Fact is, the Lemmy ecosystem needs money to handle the growing server reqirements as more people migrate as well as the development cost of new features (I know Lemmy is OSS but the devs should still get some compensation for their effort).
Seeing how much some reddit users love awards so much that they cant stop giving money to Reddit to award posts protesting the api change, this could be a great way for users to voluntary support the ecosystem. It can be easily ignored by users not caring about them (clients could even add an option to hide them), but users liking the feature can go wild and this time the money goes to volunteers keeping this alive instead of greedy admins, power mods and investors.
Though there would be some big organization questions attached: attached:
- Which server handles the payment? A centralized one, the one where the post was made or the one where the user giving the award account was created.
- How will the money be shared between the Devs and the individual instances in a way that is fair but cant be abused easily.
So, the problem is that seeing who downvoted you lets a certain type of person track down and stalk people who disagree with them. Not only could your inbox get filled with “Why’d you downvote me bro?”-messages, it could lead to these people following others around to unrelated comment threads and harassing them as “retaliation”.
I take it these people haven’t found Kbin in any significant numbers yet and so it hasn’t been a problem, but I’d be wary for the future.
Let me ask this question instead. What value does it add to know who downvoted you?
Trolls know why they’re being downvoted; for reasons I don’t understand, they seem to enjoy it.
You probably shouldn’t be downvoting people having a good-faith discussion, but if you do, the venn diagram of people having a good-faith discussion and unstable enough to harass someone for downvoting them is probably pretty small. Small enough for the block function to mitigate it.
Flip it around. Anonymous downvotes would let anyone spin up a lemmy instance, fill it with sockpuppet accounts, and downvote everything by hundreds or thousands of downvotes, and it would be impossible for users to know the difference.
You’re right, it wouldn’t be questions about why the downvote so much as just straight insults probably. I’m too hesitatant to use that sort of language so I didn’t represent the type of message properly.
So the primary argument for why public downvotes are beneficial is that it helps prevent spam-infuencing posts and comments? Is this then not more of a problem with bot detection? And just how easy is it really to “just spin up an instance and fill it with sock puppet accounts”?
I don’t know that I’d call it the primary argument, just an argument. And containerization makes hosting your own lemmy instance trivial.
Personally, if it makes people a little more judicious about applying a downvote, maybe that’s a good thing.
What would you say is the primary argument?
I don’t know by what metric I’d even use to quantify that. Why do you need one?
To form an opinion I like to hear arguments from both sides. I can come up with my own arguments as to why public downvotes might be bad (anonymous voting is a cornerstone of democracy, hidden votes makes engagement easier for socially shy individuals, aforementioned harassment), but I have a harder time finding its positives.
This isn’t meant to be combative; I have tried thinking about ways I would use this information (apart from reporting bot spam) and none of them would add anything positive to my experience using the platform. If anything it could lead me to be unhealthily obsessed with checking activity for who upvotes and downvotes me. My experience doesn’t equate to everyone though, so I’m curious to hear another perspective. I might very well be missing something big.
My question was more along the lines of “why do you need to label any given reason as a ‘primary’ argument”. You’ve already been given counter-points.
I think that if you’re concerned about this, you should seek out an instance that both does not federate downvotes and does not display the downvote button. Then you will be unable to downvote, and you won’t see any downvotes from other instances.
But I think downvotes are an important part of how the sorting for a platform such as this operates and it helps deal with spam, off-topic posts and shitposting in serious communities etc.
I’m not against downvotes, I just don’t see the benefit to publicly accessible data on who voted for what.
Now? A bit troublesome. Soon enough, as the tooling improves? Trivial.
You don’t even need to spin up a Lemmy instance specifically. There’s some very small script-driven ActivityPub servers already showing up that can be used for this kind of activity with ease if you’ve got a minor amount of technical chops. Give it a few months and someone will have turnkeyed an ActivityPub harassment engine.
You can block people like that. And you will be able to see that they’re “retaliating” against you because of the transparent voting system - you’ll be able to say to the admins “look, this guy’s done nothing over the past six hours except downvote every comment I’ve ever written” and if you’re on an instance that cares about such things he can be taken care of.
