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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[–] unconfirmedsourcesDOTgov@lemmy.sdf.org 82 points 2 months ago (2 children)

"If you have nothing to hide then you have nothing to fear."

Given the strong presence of the privacy community on Lemmy, I have to say that I'm a bit shocked to hear so many in these discussions chiming in to support voting transparency.

I'm on board with the idea of using ring signatures to validate the legitimacy of a vote and moderating spammers based on metadata.

Or, for something (potentially) easier to implement, aggregating vote tallies at the instance level (votes visible to your instance admin and mods) and federating the votes anonymously by instance, so you might see something like:

lemmy.world: 9 up, 2 down
discuss.tchncs.de: 3 up, 4 down
Etc

Up/down votes are the method of community moderation that sets Reddit apart from many other platforms. If the Lemmy community is trying to capture some of that magic, which is good for both highlighting gems AND burying turds, radical transparency isn't the path to get there.

In fact, I'd argue that the secret ballot has already been thoroughly discussed and tested throughout history and there are plenty of legitimate examples of why it would be better if they were more secret than they are today.

Many people have brought up the idea of brigading, but would this truly get better if votes are public? Is it hard to imagine noticing that an account you generally trust has voted and matching their vote, even subconsciously?

For those who feel that they aren't able to post on Lemmy because downvotes make you feel sad, my feeling is that if you make posts in a community and they consistently get down voted to oblivion, you're in the wrong place. The people in that community don't value your contributions, and you should find another place to share them. This is the system working as intended and the mods should be thankful that such a system has been implemented.

The last point I'll make is about the potential for a chilling effect - making users less likely to interact with a post in any way due to a fear of retaliation. Look - if you're looking for a platform where all of your activity is public, those are out there. Why should we make Lemmy look just like every other platform?

[–] Socsa@sh.itjust.works 6 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Agreed. 10/10.

And you don't even need real crypto here to start. The home instance can just send vote actions as fixed unique tokens. The way the trust framework currently works, this is literally a drop-in replacement and introduces no new spam/brigade vulns which don't already exist from a rogue instance. It would be imperfect, and may still make it possible to correlate and infer vote patterns for a sufficiently motivated adve, but it would raise the bar for protecting user telemetry by a huge factor with very minimal effort. I'm honestly a bit surprised it hasn't been done already.

[–] amju_wolf@pawb.social 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

introduces no new spam/brigade vulns which don’t already exist from a rogue instance

It does though. Now a rogue instance would have to have "believable" profiles for the accounts that vote, because an instance of just "lurkers" who seem to suspiciously vote is a pretty big signal of vote manipulation. If you only see a random identifier (or not even that, just a tally of votes) it'd be impossible to tell if it's truly the instance's users just passionate about something or actual vote manipulation.

In other words it would at least make the problem way worse.

[–] Socsa@sh.itjust.works 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

The rogue instance would still need fake users though. It would be very easy to see if you are getting votes from 300 unique tokens, but the instance only has 100 users.

Also the method I am proposing would simply be transparent in terms of user management, so if you are running core Lemmy, the only way to generate voting tokens would be to generate users.

[–] amju_wolf@pawb.social 2 points 2 months ago

I guess that's true. Then you could just ask the instance admins to check their users' voting patterns / deanonymize them / whatever, and if they don't comply defederate them.

[–] michaelmrose@lemmy.world 4 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Is it hard to imagine noticing that an account you generally trust has voted and matching their vote, even subconsciously?

Not only is it not hard to imagine its easy to imagine the benefits of using this information automatically. I could imagine a client side script which re-ordered content based on who I trusted who had up or down voted it.

So I have users A B C D E F who are known to me who have voted on a given post. D and E are idiots I disregard their votes. F literally hates everything I love so I count his votes inversely. A and B are fantastic I count them x10 I tend to agree with C so I count his x2.

Not only can I potentially re-score threads and comments based on whom I trust I can if I really trust someone's opinion apply their weights as well, and the weights of the folks upstream.

[–] unconfirmedsourcesDOTgov@lemmy.sdf.org 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Yes, I too salivate at the idea that I could simply disappear all of the ideas I disagree with, but that is exactly how to turn a community into an echo chamber.

So I have users A B C D E F who are known to me who have voted on a given post. D and E are idiots I disregard their votes. F literally hates everything I love so I count his votes inversely. A and B are fantastic I count them x10 I tend to agree with C so I count his x2.

What you are suggesting here is, as I'm understanding it, a way to only get feedback from people you agree with and to never experience a critical discussion of ideas based on their merits.

Now, I'm not here to suggest that Lemmy is some kind of shining beacon of drama-free intellectualism, where every idea is discussed without bias or agenda, but I DO think it is valuable to hear from people whose lived experiences led them to a different conclusion than the one I've reached. Obviously there needs to be a mechanism to remove trolls from the discussion, but I fear a world where we only see content that we agree with, because then we will truly be removed from reality, and that's not why I'm here.

[–] michaelmrose@lemmy.world 6 points 2 months ago (1 children)

There are a lot of people not worth attending to. If you do spend your time listening to these folks you don't hear new ideas you hear the same bad ones over and over. It would be lovely that having noticed that someone is a persistent holocaust denier he could be added to a list that would disappear not only their contributions but their votes as well for thousands of users.

[–] unconfirmedsourcesDOTgov@lemmy.sdf.org 0 points 2 months ago

Sort by Top and I'm sure the crusaders of New will have everything sorted out by then. If you find these ideas being upvoted, you're in the wrong community and you may be in a lemmygrad community. You're on the wrong side of the train tracks and need to seek higher ground.

We don't need to create literal echo chambers of people talking past each other because we block out any information that makes us uncomfortable. That's not how we foster constructive dialog and

[–] OpenStars@discuss.online 2 points 2 months ago

I want to have the ability to turn on my echo chamber, when I want it, and also to be able to turn it off, when I want to step outside of it for awhile. This doesn't have to be a toggle - it could be having an alt on a different instance.

I don't want this choice made for me by people who think they know better how to run my own life than me. They can write an appeal that I will consider, but ultimately I want to make my own choice.

Having votes be publicly viewable allows us all the freedom to do as we choose with that information - including to ignore them entirely. What I would probably do with it is make large block lists of people on lemmy.ml, since it turns out that user blocks of an instance don't block all that much. Fwiw, for everyone I've blocked in the past, I look through the post history to see if they merely are being disagreeable on a particular matter but overall are capable of contributing something substantive to a conversation, or are nothing more than a troll, setting out to vomit their emotions upon everyone worldwide across the Fediverse.

I've been a mod before, on Reddit, and am under no illusions anymore that everyone is worth listening to - a downvote from someone rational I will give serious thought about, but an idiot is an idiot, even if a community mod hasn't banned them (yet?).

It's like autocorrect: feel free to make suggestions, but it would be nice if I could have control when I want it, including/especially not wasting my time.