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.
  • Coelacanth
    2•1 year ago

    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.

    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.

    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”?

    • effingjoe
      2•1 year ago

      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.

        • effingjoe
          2•1 year ago

          I don’t know by what metric I’d even use to quantify that. Why do you need one?

          • Coelacanth
            2•1 year ago

            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.

            • effingjoe
              2•1 year ago

              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.

              • Coelacanth
                2•1 year ago

                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.

                • effingjoe
                  2•1 year ago

                  Have you stopped to think about how that works in practice? If I downvote something on kbin (where I am now) and it federates to feddit.nu, how does that work without also knowing my username? As I think I already saw someone point out to you, stripping out that information would make it very easy to send unlimited downvotes to any given instance, because it would just be a counter of downvotes without a user associated with it.

                  The only reason downvotes were “anonymous” on reddit was because it was closed source and didn’t federate that information to other services. The downvote was still linked to your account, just obscured; Reddit admins could certainly see what you downvoted. This tactic won’t work on any platform that uses ActivityPub, or something similar, without getting rid of downvotes entirely. It’s probably best you get accustomed to this; treat it as you would a comment that says “I think people should see less of this” or something equivalent.

                  • Coelacanth
                    2•1 year ago

                    The downvote was still linked to your account, just obscured; Reddit admins could certainly see what you downvoted.

                    Well yes of course, I have never assumed otherwise, and this was never about that.

                    The truly dedicated can’t be stopped, but most people aren’t going to spin up their own instance to check who downvoted them. So you end up reducing the potential amount of harassment.

                    I still don’t feel like I understand the benefits from easy access to voting info. The downside is that it makes life easy for trolls, stalkers and people of that nature. What’s the upside?

    • @ttmrichter
      1•1 year ago

      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.