I understand that but those things are added discomfort and hassle. If voting was anonymous, they would not be able to identify me and thus I wouldn’t have an insult in my inbox to wince at before blocking the user and I wouldn’t have my page full of retaliatory downvotes to report to an admin.
These aren’t world ending flaws, but they are the trade-off. The negative downside to public voting. But what is the upside? What is the user level benefit I’m getting that makes tolerating the downside worth it?
Well, one upside is that it lets voting be a thing, since ActivityPub is public by nature.
It should be possible to build bots to detect these voting patterns. Reddit had plenty of user-created bots that helped moderators identify toxic or otherwise undesirable users to ban, something like that could be done in the Fediverse too. It’s pretty early yet - there isn’t even an API for Kbin as far as I’m aware - but once something like that is in place you might not even notice when your stalker gets caught.
I mean I wouldn’t call that an upside in this context since the argument starts from the basic assumption that up/downvotes exist.
If votes by nature have to be public due to necessary operations of the ActivityPub protocol the entire argumentation becomes meaningless.
I still maintain that I prefer making accessing this this information harder rather than easier. Yes, a dedicated user can still spin up their own instance and check, but that added bothersome task is going to be enough to deter a lot of people.
It’s kind of like a door lock. You can’t stop anyone from getting into your house if they really want to, but locking your front door still reduces the risk of having your possessions stolen due to the added friction.
They do, that’s why I said having them public is what lets voting be a thing.
There are instances out there that already hide some aspects of voting, beehaw.org doesn’t show downvotes in their interface for example. But I expect that someone who’s keen on being a troll or stalker will gravitate towards instances that have that information at their fingertips. Hiding the information from the interface of a particular instance doesn’t make the actual data go away and a different instance can show it just fine.
That’s what I’m trying to get at though. I understand that voting data will ultimately be accessible to anyone who is dedicated enough (they can spin up their own instance). You yourself seem to see why some instances might want to obfuscate this information seeing as you brought up BeeHaw. You yourself state that trolls and stalkers would like all this information at their fingertips. These are valid arguments for making this data more bothersome to access.
What are the positive benefits that motivates an instance to go in the opposite direction and make everything easily accessible and public? Whats the completion of the sentence “I think it’s good that everyone can see who up/downvotes them because ___”?
The only two arguments I’ve gotten so far is that it might help identify bots/vote manipulation and a more general “it’s technically publicly accessible by anyone so might as well just show it to everyone”.
It’s not just technically publicly available, though. Anyone can go to an instance that displays it (which is basically all of them) and take a look right now.
This is a thoroughly unbottled genie, the only way you’re going to get it back inside is if every instance was to agree to hide this information and defederate from any stragglers that don’t. It’s infeasable at this point. IMO hiding the information on a few individual instances is only going to give a false sense of security.
Then they know the information is out there, and they can use it themselves to spot people who are abusing the system.
And regardless of whether you think it’s “good”, the information is out there.
This is true for Kbin, but I don’t believe I have come across a Lemmy instance that shows you who up/downvoted you. Hell, as far as I know most Lemmy instances hide “karma” too. You have to check these things from the Kbin side (unless you spin up your own Lemmy instance). Which is the reason this whole thread started.
While it will be impossible to prevent those actively seek out this information, most people will still flock to the largest instances. A percentage of those will be inclined to want to abuse voting info. If the big instances obfuscate it, maybe some amount of harassment can be avoided. Even the friction of having to switch accounts to check will be enough to prevent some heat-of-the-moment reactions.
I guess that’s the trade-off. Having everything easily and openly accessible makes things easy for trolls, stalkers and harassers; obfuscating it might mislead users into thinking they’re anonymous.
Thank you for the answer. I’m still not convinced it’s not worth trying to hide it, but that’s a very fair and valid stance.
That’s true. And regardless of how an instance decides to run it’s voting policy, it’s an important fact to make the users aware of.
I love this idea of “retaliatory downvotes”. People take fantasy Internet points so ridiculously seriously!