal with karma.
that’s kind of the point, other instances are already aggregating and rating your votes given and received, why shouldn’t lemmy show this to you?
I liked it being relatively obfuscated. Even though I rarely downvote. But the ones I do are the ones I’d like to avoid. Tbh I’m more ambivalent compared to my thoughts on karma.
Summed up my whole sense of humor in half a throwaway sentence ;-)
Seriously though, interesting read, thank you kux… you can really feel the author’s frustration and yet I can’t help but feel that they are interested in a certain kind of idealistic online community. Reddit but with a really restrictive HOA where everyone has the exact same color mailbox.
the author almost certainly has more experience in managing online communities than me (i have none) but it seems counterintuitive to see a dumb take, downvote and bother to leave an argumentative reply rather than just downvote and scroll past. downvotes in this case would defuse potential arguments rather than start them, but i’ll defer to the author and assume that’s not what happens
That was my take on it too. The vague sense that you’re just going to end up with nothing but circle-jerks if you implement all these suggestions. I could also just be whooshing an attempt a levity, something obvious to a seasoned community moderator.
Hopefully my shitty attempts at socratic method rate a bit better then trolling, but I often doubt it :-)
What if some troll sets up a website that indexes/publishes this data? What technical skill would be required then?
The data is public and ignorance is not bliss. People need to be made aware of this. If this will lead to people being more careful about what they post online or how they interact with a public social media service, then all the better.
They’d get defederated.
How do you know who you’re defederating with? When I set up my instance, the list of federated instances was thousands. How do you know which one is scraping the data?
Ok, yeah, theoretically.
But we’re talking about putting voting info into the UI for anyone to see. Not highly motivated and skilled bad actors.
And the “we should not make it available for the public at large because it will lead to abuse” is also theoretical.
Anyway, I’m already on record saying that I don’t like the voting system and that we should get rid of it altogether. Voting on content used to be about collective curation, not a constant popularity contest.
I’m also on record saying that we need to stop relying on systems that only give us the illusion of privacy and depend on the software developers for culture shaping.
If making the vote public gets people to be exposed to these fundamental issues of the current design, and leads us to search for better solutions, then I’m all for it.
We’ve already seen that kind of harrasment on major platforms including X and those owned by Meta.
This feels a bit of a conversation-shutting argument. Lots of things (good and bad) will happen on a platform that has billions of users. The real question is to about many of those instances happened solely due to the data being (easily) available to the public.
In any case, I really don’t think that the solution to the problem of targeted harassment is by providing quote-unquote-privacy. Today, people want to obfuscate votes. Tomorrow it will be subscription lists and later it will be even posts/comments. By then it will be better to just use a closed network or just go full darknet. I’d rather we spent more time educating the people on how to use actually secure and private communications platform instead of sacrificing Transparency and Accountability for the sake of a vocal minority who will keep trying to turn the “Open Social Web” (which is meant to be open and public) into their exclusive, cocooned service.
Admin access means nothing if you can set up your own instance in an afternoon, federate with everything, then get all the votes copied to your database. I have done this just to prove it could be done, btw.
Technical people can struggle when a choice isn’t a zero or a one.
I’m down to work on an analyzer tool that would make it easier for everyone to see the votes
(b) will just lead to fewer up and down votes, i.e. less engagement. That in turn could lead to slowly bleeding out.
I would like a (c) where my instances collects all the votes on the post, and then transmits an anonymized aggregate.
That would require a major change to the ActivityPub standard, which is not easy or trivial. This is at worst infeasible to impossible, at best something that is 5+ years away.
This is not true, the piefed admin implemented pseudonymous voting agents in around 48 hours
Piefed’s experimental mechanism isn’t truly anonymous. For instance I’m pretty sure you’re the downvote from PieFed on my comment.
You can still figure out who is behind votes by examining the proxy voting actors and their voting patterns. But it’s probably close enough.
If you wanted to share only an aggregate with other instances, that would require activitypub changes.
I didn’t downvote you, but I also use the term pseudonymous for a reason
But if you use that term, don’t say what I said isn’t true.
Interesting that you said you didn’t downvote me and then the downvote from PieFed I saw just before is gone hehe
Someone is having a chuckle
My votes on piefed are not public. This dev took the obvious idea of a dedicated voting agent and implemented it in about 48 hours.