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Lemmy votes ARE public, should they be anonymous? (discuss.tchncs.de)

submitted 4 weeks ago by lalo@discuss.tchncs.de to c/fediverse@lemmy.world

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Currently, almost anyone in the Fediverse can see Lemmys votes. Lemmy admins can see votes, as well as mods. Only regular Lemmy users can't. Should the Lemmy devs create a way to make the votes anonymous?

There is a discussion going on right now considering "making the Lemmy votes public" but I think that premisse is just wrong. The votes are public already, they're just hidden from Lemmy users. Anyone from a kbin/mbin/fedia instance can check out the votes if they are so inclined.

The users right now may fall into a false sense of privacy when voting because the votes are hidden from Lemmy users. If you want to vote something and not show up on the vote list, please create another account to support that type of content and don't tell anyone.

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[-] Xirup@yiffit.net 118 points 4 weeks ago

Wait a minute, so any admin can see which posts do I upvote/downvote?

[-] oleorun@real.lemmy.fan 172 points 4 weeks ago

I'm an instance owner and mod. I'll describe what we see.

Like anyone else, I can check a post or comment and see the upvote and downvote counts. If I click on a specific menu item by a post or comment I can also see who voted which way.

I check it often and to date have only banned two users, out of thousands, who were consistently downvoting posts. These bot accounts were literally voting within seconds of the post going federated.

It's a useful feature on my end and I think others should be able to see it.

[-] PhobosAnomaly@feddit.uk 23 points 4 weeks ago

Thamk you for the insight, instance administrator views are valuable and unique.

At the risk of sounding like I'm presenting a bad faith argument, why ban them? I don't like the whole "free market" analogy but surely it's one of the liberating features of federated servers, being able to to largely express your votes or content as you see fit within the legal framework of the host nation. Wouldn't the odd one or two mass downvoters/upvoters/theyvoters ultimately be a statistical abberation or is the fediverse still small enough for this sort of shit to carry weight?

Open criticism of my view welcome, as always!

[-] Serinus@lemmy.world 28 points 4 weeks ago

If votes are anonymous and federated, it's very easy for me to add or subtract 900 votes from whatever I want.

You should consider anything you do on social media to be public. Even if Facebook tries to claim that it's not.

[-] PhobosAnomaly@feddit.uk 6 points 4 weeks ago

Oh I like a pessimistic view - partly because it makes a discussion spicier, but also because it's important for a user to understand the power that an instance owner wields!